Rosbank Future Cities

Digital public art project with web-based augmented reality

The digital art public festival Rosbank was simultaneously held in 6 Russian cities in July 2021 and we were honored to be a technological partner of it.

The project has become a groundbreaking precedent in the field of technology and art in Russia owing to the unique technology and its coverage – more than 60 000 people tried it within 1 month.

Year: 2021

Client: V Confession Agency / Rosbank

Duration: 2 months

Technologies: #WebAR #8thwall #location-based

Project’s website

The mission of the festival is popularization of digital art and decentralization of culture with the help of digital technologies.

The event is dedicated to rethinking the notion of public art as an art within urban space. It united young artists that expressed their opinions about cities, role of technologies and people within it in augmented reality.

Artists-participants of the project:

– Yan Posadskiy, Vadim Epstein
– Anna Tagantseva-Kobzeva
– Kirill Makarov
– D-o-a (Anna Leonova and Sasha Puchkova)
– Sophia Skidan

WebAR technology is the most accessible for a broader audience – you only need to click on the link to begin an AR experience.
That’s why we have chosen it for such an enormous project – AR is here and now without downloads and installations.

Technology is still considered new for the audience, that’s why it was important for us to make the interface as intuitive as possible.

WHY WEBAR?

The user adventure began on the map with marks of digital artworks’ location. We paid much attention to making instructions and visual marks, so the user felt comfortable during the whole experience and could easily find answers to any questions.

ART WALK

The festival was based on the idea of a quest. Participants walked through cities orienting with points on the map. With GPS-coordinates we put specific triggers, and if a participant finds it, the secret artwork is shown to him.

After completing the quest a viewer received an award – a free ticket to one of the cultural institutions within the city.

Among the partners of the festival were museums and art spaces: MMOMA, Eltsin center, Strelka and others.

The artists explored monuments as powerful images that organize public space. The art object was created by a neural network trained on a dataset of monuments of Russian cities.

A MONUMENT TO EVERYTHING

Yan Posadskiy, Vadim Epstein

Visualization of the most important bridge of all social interactions. The artist looks at trust as a type of relationship in the context of the city from the person's perspective – a subject located within a set of systems.

TRUST

Kirill Makarov

The art object draws a parallel between digital data transmitted using wireless technologies and plant pollen, which transmits knowledge about the species and its population.

POLLEN

Anna Tagantseva-Kobzeva

Digital poetry of familiar urban images. The D-o-a team looks at the digital infrastructure through one of its most invisible manifestations — wires: electrical, transport, Internet cables.

THE UNBEARABLE INFINITY OF BEING CONNECTED TO THE NET

D-o-a (Sasha Puchkova, Anna Leonova)