Creative Tech Week: The Wayfinding Project AR/VR Demos

The Wayfinding Project is initiated by John Kuo Wei Tchen and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and launches with an exhibition by artist Beatrice Glow with augmented reality and virtual reality features creating a space to promote curiosity, research, and decolonize New York’s history.  From March-December 2016, the exhibition doubles as a lab hosting collaborative research to explore the many facets of Indigenous life along the Lenape Trail (present-day Broadway) before and after Henry Hudson’s “discovery” in 1609. The lab uses technologies—time-tested and cutting edge—to reconstruct one block of Broadway with geo-data in augmented/virtual reality to simultaneously overlay the pasts and futures of Mannahatta/Manhattan. The installation will evolve over the course of its nine-month run, incorporating work by Lenape and Pacific scholars, experts, and culture bearers and Algonquian language scholars, digital cartographers, and communities, who will piece together the surviving historical fragments of land dispossession, dislocation, and diasporas. Their combined findings will inform the creation of additional augmented/virtual reality experiences that will contribute to the envisioning and shaping of an Indigenous futurism.

These demonstrations are part of Creative Tech Week. See the full CTW schedule here, and use code ‘CTW’ for 20% off of any ticketed events.