Animating Sculpture: AR, Iteration, and Public Art
In this talk, Dr. Lori Landay from Berklee College of Music discusses how she developed two AR experiences layered onto existing public sculptures—and what she learned by iterating between them.
In the first project, "Moving Memory AR," Landay debuted playful, motion-captured bots performing choreography around Jaume Plensa's sculpture Alchemist at MIT in February 2025. Users responded enthusiastically, but Landay identified several limitations she wanted to address. Her second project will bring "Moving Memory AR" to SXSW's Kempelen's Owls sculpture in Austin in March 2026, evolving the design across four dimensions: emotional, spatial, technical, and representational. Through iteration, she expanded the bots' emotional range and movement vocabulary, reduced their exaggerated gender coding, incorporated discovery-based movement requiring exploration across the sculpture's site, and deployed advanced Hoverlay sequences to deepen the experience. As Landay describes it, this latest version “makes a place to bridge contradictory themes of nature and technology, geometric and organic, clandestine and open, seen and hidden.”
Join us as Landay reflects on what changed between these two projects and why. She will discuss ethnographic observation methods for AR sites, Laban Movement Analysis for expressive choreography, advanced sequence-based authoring, strategies for creating modular content that adapts across contexts, and an honest assessment of what designers can and cannot anticipate without direct site experience.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Interactive Arts Collaborative through the Arts + Technology Program, a partnership between the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute, the Becker School of Design and Technology, and the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University.
