ARtivism: AR-Enabled Accessible Public Art and Advocacy
Lucy Jiang
TL;DR
This position paper identifies a critical accessibility gap in public art for blind and low-vision individuals and proposes ARtivism, an AR-based artifact, to make murals and their advocacy messages more accessible. The approach combines an audiovisual prototype with a labeled mural map and crowdsourced descriptions, drawing on prior work in art accessibility and immersive AR to design multimodal, user-tunable experiences. Key contributions include a dataset of crowdsourced mural descriptions, demonstrations of synchronous mural tours, and a design rationale favoring head-mounted AR, diverse descriptions, and sound-based context to reduce cognitive load. The work discusses important tensions around logging and accessing unsanctioned public art, privacy, and safety, framing AR as a tool to extend enduring access to activism while acknowledging governance challenges and the need for careful future work.
Abstract
Activism can take a multitude of forms, including protests, social media campaigns, and even public art. The uniqueness of public art lies in that both the act of creation and the artifacts created can serve as activism. Furthermore, public art is often site-specific and can be created with (e.g., commissioned murals) or without permission (e.g., graffiti art) of the site's owner. However, the majority of public art is inaccessible to blind and low vision people, excluding them from political and social action. In this position paper, we build on a prior crowdsourced mural description project and describe the design of one potential process artifact, ARtivism, for making public art more accessible via augmented reality. We then discuss tensions that may occur at the intersection of public art, activism, and technology.