Artist Talk (Nancy Baker Cahill)

Nancy Baker Cahill relates to more than one branch of knowledge. Nancy is an expanded filmmaker with a hybrid practice focusing on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body through ecological thinking. She has created research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual projects rooted in drawing history. Nancy is known for her Augmented Reality but her primary practice is drawing since she was little. Nancy records her ideas in thematic journals. Nancy before she uses technology draws on paper. She uses it for ideating, imagining, and composing her thoughts; Nancy starting with drawing is the raw form of her ideas. Nancy stated that even though she used a variety of digital mediations she always went back to paper. Nancy learned chiaroscuro and basic rendering techniques at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; her father insisted on taking her drawing and sculpting classes as foundational to her future career. This is evident that Nancy learning those precise skills at Boston; helped her with paper-based sculptures and rendering them in Augmented Reality artwork. Nancy did get obsessed with drawing in VR and got deeply frustrated by its inaccessibility to the general audience. She wanted to expand the immersive drawing into a shared space just as public art does. Nancy’s development team at Drive Studios suggested creating an Augmented Reality app that would feature Virtual Reality drawings that can translate into Augmented Reality. So Nancy did just that and created a public shared space for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Nancy is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform that explores site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression.

Nancy’s work is globally-exhibited geolocated Augmented Reality installations earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze, The Art Newspaper, and other publications. The Whitney Museum of American Art had commissioned one of Nancy’s pieces CENTO; it is the first participatory AR project co-built by a global audience and is now permanently on view. CENTO located at the Whitney Museum is a fantastical airborne being with cephalopod tendrils, rubbery manta ray wings, a machine pentagon for a head, a serpentine body, and a mycelium belly glowing with neon feathers. Nancy said that CENTO is a “bio-engineered future creature,” a transspeciated being with techno-organic parts to ensure its survival in an unseen, toxic environment. You can see the alternate universe in the Augmented Reality which you can see in Nancy’s 4th Wall app. February of 2018 Drive Studios in 4th wall. It is a completely free Augmented Reality public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Nancy intended to challenge traditional conventions of public art and introduce a participatory, immersive art experience. The app since it first came out in 2018 has expanded and includes geolocated Augmented Reality land art, curated Augmented Reality exhibitions, and collaborative projects with artists around the globe. 4th Wall is committed to conceptually rigorous artworks and intends to prompt thoughtful discourse and active ideas that use the unique affordances of augmentation.