Jill Miller presents “Dog Pack” with collaborator Melody Chang at ICASF
Professor Jill Miller and collaborator Melody Chang present Dog Pack, an augmented reality artwork at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. With the help of AR Technical Lead Yuting (Kathy Wang) Miller and Chang created a site specific AR environment inspired by the urban legends about parks of feral dogs who roamed the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco during the 19th century, surviving on slaughterhouse scraps from 3rd street processing units.
“Dog Park” is part of the ICASF’s Meantime program, a series of takeovers and pop-ups occurring at the museum in advance of their fall 2022 opening. The project opened within Chris Martin’s sculptural installation at the ICASF on Friday, April 15, and is open for viewing until April 30th. We encourage everyone to go see this incredible exhibit, which brings together new media, mythmaking, and local San Francisco history. Congratulations, Jill!
From the exhibition description:
The ICASF exhibition, Dog Pack, is an augmented reality environment that uses the Institute of Contemporary Art SF as a site for exploring Dogpatch neighborhood lore in a fantastical and fabulative way. The work combines virtual objects with the physical space to create a hybrid ecosystem where visitors engage in a participatory artwork.
The ICASF is a new museum space in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Drawing on urban legends about the origin of the Dogpatch name, Dog Pack is a site-specific project that explores and embellishes local lore about wild dog packs roaming the neighborhood, feeding off of slaughterhouse scraps from 3rd Street processing plants. These dog packs purportedly “ruled” Bayview and Dogpatch neighborhoods from mid-1800s for the next century as the neighborhood shifted from rural to industrial. While there are three competing stories about the origin of the Dogpatch name, this work focuses on one: wild dogs.
By situating the audience-participant in both a virtual environment and a physical space, Dog Pack blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the historical and the present. The work grounds itself in the conceptual art of the 1960s, a time when questions about the nature and necessity of the physical art object were primary. The project nods toward modern-day artmaking, where semiological questions about the nature of art have new meaning as technology has advanced and AR objects are both “here” and “not here” simultaneously.
For more information on Jill’s website, click here! https://www.jillmiller.net/media#/dog-pack/
For more information about Dog Park and Meantime programming, visit the ICASF website here: https://www.icasanfrancisco.org/programsandexhibitions