New York, USA Fri, Oct 3, 2025 at 4:00 pm EDT
Vancouver, Canada Fri, Oct 3, 2025 at 1:00 pm PDT
UTC, Time Zone Fri, Oct 3, 2025 at 8:00 pm
A revisiting of the New Media Architectures: Vancouver exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2025 which featured augmented reality (AR) works by eight artists in dialogue with “Heron’s Dreamscape”, a vibrant public mural by artist Priscilla Yu. Participating artists included: Jiwon Ham & Ana María Cárdenas, Joshua Dickinson, Sahar Sajadieh & Manaswi Mishra, Mike Rader, Darya Ramezani & Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, and Priscilla Yu. Curated by: Miriam Esquitín, Johannes DeYoung, and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon. The exhibition reimagined the role of public art through digital augmentation, activating the mural as a living interface between place, community, and technology. Our discussion will delve into the collaborative process behind the exhibition and the evolving relationship between physical murals and digital interventions. Together, we’ll explore how site-specific digital media can expand the narrative capacity of public artworks, deepen community engagement, and reframe our experience of urban environments. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the conversation will address the potentials and challenges of blending artistic traditions with emerging technologies — and what it means to co-author public space in the digital age. All audience members will gain insight into the artistic, curatorial, and technical approaches and visions that shaped the exhibition, while reflecting on the broader cultural impact of art in augmented urban landscapes.
This SPARKS event will feature artists Joshua Dickinson, Jiwon Ham, Ana María Cárdenas, Mike Rader, and Sahar Sajadieh in dialogue with curators Miriam Equitín, Gustavo Rincon, and Johannes DeYoung. Acknowledgements: This exhibition is organized in partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGGRAPH DAC standing committee, Bentall Centre, and Downtown Van.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 research scholar. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His work with DigitalFutures has gained a global audience with a yearly program along with a series of free summer workshops. 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.