YEONGSANG: IMAGE, VIDEO, REFLECTION
‘Yeongsang’ 영상 is an augmented reality artwork that reflects its environment in real time. Through this work, we explored how digital artworks might exist more seamlessly in the real world by becoming context-aware.
In June 2025, Dr Toby Gifford and I delivered 'Yeongsang’ as a juried work in the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) held in Seoul, South Korea. The work was exhibited at Seoul Arts Centre among world-leading interdisciplinary and experimental artworks using technology. With this artwork, Toby and I were interested in how sensing technologies might be used to create digital phenomena that take on physical traits - like a mirror, Yeongsang reflects its environment and viewers, and like a hyperrealistic floating mass, it ripples and drifts in the wind. By being tied to a specific place, viewers also share the experience of viewing the work together, though it must be mediated through a custom AR app installed on a smartphone. Watching the work in action was an intriguing experience; groups of people moving around a static, plywood box (our tech housing) pointing and gesturing with their phones. To onlookers, it begged the question: “What are we missing?”. This intimation that something ‘existed’ there - at a specific place, and in a specific time - is what we aimed to explore through the work.
Artist Statement:
Yeongsang: image, video, reflection explores how phenomena might exist at the threshold between physical and digital presence. By sculpting digital mass that responds to its physical setting, this site-responsive augmented reality artwork toys with viewers' perceptions. The sculpture responds to environmental changes, hyper-realistically bending to wind direction and changing in mass according to temperature. Perceptually, the sculpture exists inside reality - it reflects, responds, and is tangibly congruent with its surroundings when viewed through AR, but without the window of a device, the sculpture is non-existant.





