Mobile Augmented Reality Art and the Politics of Re-assembly Rewa Wright University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia Abstract Experimental art deployed in the Augmented Reality (AR) medium is contributing to a reconfiguration of traditional perceptions of interface, audience participation, and perceptual experience. Artists, critical engineers, and programmers, have developed AR in an experimental topology that diverges from both industrial and commercial uses of the medium. In a general technical sense, AR is considered as primarily an information overlay, a datafied window that situates virtual information in the physical world. In contradistinction, AR as experimental art practice activates critical inquiry, collective participation, and multimodal perception. As an emergent hybrid form that challenges and extends already established 'fine art' categories, augmented reality art deployed on Portable Media Devices (PMD’s) such as tablets & smartphones fundamentally eschews models found in the conventional 'art world.' It should not, however, be considered as inscribing a new 'model:' rather, this paper posits that the unique hybrids advanced by mobile augmented reality art–– also known as AR(t)–– are closely related to the notion of the 'machinic assemblage' ( Deleuze & Guattari 1987), where a deep capacity to re-assemble marks each new art- event. This paper develops a new formulation, the 'software assemblage,’ to explore some of the unique mixed reality situations that AR(t) has set in motion. Keywords Mobile Augmented Reality; Twenty-First Century Art; Assemblage; Deleuze & Guattari; Tamiko Thiel & Will Pappenheimer; Manifest.AR; Code; Embodiment; Public Art. Introduction Politically, the disruptions posed by AR(t) have presented a series of uncompromising critical interventions directed at the canonical Artworld ( Thiel 2014:31) and at Global Capitalism ( Swarek 2014:3). As an emergent form of interactive social commentary, AR(t) on mobile devices pushes into new territory and destabilises old concretions. Pioneering works by key practitioners have collided portable mobile devices with public art practice, deploying geo-locative technology at relevant sites in North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere. Historians, theorists, as well as the artists themselves have tackled the conceptual and pragmatic implications of mobile augmented reality in public space, focussing attention on the practice of geo- location (Aceti 2011, 2013; Rinehart 2013; Ulmer & Freeman 2014; Lodi 2014; Rhodes 2008; Geroimenko 2012, 2014; Gwilt 2010, 2014; Lichty 2010-; Rhodes 2008; Thiel 2010-; Swarek 2010-; Pappenheimer 2010-, Freeman 2010-); McGarrigle 2012 -). The intention of this paper is to offer an additional chapter on the unfolding story of AR(t), through exploring the largely untapped relation between mobile AR and assemblage theory, and bringing that to bear on issues of embodiment, ubiquity, surveillance, and materiality. Deleuze and Guattari attacked the problem of how to provide an adequate account of the forces, flows and intensities operating on the contiguous parts of a dynamic system. Their account situated the compositional drive in a material flow as an assemblage: a self-organising system of material elements drawn from a common technological lineage, where organisation is achieved by way of procedural operations vested in movement, intensity, scale, and flux. Dynamic and provisional, an assemblage always has a side facing 'vertical content' (control, authority, stratification) as well as a side that can make connections with other machines of expression, movement and so forth. The assemblage can therefore instantiate new becomings, while remaining connected to its technological lineage: existing materials are meshed together in all together different ways, allowing highly unique connections to emerge from any given matter-flow. Deleuze and Guattari announce: 'We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow— selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention (1987: 406). An understanding of assemblage facilitates an examination of the material elements and relational forces that coalesce in some of the new types of hybrid mixed reality situational artwork emerging from the AR medium. The assemblage allows us to understand such works as both inseparable from the utilitarian thrust of industrial and military AR, the trivialities of entertainment and gaming paradigms, and the possibilities of new and novel aesthetic experiments. Experimental AR artworks that can be understood as software assemblages include Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s the City of Forking Paths (2014), Julian Oliver’s Level Head (2008), and Tamiko Thiel and Will