New Media Architectures: Vancouver
In partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH, Bentall Centre, and Downtown Van.
Curated by: Miriam Esquitín and Johannes DeYoung and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon
Exhibition Opening: 11 August 2025
Introduction:

New Media Architectures: Vancouver

New Media Architectures: Vancouver features augmented reality (AR) works by eight artists in dialogue with “Heron’s Dreamscape”, a vibrant public mural by artist Priscilla Yu. Curated by Johannes DeYoung, Miriam Esquitin, and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, in partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH, Bentall Centre, and Downtown Van, this exhibition reimagines the role of public art through augmented reality activations, where the mural transforms into a vibrant living interface. Participating artists present works in various media through augmentations that invite audiences to explore the mural’s physical locale, interrogate its site and surfaces, and find resonance in the social relations that interactive public art affords.

Participating artists include: Jiwon Ham & Ana María Cárdenas, Joshua Dickinson, Sahar Sajadieh & Manaswi Mishra, Mike Rader, Darya Ramezani & Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, and Priscilla Yu.
Acknowledgements:

This exhibition is organized in partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH, Bentall Centre, and Downtown Van.
Curator/Organizers(s):
Miriam Esquitín

Miriam Esquitín is an arts and non-profit leader based in Vancouver, Canada, with a strong focus on community building and social justice. Originally from Mexico, Esquitín’s career has focused on fostering inclusivity, innovation, and resilience. Co-founder of Polymer Dance, she leads a movement to democratize the arts, creating accessible opportunities for people to engage with dance regardless of background or training. From 2023 – 2025, Miriam served as Executive Director of The Vancouver Mural Festival, an organization that transformed urban spaces by connecting thousands of people through public art, exemplifying the power of public art to transform physical urban landscapes into cultural environments that speak to diverse communities.

 
Johannes DeYoung

Johannes DeYoung (US) is an internationally recognized artist whose practice explores themes of animism at the intersection of computational and material processes. His works have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in countries such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Taiwan, and the USA, as well as being featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. He is Associate Professor of Electronic and Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously taught at Yale University School of Art (2008–2018), where he was appointed Senior Critic and founding Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama, where he was appointed Lecturer in Design.

https://www.johannesdeyoung.com/
Gustavo Alfonso Rincon

Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon (Ph.D., M.Arch., M.F.A., B.S, B.A.) earned his doctorate in Media Arts and Technology at UCSB. Rincon is educated as an architect, artist, curator & media arts researcher. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His dissertation “Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures,” led to a Postdoctoral appt. at the AlloSphere Research Facility, affiliated with the Media Arts & Technology Program, California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Participating Artists:

©A Lullaby for the City
Sahar Sajadieh
Manaswi Mishra
A Lullaby for the City

A Lullaby for the City is an augmented reality public artwork by Sahar Sajadieh and Manaswi Mishra. It presents the interspecies soundscape of Vancouver over a 24-hour period, through a 24-minute audio piece that begins at midnight. It captures the sounds of the city at night, featuring the occasional sounds of cars and garbage trucks passing by, as well as the nocturnal songs of birds such as the Great Horned Owl, Barred Owl, and Western Screech-Owl. About an hour or two before sunrise, Vancouver awakens to the dawn chorus of birds, weaving the first threads of the day’s soundscape.

As the light comes out, the sound of cars gradually joins the birds’ chorus, which is slowly fading away, followed by the sounds of traffic hum, SkyTrain whooshes, construction noise, cyclists zipping, and a multilingual ambient chatter. The city’s soundscape changes throughout the day, with various natural and urban sounds chiming in until sunset, when the evening chorus comes to life, joining the sound of the city’s exhausted chaos. After a few hours, as the city begins to quiet down, its sounds gradually subside, with occasional sirens, night buses, slow chatter, music from bars, passersby’s footsteps, wind, and crickets composing the epilogue of the drowsy city’s soundscape, marking the ending of the 24-hour sound journey of Vancouver.

This AR spatial audio artwork—activated via the Hoverlay app for visitors (within 50 ft of the murals)—augments Priscilla Yu’s “Heron’s Dreamscape” by incorporating the cross-species 24-hour soundscape of the city into a 24-minute lullaby for the city.
©Dreamscape Hatchlings
Darya Ramezani
Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt
Dreamscape Hatchlings

Dreamscape Hatchlings transforms the “Heron’s Dreamscape” mural by artist Priscilla Yu, into a living nursery where the urban facade gives birth to new winged life. By way of a browser‐based WebAR platform, visitors discover and hatch eggs across the mural, setting graphic herons in flight.  This simple three‐stage interaction (appearance, hatching, flight) embodies the core themes of “Heron’s Dreamscape”: the quiet, cyclical rhythms of non‐human life that persist inside a metropolis, and the invitation to “embrace a slower pace to notice the nature that surrounds our urban spaces.” Visitors’ interactions with the augmented mural reframe the mural as a breathable habitat, dissolving the boundary between painted illusion and living ecosystem. The tactile pleasure of hatching overlays an ethic of guardianship, every egg placed is a quiet bond to notice and nurture the overlooked wildlife that shares our skyline.
©Heron's Dreamscape
Priscilla Yu
Heron’s Dreamscape

Heron’s Dreamscape is a public mural located at 1050 W Pender St. in Vancouver, BC Canada. The mural draws inspiration from the awe-inspiring landscapes of the Pacific Northwest as well as the urban structures the city of Vancouver. In the moments spent in quiet with nature, Yu finds endless fascination by the way the natural world possesses an enchanting quality that captivates not just humans, but also the attention of other creatures. Through her mural, Yu invites viewers to embrace a slower pace to notice the natural surroundings urban spaces. In particular, the other species that share space such as the Great Blue Herons, the Crows, and the Cormorants around Coal Harbour, interwoven amidst the glass architectures that define the Vancouver skyline.
©Heron’s Soundscape
Joshua Dickinson
Heron’s Soundscape

Heron’s Soundscape is a generative musical composition designed as an interactive augmented reality (AR) experience, to be played by participants using mobile devices and the “Heron’s Dreamscape” mural as a visual score. Sound and visual accompaniment is created in real-time through participants’ direct interactions with the mural. Audience members create one or more “performances” of the piece determined by their choices and interactions, including the angles, locations, and paths they trace visually with their mobile devices while hearing the results of each engagement in relation to the images presented upon their device’s viewfinder.
©Heron’s Stereoscope
Mike Rader
Heron’s Stereoscope

Heron’s Stereoscope offers a traditional stereoscopic view of the “Heron’s Dreamscape” mural. A hand-painted plate highlights aspects of the mural that can be manually focused through the stereoscope’s
lens and viewer assembly. This traditional 19th-century apparatus plays in contrast to contemporary notions of augmented reality, more typically situated in the realm of electronic and time-based media. Here, the physical apparatus of the stereoscopic viewer grounds audiences in the material world, asking for greater sensitivities to the site of activity.
©Notes from Birds
Jiwon Ham
Ana María Cárdenas
Notes from Birds

Notes from Birds is an interactive augmented reality (AR) experience inspired by Priscilla Yu’s mural Heron’s Dreamscape. Drawing from Priscilla’s portrayal of the coexistence between birds and people in Vancouver, media artist Jiwon Ham and AR researcher Ana Cárdenas created a site-specific AR app that shares poetic and humorous stories from a bird’s perspective.

This web-based AR app, built with 8th Wall, is accessible on any smartphone. Using image tracking and interactive components, visitors on-site can scan a QR code, open the app,and point their phone at the mural to reveal hidden story blocks that unlock short, playful stories.

The narratives are inspired by Vancouver’s local birds—herons, geese, crows, hummingbirds—and were generated with AI to give each bird a unique voice shaped by its quirks, habitats, and interactions with humans.

Notes from Birds transforms the mural into a layered storytelling experience, inviting audiences to explore, imagine, and see the city as a shared space—one where birds and humans often cross paths, and sometimes even share the same stories.