RE/ VIEW | Expanding Reach and Audience with Augmented and Virtual Reality

Clockwise from top left: Sisa Bueno, Vashti DuBois and Robin White Owen

 Introducing RE/ VIEW, an online program discussion series to address reopening and reimagining museums, art spaces and institutions across the country. Understanding that this crisis has upended previous conditions and revealed vulnerabilities in how we exhibit, present and view art, we invite leaders across our field to strategize for the future. This event is open to members and non-members with a $15 suggested donation. 

How to take part!

1. Register here
2. Following registration you will receive call-in information in the form of a ZOOM link
3. Before joining a Zoom meeting on a computer or mobile device, you can download the Zoom app from the Download Center and select the “Zoom Client for Meetings” option. Alternatively, you will be prompted to download and install Zoom when you click a join link.
4. For further instruction on how to use Zoom, see here.

Join ArtTable for a discussion on using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools to expand an institutions’ reach and programming. During this discussion we will hear from Sisa Bueno, founder of Vuevelo, an AR platform that works alongside museums, Vashti DuBois, Executive Director/Founder of the Colored Girls Museum that is working with AR/VR to develop a virtual experience that connects artists, educators and technologists with everyday women of the African diaspora, and Robin White Owen, Co-founder and Principal of Media Combo, which works within museums again focusing on AR/VR.

Sisa Bueno

Originally from New York City, Sisa Bueno is an Afro-Latina film & multimedia maker who is fascinated by people of all cultures and seeks to awaken our own empowerment. She studied both film production and interactive technologies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). The NBC Network named Sisa a 2013 Latina Innovator for her upcoming documentary “To the Mountains,” which takes place in Bolivia, South America. Sisa is a recipient of the ITVS-PBS Diversity Development grant, HotDocs CrossCurrents grant, and BAVC MediaMaker fellow for her current work in progress, “For Venida, For Kalief.”

Sisa is also currently a 2018-2020 Member of the NEW INC tech incubator program within the New Museum working with Augmented Reality (AR) developing an art-viewing app tentatively called Vuevelo (currently in prototype stage). The goal is to provide an enhanced curated experience via an interactive AR platform that gives extra media content for featured works of art in real time. Her fascination with finding solutions for providing additional context, and her experimentation with VR and AR technology inspired her to create the Vuevelo platform to fulfill an existing need for art lovers seeking more vetted information about the works that they love straight from the creators/curators themselves.

Vashti DuBois

Prior to creating The Colored Girls Museum (TCGM), Vashti DuBois held leadership positions at a number of organizations over the span of her 30-year career in non-profit and arts administration. DuBois’ work focused primarily on issues impacting girls and women of color at organizations such as The Free Library of Philadelphia, Tree House Books, the historic Church of the Advocate, the Children’s Art Carnival in New York City, the Haymarket People’s Fund in Boston, Congreso Girls Center and The Leeway Foundation.

In 2015, DuBois opened TCGM to “honor the stories, experiences and history of Colored Girls throughout the African Diaspora.” It is the first memoir museum of its kind offering visitors a multi-disciplinary experience in a residential space. TCGM initiates the “ordinary” object, submitted by the colored girl herself, as a representative of an aspect of her story and personal history which she finds meaningful.

TCGM has been engineered to pop up in other cities and neighborhoods around the country, transforming ordinary spaces into Colored Girls Museum outposts that collect, archive and share the stories of indigenous Colored Girls.

DuBois is a graduate of Wesleyan University and a NAMAC Fellow. She is currently working on a book about the making of The Colored Girls Museum.

Robin White Owen

Robin White Owen is a Principal and Creative Producer at MediaCombo, a digital media studio she founded with her husband, Michael Owen, in 2004 in New York. They produce user friendly and engaging experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and interactive applications, as well as audio tours and videos. These projects are designed to build engagement, relationships and knowledge.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) create immersive experiences that can accomplish these goals because they help visitors gain a deeper, more personal understanding of a story.

She is currently completing Tracing Paint: the Pollock-Krasner Studio in VR, a VR experience for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, NY. Visitors in Quest VR headsets will find themselves in the studio as it looked when first Pollock and then Krasner painted their most iconic works there, seeing those paintings in situ, and hearing the artists speak about their process.

Her first AR project was an AR audio tour at The Morgan Library & Museum, launched in December 2018, The 1907 Tour: Pierpont Morgan’s Library Revealed. It takes advantage of the unique attributes of augmented reality to merge the past with the present, blending time and distance, delving into Morgan’s personal life, and his sources of inspiration.

Her first Virtual Reality project was a 3D virtual tour of We Are Nature, a ground- breaking exhibition examining the human causes of climate change, at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

In addition to producing in VR & AR, Robin has produced interactive applications, sim games, websites, audio tours and video programs for a broad spectrum of internationally known cultural and civic organizations, and corporations, including the Rubin Museum of Art, The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), the International Center of Photography (ICP), the American Museum of Natural History, the New-York Historical Society, the Jewish Museum, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, and Metropolitan Transit Authority Capital Construction (MTACC).

Robin has been a member of ArtTable for many years, serving on the Program Committee for several of them. At present she volunteers as Co-Chair of the Media, Technology & Design Commission in the Career & Technology Education program at the NYC Dept of Education, and is an Advisory Board Member of Calm Clarity. She frequently presents at museum and technical conferences on AR and VR in museums and has recently written on this topic for the touring museum exhibition platform TEO.