In the course of reducing it reliance on industry and big corporations, Pittsburgh has become one of the more envied stories of urban revival in the Rust Belt. The proportion of Pittsburgh’s work force in manufacturing is now actually lower than the national average, according to Christopher Briem, a University of Pittsburgh professor. But so is its unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent.
The Andy Warhol Museum layer displays important Warhol points around the city of Pittsburgh, Jan Rothuizen’s ARtours layer augments the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s “uninvited” exhibition is on display at MoMa in New York City.
Paul Stork and Ebelien Pondaag of Fabrique, members of the Layar Partner Network are presenting a paper titled Augmented Reality and the Museum Experience (which you can read here) and is hosting a workshop this week in Philadelphia at the Museums and the Web 2011 conference.
UPDATE: Two more examples:
Some of Layar’s most innovative and active “ARtists” in the US, including Mark Skwarek, Will Pappenheimer and John Craig Freeman (along with other, internationally based, members of Manifest.AR like Sander Veenhof) kick off a new exhibition this Friday at Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn called Gradually Melt the Sky. …
The ARtists will then move these and other works to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) from April 22 – May 8 for the Boston Cyberarts Festival. If you’re in the Boston area for the event, you can access the mobile site and ManifestAR layer here.
In essence, Fleeting Pages consists of taking over (taking back??) one of the spaces, left empty by a failed big box bookstore in Pittsburgh, for one month, starting April 30th, and filling it with independent & self-published work of all kinds, book arts, workshops, events, and..?(insert your ideas here)?……
The minds behind Conflict Kitchen—Jon Rubin, Dawn Weleski and John Pena see the savory in skirmish, intending to whet palettes and satisfy appetites while educating the city of Pittsburgh on the tenets of conflict. A truly novel (and tasty) installation, the experiment is a take-out restaurant meets public art project, serving food from countries that the United States is at loggerheads with, although overt combat is not a prerequisite.
"The steel collapse decimated Pittsburgh and its region, taking with it nearly 1 out of every 10 jobs there. Entire towns surrounding the city became obsolete. But it is because of that failure, that absolute bottoming-out, that Pittsburgh has been able to cast aside its past and emerge as a unique showcase of what a small, bustling, connected American city can eventually become."
— The Urbanophile » Blog Archive » Pittsburgh and the Magic of Failure by Ben Schulman
