WORKSHOP 3D is pleased to be working with Portland Artist Reginald Brooks to support his Artist’s Residency at Building Five in Portland with our ARt portal app.

From their website: Building Five provides art space for site-specific installation, performance, interdisciplinary collaborative works, film and community exhibition in Portland, Oregon. Building Five serves as a laboratory, workshop and site-specific installation facility.

While we’re not ready to spill the beans quite yet, as the artist is still preparing his plans for the residency in July, we can tell you a little bit about our part of the project.

We are working with Reg to create an Augmented Reality experience to accompany to the work he is preparing and installing during the residency. When his installation is viewed with an updated version of our ARt portal app for iOS and Android, this experience will make use of the enormous volume of Building Five, to the rafters and beyond.

Since we are not in Portland, and don’t have access to the actual building, we have built an accurate full scale 3D model of Building Five, in which we can develop, test, and visualize the Augmented Reality experience. This model also facilitates our ongoing communication and dialog with Reg, allowing us all to see how the experience will work in the space, without actually being there.

About Reginald Brooks

We know Reg from his involvement with Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle, where he has been a member artist for many years. Apart from his participation in a number of CoCA Member Shows, he has also participated in CoCA’s “Heaven and Earth” outdoor sculpture exhibitions in Carkeek Park and, importantly in this context, in our Augmented Reality Exhibition “Beyond the Picture Plane” at Shoreline City Hall in 2017, which connects more directly to the current project.

Writings on mathematics and physics, both his own and others, have formed the underpinnings of much of his work over the years. New media net.art – work created on and designed to be experience on a computer – has been a new and very exciting part of his output since 2001. This medium has provided a natural collaborative venue for separate media (white papers, prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture and animations) to come together to present a more complete immersive experience to a global audience. He has exhibited his work in a number of solo (Portland) and group shows across the country.

Enhancing the ARt portal app

WORKSHOP 3D works with artists to create unique Augmented Reality experiences not only to help the artists, but to learn from them, and to give us ideas for upgrading our apps.

In this case, Reg has an idea to move parts of the artwork around through the space in various ways, and we like that idea! In the past, ARt portal animations were limited to either simple rotations or required custom coding. Adding movement to the built-in capabilities will make ARt portal a more robust platform moving forward. We plan to to use the opportunity to upgrade the app internally in a number of ways, in keeping with our long-term goal of evolving it into a tool that can be used by artists or curators anywhere to mount an AR-enhanced exhibition without our assistance.