Articles

Re-Visualizing Afghanistan in “what if im the bad guy”: Using Palimpsest to Create an AR Documentary + Interview, Statement, Artwork


A visitor to the UC Santa Cruz 2011 Permutations art show interacts with bad guy. Photo credit: Jim Mackenzie/DANM, UC Santa Cruz.
A visitor to the UC Santa Cruz 2011 Permutations art show interacts with bad guy. Photo credit: Jim Mackenzie/DANM, UC Santa Cruz.

LEA Volume 19 Issue 1
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti and Richard Rinehart
Editors: Ozden Sahin, Jonathan Munro and Catherine M. Weir

ISBN: 978-1-906897-20-8
ISSN: 1071-4391

Re-Visualizing Afghanistan in “what if im the bad guy”: Using Palimpsest to Create an AR Documentary
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork

by Aaron A. Reed & Phoenix Toews

what if im the bad guy is an augmented reality documentary based on the stories of three US soldiers in Afghanistan accused of war crimes. Narrative fragments are embedded into an explorable, outdoor “playing field” where the participant is invited to find a point of view from which the story makes sense, and to explore the often-hidden motivations, contexts, and realities behind the surface of an at-first unapproachable news event. The piece is built on a new open-source framework for AR narrative called Palimpsest, which combines a powerful scripting language with a sophisticated low-level 3D engine capable of producing highly reactive and configurable narrative environments in real spaces.

Full article is available for download as a pdf here.

Volume 19 Issue 1 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published online as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.