Stand under the Edgewood Avenue bridge, raise your phone at the red face and bold flora of ARRRTaddict’s Somos Borincanos, and a second painting blooms over the first.
The overlay is called “Edgewood Embers,” an AI and augmented-reality installation by filmmaker Nicki Lynch that turns the mural into what Lynch describes as a digital sanctuary. Visitors who scan it can add a name to a glowing constellation of ancestors, scored to a custom 60 BPM track that folds together lo-fi hip-hop, gospel and Latin conga rhythms.
It is one stop on Altera Art: ATL, a tour of eight murals across the city, each carrying a layer only a smartphone camera can see. There is no app to download, no ticket to buy, and nothing to install — just a phone and the willingness to stand still slightly longer than usual.
Two mediums that should not get along
Murals are about as analog as public art gets: slow to paint, fixed to a wall, weathered by whatever the season brings. Augmented reality is the opposite — generated on the fly, temporary, gone the moment you look away.
That tension is the point, according to Natalia Gonzalez, founder of Altera, the AI-focused media company behind the tour. Gonzalez had seen AR used to animate static work in a museum and wondered whether the same treatment could work on murals that had already been part of the city for years, as a way to bring them into life in a new, fresh way.
Every layer went up with the original muralist’s permission. The technology extends the work rather than overriding it, Gonzalez said: at the core, both are stories, and both are art.
Where downtown shows up
Two of the eight stops sit in the Edgewood and Sweet Auburn corridor. Beyond “Edgewood Embers,” a marker at Sweet Auburn Trail Stop #12 becomes something closer to a resurrection: scan it and “Women of Auburn,” an AR layer by Dana Xavier Dojnik, raises the Auburn Branch Carnegie Library — Atlanta’s first public library for African Americans, demolished in 1960 — back into view above the street where it stood.
The rest of the trail runs outward. In Cabbagetown, FoxySwine’s psychedelic Cheshire cat on Wylie Street coughs up a soccer ball and predicts a World Cup winner in Mikey DiCenso’s “We’re All Mad Here.” FoxySwine’s dragon at the Center for Puppetry Arts becomes “Dancing Dragon” under Domitri Parker. In Inman Park, the “WE ♥ ATL” mural by YikYak and olive47 gains a pulse when Dr. Ric Mathis’s film “Heartbeat” plays over it. Little Five Points carries three: an interactive AR game built on TeMika Grooms’s two-sided signal box, a playful layer over Killamari Yo!’s AAPI Heritage Month mural, and a six-part journey through Taíno culture built on a second ARRRTaddict wall.
Built in six weeks, by people who had never done it
The tour came out of a fellowship. Over four days in late April, roughly 50 people — many with no technical background — sat through eight-hour workshops on the 8th Wall platform alongside generative media and storytelling craft. The cohort spent May building in direct conversation with the muralists whose walls they would be augmenting. Eight pieces made the final cut; each winning artist earned $1,000 and a spot on a trail timed to Atlanta’s World Cup summer.
For a downtown that spent six weeks hosting the world, it is a fitting piece of afterglow: the walls did not change, but what you can see on them did.
Reporting by Sherri Daye Scott for Rough Draft Atlanta. Read the original: Technology adds digital layers to Atlanta mural tour.