Diana Manfredi - Augmented Reality

I am a big fan of Augmented Reality. Mixing reality with 2D animation (rotoscoping) has always been one of the main elements in most of my videos, so I couldn't help but fall in love with AR. I've used it at first to create anti-beauty Instagram filters, a way of reclaiming "I feel and look like shit today" and just accepting it and going with it with irony, without trying to beautify anything. This probably resonated with a lot of people, given that, since 2019, my filters have been used over 200M times! This led me to win an international contest and make a filter for Dualipa and various brands.

Then I started delving more into the technology and working on both artistic and educational projects. For example, I animated paintings in the Senate room of the Vienna City Hall for an educational program for kids, I animated record covers for the project This Cover, and I “erased” with AR the statue of Indro Montanelli - a famous Italian journalist who also casually bought as his “wife” a 12-year-old Eritrean child while he was a volunteer, with the colonial fascists, in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war - and, using image recognition and tracking technology, I replaced it with a new monument I created called Monument to the Present. My Augmented Reality artwork is cited and featured in the academic book Nomumento (“non-ument”) written by Aesthetics professor Andrea Pinotti.

For me, AR can be such an amazing tool to add culture to culture. There are so many facts and people that History has forgotten, or never taken into consideration, and that can be brought to life for people to see and learn. It's like using the past, or any contemporary physical element that we don't like, and changing it, unleashing complete freedom of imagination and re-inventing the world we live in today making it more artistic, friendly, and inclusive. It's really fascinating and powerful to me.