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The Incompleteness of Lookings
- Vol. 3, no. 1
- 2018
- 09/04/2020

Abstract
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Augmented reality is fundamentally different from virtual reality: it does not map a real world environment into a digital one as a virtual experience. Instead, it locates both reality and virtual within the same experiential frame. Through it, our interactions with reality are mediated via the fantasy of an augmented experience. Thus, augmented reality supplements what we see with the purpose of trying to maintain our attention. What is most fascinating about augmented reality is how reality itself becomes a part of, rather than distinct from, digital information. It is in this sense that the very notion of seeing is fundamentally challenged. Since when augmented technology is not deployed, what is left is an apparent incompleteness of simply looking. But what are the consequences of confronting this incompleteness? In this article I examine how augmented reality simply renders a structure that has always sustained the visual field.
- Keywords: augmented reality, gaze, Lacan, looking
John Hillman is an educator, image-maker and writer. Based in the U.K. his interests are focused around post-photography theory – an investigation into the contemporary account of what the image is becoming, and in philosophical approaches to contemporary culture and understanding how images and media technologies shape our experience. What unifies all his interests is the exploration of how theory can enrich and offer new insights to creative practice and lived experience.This has led to thinking through the aesthetic, philosophical and technological approaches to image making. Ultimately, his written work and his practice is an interrogation of how images operate in a contemporary culture, which is currently largely structured by the digital. He is engaged in the interdisciplinary areas of photography, image and visual culture. He currently works as Course Director of the Department of Photography at Birmingham City University.
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- Uricchio, W., 2011. The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image. Visual Studies, 26(1), pp. 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586x.2011.548486
- Žižek, S., 2017. Incontinence of the Void. London: MIT Press.
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In augmented reality, as things behave in unexpected ways, our ‘real’ reality seems more obscure, confused and hidden.
- Cover photo: Gerhard Richter: 48 Portraits, seen through an iPhone camera with facial recognition overlay. Photograph: J. Hillman.
Reading time: 11 min.
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