Artificial Truth

Artificial Truth is an augmented reality mobile application for viewing the counter reality that has been generated by the mediated reality through advertisements and the entertainment industry.

This project tried to generate an awareness about how mediated reality are constantly trying to generate a pre-conscious experiential filter of the social reality.

Mass Media has shifted our culture away from private ideals to a corporate image represented by pictorial images that she/he has aspired from TV / film or commercials. Instead of presenting a private argument or vista, it offers a way of life that is for everybody or nobody. It is a world in which images from mass media like print, television, online digital, advertisement are layered and engraved in our mind so strongly, that the sense of what is real has become problematic, buried under the thick sediment of its visual representations.

As time has passed, this new electronic and information culture is associated with technological solutions of their aspirations of the new and improved human culture.

“Technology can reveal the dream world of society as much as its pragmatic realization.” (Gunning, quoted in Boddy 1994: 105)

The new technologies have rejuvenated the utopian aspirations in the modern techno-rationalist society. Co-existing with this desire for technologically empowered control, the technological imagination leads us to dream of the pleasure of shifting our existence to ‘an alternative environment, one that has been cleansed of the real world’s undesirable qualities’ by entering ‘into the image’.

In current scenario, our perception of the real world around us has changed because of the exploitation of the content of communication. Advertisement tries to consciously manipulate reality through layering multiple levels of images on the actual reality

Technology & Working: Artificial Truth works by recognizing the AR markers. The entire advertisements can be transformed into a marker for the mobile/ hand-held capturing device to recognize, so that it can be replaced with an alternative content, like images and video on the mobile screen. The applications acts as an open source repository where pedestrians can contribute by capturing and tagging the respective product name for the images of the new advertisements and also they can give their views about the ads. These new ads can be uploaded to online repository so that a counter view can be substituted for the new ads.

Created in collaboration with Promila Roychoudhury.