Snapchats new AR artwork vandalised by artists
- Monday, October 9th, 2017
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Following the launch of its AR art exhibiting feature, in collaboration with artist Jeff Koons, Snapchat has faced backlash from the artistic community and fallen victim to ‘digital vandalising’.
Artists have expressed their worries about corporations’ ownership of digital art and how they could monetise AR artwork by placing it wherever they like digitally, without having to pay to do so.
To show disapproval, graffiti artist Sebastian Errazuriz teamed up with Cross Lab Studio to ‘vandalise’ a mocked-up version of Jeff Koon’s AR Balloon Dog, before geotagging it in the same location.
“Should corporations be allowed to place what ever content they choose over our digital public space? Central Park belongs to the city of NY,” said Errazuriz on Instagram. “Why should corporations get to geo-tag its gps coordinates for free? We know they will make money renting gps spots to brands and bombard us with advertisement. They should pay rent, we should choose to approve what can be geo-tagged to our digital public and private space.”
With Snapchat making the move into this AR art world, it’s only a matter of time before others follow suit, which in turn will lead to the inevitable legal cases surrounding the ownership of augmented digital artwork and the places they are geotagged.