The Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University is very pleased to announce that we will not be presenting the augmented reality artwork of the art collective, MANIFEST.AR from June 4 through November 27, 2011. This collective, famous for using augmented reality technology to “hijack” an exhibition at MOMA in 2010, has focused its latest intervention on an even bigger art world target, the 2011 Venice Biennale.

From the collective’s Venice Biennale AR Intervention manifesto, “As ‘one of the world’s most important forums for the dissemination and ‘illumination’ about the current developments in international art” the 54th Biennial of Venice could not justify its reputation without an uninvited Manifest.AR Augmented Reality infiltration. In order to “challenge the conventions through which contemporary art is viewed” we have constructed virtual AR pavilions directly amongst the 30-odd buildings of the lucky few within the Giardini. In accordance with the “ILLUMInations” theme and Bice Curiger’s 5 questions our uninvited participation will not be bound by nation-state borders, by physical boundaries or by conventional art world structures.”

The Venice Biennale has not invited MANIFEST.AR to exhibit these artworks. The Samek Art Gallery has invited the artists to not exhibit the works.

MANIFEST.AR’s Venice Biennale 2011 AR Intervention descends from the artistic lineage of Salons des Refusés and Institutional Critique. This project imbues healthy critique with a sense of play and offers a new lens through which to view questions of absence and presence, of center and periphery. Artists from Marcel Duchamp to Michael Asher to Andrea Fraser have shown that when an artist gestures beyond the limits of the current art world, they do not leave that world behind; instead they expand its borders. MANIFEST.AR is expanding the art world in a discursive sense as well as technologically and spatially.

The Venice Biennale 2011 AR Intervention includes artworks by Tamiko Thiel, Sander Veenhof, Mark Skwarek, Will Pappenheimer, John Craig Freeman, Lily & Honglei, John Cleater, and Naoko Tosa.

The Samek Art Gallery is closed for the summer; please do not visit looking for these groundbreaking artworks. They are not here* The Gallery will also not be hosting a gala dinner at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice to honor the artists.

* While they are not inside The Gallery, these artworks have been dropped off, virtually, outside the doors of The Gallery and they have spilled out of the building across the Bucknell University campus. To view these artworks on-site, follow the instructions at http://www.bucknell.edu/x70622.xml. These artworks can be viewed from only two places on Earth: Venice, Italy and Lewisburg, PA. They can be not viewed from anywhere.