Using archival images from the Austin History Center’s Collections and Augzoo iOS, local artist Adrian Aguilera’s East: Sun-Rise AR Intervention invites viewers to trace historically significant images embedded within their contemporary landscape throughout experiences that relate to history, origin, and labor. The project activates 10 sites across East Austin with the use of the augmented reality app on a smartphone and website. The project is an experience that offers a different understanding of where we are and allows us to see the past in the present simultaneously. It questions the way we use and approach public places and brings the past into contemporary landscapes in real time by virtually layering archival photographic material. The project also eludes the typical framework of engagement as it is not a timed, ticketed, or framed piece.

Perhaps the most constant part of Aguilera’s practice is his desire to learn new mediums in pursuit of artistic ends. Trained as a painter at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, México, he began his career creating photorealist paintings but quickly adapted his practice to include collage, sculpture, text, print media, performance, and installation. Often conceptual, interactive, and in collaboration, his work examines the phenomenological elements of objects and places. Though his first foray into AR, East: Sun-Rise ARI clearly builds upon his previous work’s interest in the BIPOC experience and public(s). In a studio visit prior to the work’s opening, Aguilera described how the people he highlights in the project–Anderson High School students and athletes, demonstrators against the Aqua Festival, and beauty contestants at the Miss East Contest (among other POC whose presence is not immediately apparent in their contemporary settings)–are and still in those places.

Drawing upon Black, Indigenous and Latino people, the work reveals embodied history that is both part of the past and ever-present. It suggests that wherever we were and are, we always are–a particularly resonant concept in a rapidly gentrifying East Austin, where history and future are hurtling in opposite directions at a dizzying pace.  Below, Aguilera poses at the site of the out-of-service Gulf Station, now painted robin egg blue, with the archival image of the active station and crew superimposed next to him. The project unwillingly, or perhaps very intentionally invites viewers to embody the same movements and stances seen by mostly white bachelorette parties and tourists flooding the streets of the historically Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Rather than trivializing the sites as fodder for Instagram and TikTok, East: Sun-Rise ARI reanimates forgotten ways of being.

Aguilera only promoted the run of East: Sun-Rise ARI from March 1- April 30, 2022 but it can be accessed indefinitely through the app, appropriately immortalized in the digital sphere. He had originally planned to keep building the project–expanding to additional sites across the city, however, he is already onto the next medium, and jokingly says he is ‘done with AR’. While I have no doubt that his next venture–creating and recreating organic objects out of plaster and other produced materials–will activate a different aspect of his practice, East: Sun-Rise ARI is not gone even if it is “over.”