Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, presented an online invited lecture with Dale Hudson, New York University Abu Dhabi, entitled “Documentary’s Augmented Realities” for Bayreuth University, Germany on June 12, 2023.
The Department of Digital Media and Applied Media Studies at Bayreuth University has launched a weekly lecture series called “Expanded Documentary: Ecologies of Images/Images of Ecologies” featuring new media theorists and historians from across the globe.
Zimmermann and Hudson’s presentation probed how AR documentary has become a way to engage viewers on site as well as online. Their argument expands beyond conventional conceptions of AR as a mobile app to consider other ways that material and perceptual reality can be augmented by virtual and machine-generated layers through projection mapping of digital images onto physical objects such as buildings, alongside individual private AR on an app or laptop. They analyze how machine vision can visualize invisible histories, such as extinct natural and built environments as well as invisible realities such as air pollution.
