rainbows – I Have Pop™

Rainbows (Site specific AR)

In honor of pride month I placed six augmented reality dioramas on the streets of Amsterdam, adding a colorful halo to the city. They were attached to existing features in the cityscape within view of some of the main highlights around town like the Rijksmuseum, the skinny bridge across the Amstel river, the red light district and the Westerkerk.

I wanted to find a way to show the ambiguity of perception and reality. Rainbows have become a symbol of hope and diversity and also bring a lot of joy and happiness to many people. Unfortunately they don’t happen very often, however this town has created an aura of open mindedness around itself. I wanted to see if these are really our true colors or just a fantasy?

The dioramas work like camera filters and were specifically made for these places. The filters with the rainbows were placed in six different color cabinets, each color representing one of the colors in a rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. To make them work the filters had to match the locations exactly, which was quite a search. They had to provide both a nice image and there had to be a point to attach the cabinets to and still look good.

Digital camera filters read and adapt to the image by means of algorithms and artificial intelligence. The filters in the dioramas are the opposite in that regard. They are hand crafted and placed in the physical world. They are real in some regards, as long as they remain.