La Lotería Aumentada

A Borderline Project

by Patricia Espinosa and John Craig Freeman

La Lotería Aumentada is an augmented reality public art project inspired by La Loteria Mexicana. La Loteria is a game similar to Bingo. Instead of numbers, it uses a deck of cards illustrated with figures that represent everyday objects, plants, animals, mythical creatures and other characters.

Brought together in September of 2011, during Borderline Projects’ La Lotería exhibition, collaborators Patricia Espinosa and John Craig Freeman have set out to create an augmented reality public art experience using all original paintings created by Patricia.

The public can simply download and launch the project and aim their device’s cameras at the surrounding area. The application uses geolocation software to superimpose the cards at precise GPS coordinates, enabling people to see the cards integrated into the physical location as if they existed in the real world.

Instructions:

1. Download any free code reader app to your iPhone or Android now.
2. Press the scan button and aim at this code or enter http://m.layar.com/open/laloteriaaumentada in your phone’s web browser.
3. If you don’t have the free Layar Augmented Reality Browser installed, you will be prompted to do so.
4. Once Layar is installed, reading the code will launch the La Lotería Aumentada project in Layar.
5. Stand at the locations indicated on the map above.
6. Aim the device’s camera towards the small dots in the mini-map in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Biographies

Patricia Espinosa is a Mexican-born emerging artist living in New York City.

After completing her BFA at Universidad de las Américas in Mexico in 1996, Patricia moved to New York City to earn her Masters in Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design.

In 2005 she joined the Art Student’s League of New York and is currently studying drawing under Nicki Orbach and painting under Kenneth McIndoe and Mariano Del Rosario. She is currently a recipient of the Merit Scholarship awarded by the same institution. In April 2011 she had her first solo show of drawings at Joe’s Chelsea. In 2010 she was selected at the International Juried Drawing & Printmaking Exhibition held at Rogue Space in Chelsea. Her drawings have been published in the 2007/08 Catalog of the Art Students League of New York and exhibited at Climate Gallery and at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.

Patricia’s work conveys an emotional feeling born and inspired by her native country as a land of contrasts. Social and educational disparity has not only triggered her art but also her active role in the workforce. Patricia has carried a successful career in the Design & New Media Industries for over 10 years, serving the community by disseminating information, educating and reaching out through her work to young people. Patricia has designed and led award-winning projects for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the United Nations, among others.

John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place.

He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in Venice, Istanbul, Xi’an, Belfast, Los Angeles, Beijing, Zurich, New York City, Taipei, São Paulo, Warsaw, Kaliningrad, Miami, Bilbao, Havana, Atlanta, Calgary, Buffalo, Boston, Mexico City, London and San Francisco. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has had work commissioned by both Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper’s and Der Spiegel. Christiane Paul cites Freeman’s work in her book Digital Art, Second Addition, as does Lucy Lippard in the Lure of the Local, and Margot Lovejoy in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.

His writing has been published in Rhizomes, Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure.

Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.

Borderline Projects

Borderline Projects is the brainchild of writer and researcher Salvador Olguin, and was born out of the need to bring separate artistic projects together under one single name. It takes advantage of a network of collaborators, fellow artists, and cultural institutions in order to promote its events and reach larger audiences.

The different projects and events that it promotes revolve around the notion of liminality, and are dedicated to explore interdisciplinary encounters and imaginative investigations, and it’s interested in the limits of experience: the limits between art and science, imagination and technique, the intimate and the collective.

Salvador Olguin holds a MA in Humanities and Social Thought by New York University. He has studied representations of Death extensively, and has work with Mexican cultural artifacts from the late nineteen and twentieth century. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Since 2011, Salvador Olguin has been a member of Observatory, an art and events space in the Proteus Gowanus Art Complex in New York City. Since then, Observatory has become a home for Borderline Projects and a place where most of its events are hosted. Observatory has been recognized as an up and coming venue in the New York City art scene, and it has provided a valuable new network to promote Borderline Projects.

To read about previous events and projects by Salvador Olguin hosted at Observatory and other venues please click here.