Virtual Vandalism: Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog’ Is Graffiti-Bombed

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/arts/design/augmented-reality-jeff-koons.html

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Who gets to control augmented reality?

The graffiti artist Sebastian Errazuriz doesn’t think the privilege should necessarily fall to technology giants. After Snapchat announced a partnership with the sculptor Jeff Koons that uses augmented reality to place his artworks into famous landmarks around the world, Mr. Errazuriz “graffiti-bombed” the project in protest.

In what might be the first example of augmented reality vandalism, Mr. Errazuriz defaced a version of Mr. Koons’s “Balloon Dog” with graffiti and placed it in the same geotagged location in Central Park as the Snapchat version.

“It all seems fun, but I believe it is imperative we start questioning how much of our virtual public space we are willing to give to companies,” Mr. Errazuriz wrote on Instagram about his rendering of “Balloon Dog.”

While Mr. Errazuriz did not deface a real Jeff Koons artwork, he sent a message about the role companies play in using art to commodify public spaces. He described the move as a “symbolic stance against an imminent augmented reality corporate invasion.”

The version of “Balloon Dog” that Mr. Errazuriz and his team at the Cross Lab studio created can be viewed using Mr. Errazuriz’s own app, ARNYC, but not Snapchat. Mr. Errazuriz told the BBC that he and his team had first tried to submit the protest sculpture to Snapchat, but that they did not receive a response. So they made their own app instead.

Snapchat did not immediately reply to New York Times requests for comment.

In a video posted to Instagram, Mr. Errazuriz explained why he had questioned Snapchat’s collaboration. “For a company to have the freedom to GPS tag whatever they want is an enormous luxury that we should not be giving out for free,” Mr. Errazuriz said. “The virtual public space belongs to us, we should charge them rent.”

Defacing artwork in the name of protest has a long history. In 2012, Wlodzimierz Umaniec vandalized a Mark Rothko painting, in what he said was an act of “Yellowism,” an artistic art of appropriation comparable to the work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp.

Mr. Duchamp’s own “Fountain,” a factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of Conceptual Art, was attacked by a Frenchman who said his intervention had been a piece of performance art.

While Mr. Errazuriz’s message was about using art vandalism as a form of protest, art institutions have also started used technology to battle vandalism. This year, in an effort to curb graffiti on the walls of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence, Italy, known as the Duomo, officials installed tablets and invited visitors to leave messages digitally instead.