SERVICEPLAN GERMANY

Client: STROKE ART FAIR
Product: STROKE ART FAIR
Title: SCARS OF DEMOCRACY
Media: Mobile app available on the App Store and Google Play
Country: Global
Date Of Campaign: May 16th, 2019

Background: The "right to exercise artistic freedom" under Article 19 of the UN Convention for Human Rights is increasingly under threat worldwide. As one of Europe's most important urban art fairs STROKE Art Fair chose to celebrate this internationally ratified human right with a special exhibition of "Scars of Democracy" – a series of political portraits by street artist “capo's finest”. The series includes paintings of Obama, Merkel and more, their bodies adorned with tattoos that represent decisions, unfinished business and the things they tried to keep from the public eye. For the first time, street art was transformed into a virtual vernissage.This project was about bringing the physical and virtual worlds together and engaging users in the fight for artistic freedom. During the STROKE Art Fair exhibition, huge canvases depicting each political portrait hung from the ceilings for attendees to view – but the true depth of the experience and message was only possible with digital augmentation.

Idea: We developed the SCARS AR app to allow users to interact with the portraits on a whole new level. Visitors at the art fair could hold their smartphones in front of the tattoos to scan them and see the story (thoroughly researched video snippets) behind the tattoo. For those not visiting the art fair, the app’s “Couch Mode” enabled users to immerse themselves in this murky world of politics from the comfort of their own home: users virtually place the protagonists onto their home walls and discover the stories behind each tattoo.„The rights of artists to express themselves freely are under threat worldwide. Art has the extraordinary capacity to express resistance and rebellion, protest and hope…“ Deeyah Khan, Unesco – Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity.It is the stated mission of „STROKE Art Fair“ to present a great variety of styles with a particular focus on the various forms young artists use to express themselves – artists who are bold enough to take a stand and defend their point of view even under pressure. Therefore „STROKE Art Fair“ supports the freedom of expression in arts and entertainment: a human right as of 1948 set out in Article 19 by the United Nations General Assembly. This project was about mixing online and offline; bringing the physical and virtual worlds together and engaging users in the fight for artistic freedom. During the STROKE Art Fair exhibition, huge canvases depicting each political portrait hung from the ceilings for attendees to view – but the true depth of the experience and message was only possible with digital augmentation … literally. We developed the SCARS AR app to allow users to interact with the portraits on a whole new level. Visitors at the art fair could watch out for our artworks, hold their smartphones in front of the tattoos to scan them and tap on the scanned image to see the story (thoroughly researched video snippets from a wide range of international news outlets) behind the tattoo.With the SCARS AR app you can interact with the portraits in two ways: The app allows you to scan the tattoos on the artist's artwork. By pressing on the scan you get the story behind the motif. The second experience was made possible thanks to Apple’s top notch ARKit 2.0. Visual Inertial Odometry tracks the world around the user’s device and transforms the data into a virtual object. No physical artworks required!In order to allow an easy handling of the app, the functionalities were placed in the bottom bar. It allows a fast handling for scanning tattoos or selecting artworks. The operation of the individual motifs was natively adapted to the finger movements of the users.We engaged users on social media via Instagram where we hijacked the well-known user interface by posting a series of individual images which over time revealed a full Scars of Democracy wallpaper.

Results: More than 8000 visitors got actively involved in the AR-exhibition with hundreds of (free) App Downloads in just 48 hours as well as a broad international social media response (1927 Instagram followers).