Actuality

Premiering as part of Borderlines Film Festival 2020, this state-of-the-art work by artist Emma Posey draws on Augmented Reality (AR) technology to produce a virtual cinema installation. Participants use a mobile app to ‘discover’ a huge cinema screen in Hereford City Centre to view virtual film and 3D creations.

Since the mobile gaming brought AR to a mass audience, creatives have been experimenting with the emerging technology as the development software became more accessible to them. Actuality encourages contemplation of technology’s ever-present, mediating affect in our lives.

The work challenges a time-old convention - the ‘fourth wall’ - an invisible barrier that separates an audience from the action. In breaking that ‘wall’, it calls into question how we process what is real in a digitally saturated world, raising viewers’ awareness of what it means to be ‘present’ as we enter the third decade of the 21st Century. Recalling the subtle and tactile beauty of celluloid, Actuality explores the physicality of both old and new technology.