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Marble and Media: Augmented Reality Walking Tour

Welcome to the Marble and Media public art exhibition! Presented as an augmented reality (AR) walking tour in Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse, this exhibition showcases AR artworks from seven emerging Bay Area artists who participated in the ZERO1 creative laboratory, Marble and Media: Digital Activations of Public Memory. Inspired by the work of artist Cheyenne Concepcion’s fictional municipal agency, New Monuments Taskforce, the lab investigated and contributed to contemporary public discourse around past, present, and future monuments through the creation of artistic AR interventions. 

Tour tips:

  • Download Adobe Aero (available only on iOS) on your mobile device before you go
  • Exit out of any apps you're not using on your phone during the tour
  • Use headphones for optimal listening experience of artworks with an audio component
  • Please be patient! Some of the artworks will take time to load on your device
Once you're there: 

  • Launch the walking tour route on Google Maps
  • Open the camera app on your phone and point it towards the QR code that can be found on a floor decal, yard sign, or sticker at the base of each monument (QR code missing or not working? You can download the artwork using the link under each artist's AR activation description below)
  • The Aero app will automatically launch and download the artwork
  • Step back from the monument (10-15 ft) as you pan side-to-side with your phone pointing towards the ground around you for the Aero app to find horizontal surfaces
  • Tap to place the artwork in front of the physical monument and engage with the piece!

*This exhibition is best experienced during daylight hours

Tell us what you think in our 4-question survey

Also available in: Español and Filipino
Stylized map depicting stops on the AR walking tour in the Music Concourse

Access the walking tour route on Google Maps

Click on the pins marking the location of each monument in the Google Map above for extra walking tour tips and guidance
(On mobile, tap and drag upward the informational box that pops up on your screen once you click on the pin)

AR Activation Descriptions

Speckels Temple of Music

A. Welcome to the Marble & Media AR Walking Tour

Activates: Spreckels Temple of Music
Giuseppe Verdi Monument

B. Verdi, Shrouded
Kim Nucci

Activates: Giuseppe Verdi Monument
Bronze Sundial

C. This Land Before It Was "Found"
Mae Ross

Activates: Bronze Sundial
Rideout Memorial Fountain

D. American Bison
Jeff Enlow

Activates: Rideout Memorial Fountain
Francis Scott Key Monument

E. Schema for a Post-Historical Monument
Caleb Lightfoot

Activates: Francis Scott Key Monument
Padre Junipero Serra Monument

F. Monument to the Movement
Paola de la Calle

Activates: Padre Junipero Serra Monument

G. Speculative History
Hannah Scott

Activates: General John Joseph Pershing Monument
John McLaren Monument

H. Plant Your Seeds
Hena Muttreja

Activates: John McLaren Monument

Welcome to the Marble & Media AR Walking Tour

Activates: Spreckels Temple of Music

Access the walking tour description, instructions, and stylized map in this AR activation.

Download the Welcome Artwork for Viewing (in the Aero Mobile App)

Verdi, Shrouded
Kim Nucci

Activates: Giuseppe Verdi Monument

The Verdi monument is both a portal to Italian nationalist history and some of America’s most despicable actions at home during WWII. 

The monument was erected by L’Italia, an Italian language newspaper in San Francisco that ran from 1887-1943. The paper fundraised for the statue commemorating Guiseppe Verdi, which was completed in 1914 and unveiled with a grand concert attracting thousands of people. 

Verdi’s operas gained a life of their own as political anthems. “Va, Pensiero” an aria from Verdi’s opera Nabucco became the anthem of the Italian Risorgimento (nationalist unification). The monument shown in AR here is a deconstruction of the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument (Altare Della Patria) commissioned during the Italian Nationalist period and the sound is a granulated version of “Va, Pensiero.”

Ettore Patrizi, the opera-loving editor and publisher of L’Italia, was a victim of American nationalism. In 1942, he was dubbed a fascist sympathizer and “excluded” from San Francisco as part of the Individual Exclusion Program. Exclusion and internment were two of the ways in which Italian immigrants (regardless of citizenship status) were forcibly relocated by the American government during WWII. Roughly 10,000 Italians were removed from areas surrounding military operations, including San Francisco. Another 600,000 throughout the country were monitored by the FBI.

Download Kim's Artwork for Viewing (in the Aero Mobile App)

This Land Before It Was "Found"
Mae Ross

Activates: Bronze Sundial

This project is a direct response to the Bronze Sundial located in front of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. It is interesting how something that is simply meant to tell the time also commemorates the three navigators who were credited with the discovery of California. In my project, I showcase the true founders of what we call California. The ones I highlight in my piece are indigenous to the Bay Area and are just a few of the thousands of beings that are native to this land. Here I present my own clock, one that breathes with life and can educate us on how this land that we call home came to be. In this scene, we can reimagine the imposed concept of a founder and form our own ideas around who deserves to be honored.

Download Mae's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

American Bison
Jeff Enlow

Activates: Rideout Memorial Fountain

In 1891, the first bison were brought to Golden Gate Park. They lived in a pen where the Music Concourse is today. An attempt to conserve an animal that once numbered in the millions, they served as a symbol of the Wild West that no longer exists. A living monument to the violence of progress. 

At a time when California is dealing with multiple crises around land access, management, and stewardship, this work creates an immersive space in which to imagine a rewilded Golden Gate Park, where the nearby bison have broken free of their enclosure and reclaimed the land.

Download Jeff's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

Schema for a Post-Historical Monument
Caleb Lightfoot

Activates: Francis Scott Key Monument

The idealist vision of history functions by promoting the myth of the genius, obscuring class antagonisms with white supremacist figures plucked from the annals of time and deposited in our public spaces as monuments. This reification of national identitarianism is a double bind: it must simultaneously promote and exalt these figures while oppressing, often with state sponsored violence, those who seek to overturn the hegemony of this bourgeois mythos. While direct action over the last year removed many of these figures from our public spaces, the question of what is to be done with the neoclassical architecture left behind remains unanswered. This project imagines simultaneously occurring states of deterritorialization in which the monument is torn apart, sorted, and temporarily suspended as a specter of itself, an inverted cenotaph in which the death of the historical narrative is displayed as a perverse and post-historical fabulation. This project longs for a return of historical materialism in our public discourse: a proto-revolutionary mockup of a world where the desecrated detritus of the American state is primed and ready to be deployed in the building of a new and egalitarian society.

Download Caleb's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

Monument to the Movement
Paola de la Calle

Activates: Padre Junipero Serra Monument

Using the movement to remove Junipero Serra’s statues as inspiration, “Monument to the Movement'' asks the viewer to consider whose history is valued and whose is erased when we create monuments to colonizers. Monuments both share history and withhold it. They are part of our collective memory, and who we remember says a lot about us, our understanding of ourselves, and our history. This piece uses found photographs of various movements to remove Serra’s statues which act as windows into a specific moment in time. They offer alternatives to the history we are presented by interrogating what it means to unlearn, and then rewrite, the history that has been imposed on us. 

Download Paola's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

Speculative History
Hannah Scott

Activates: General John Joseph Pershing Monument

“Speculative History” imagines a future utopia that has collectively reoriented its understanding of history toward an expanded, holistic view of our past and away from singular monopolies over “Truth.” Presented as a historical anatomy of the monument to General Pershing, this piece critiques the ways in which American practices of memorialization collapse complex, violent realities into glorified figures. Viewers are invited to explore the network of events, materials, processes, and myths that form both the statue and the person it represents while an audio guide provides further context.

Download Hannah's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

Plant Your Seeds
Hena Muttreja

Activates: John McLaren Monument

John McLaren, known as the beloved grandfather of Golden Gate Park, was park superintendent from 1890-1947. He understood how both the complexity and beauty of nature affected our being. McLaren dedicated his life to creating an ode to nature that continues to grow far beyond his lifetime. 

This scene provides a window into McLaren’s memory; both a glimpse of the past and a view of the future. The deconstructed style highlights the irony of McLaren’s monument, as he expressed a strong distaste for all monuments by planting bushes throughout the Park that would eventually grow to cover them. My hope is that we can learn to coexist with the natural world by emphasizing it through the digital. I now invite you to enjoy the scene, the day, and take some seeds to plant yourself. 

Download Hena's Artwork for Viewing (on the Aero Mobile App)

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