Digital technologies are nowadays changing the ways we conceive space. By means of their instrumental power, they pierce “the woven fabric of reality” on one hand, and construct Virtual Reality, expanding it towards infinity, on the other hand. Virtual Space breaks through Real Space, making it fluid, flexible, collapsible and mobile. It blurs the difference between inside and outside, joins sites distant from each other in space and time and hybridizes a diversity of planes, from formative aspects of space to informative ones, to political, social and cultural. In addition to that, expanding Real Space through Virtual Space opens new vistas of experience, and new possibilities of rewriting it. 

The changes in the conception of space did not spare traditional showrooms, i.e. museums and galleries. The Augmented Reality Exhibition: Place-non-Place Exhibition, strives to explore a new kind of exhibition space, in the real heterotopia of the gallery (which can be considered as "non-place") as well as in public venues, lately serving as an arena for established and/or non-established artistic activity. At the same time, the exhibition strives to explore the status of objects or, alternatively, "non-objects" in these spaces. Their effects on the very concept of Space as a result of new object/space relationships are also explored, created by the encounter of real and virtual.

The HIT Research Gallery invites artists, designers, film makers, animators, architects and musicians from Israel and abroad to submit works for its launching exhibition. The exhibition is designed to occur simultaneously in the physical space of the gallery, acting as a "White Cube", and in the urban space outside it. This neighborhood inhabits Holon Design Museum, designed by Ron Arad; The Town’s Mediatheque; the commercial center nearby, as well as new and old housing complexes in the surrounding-all typifying the urban fabric of Holon. The exhibition is based on Augmented Reality technology, enabling a connection and a bonding of the Real and the Virtual by means of smart phones and tablets. This platform is widely used in various contexts: commercial, military, educational and entertainment, scarcely explored before in art and design contexts. Place-non-Place Exhibition is intended to examine the ways in which these technologies change the modalities of representation, or on the contrary, make the act of representation irrelevant. It is meant to become a traveling exhibition, adjusting itself to specific showrooms and public spaces.  

Artists wishing to participate in this exhibition are invited to send works connecting  the Real with the Virtual to the e-mail address below, following the technical  instructions. The proposal should state whether the work is intended for the gallery or for the public space. Works intended to be shown in the gallery should contain a physical object, two or three dimensional, which will operate in the gallery as a QR Code.  The work should also contain a file with a two or three dimensional image, or video clip, or an interactive file, relating to this object in Augmented Reality technology. Artists wishing to create works intended for a public space should contact us by mail, and we will send them photos of the specific sites in Holon, to which they should relate in their work. The public space work will be activated by a QR Code.

It should be noted that no special technological skill is required for participation in this project, beyond that needed for creating the computer files.

A short text 100- 300 words concerning the work + CV should be added to the proposal.

Confirming acceptance: until 30.9.2012.
Opening date of the exhibition: 8 November, 2012.
The Research Gallery of Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) will open on November 2012 with this launching exhibition.

Technical instructions

Images
Format: PNG
Resolution: max. 1024x1024

Video
Format: OGG
Resolution: 640x480
File size: max. 5MB

Sculpture
Format: FBX
Each sculpture model must have less than 15000 vertices, 15000 faces .
only png and jpeg images can be used as textures
File size: max. 5MB (inc. textures)

Sound
Format: OGG
File size: max. 5MB