Shapes of Silence
2025
Augmented Reality Intervention
Central Park, Boulder, CO
Through a smartphone or tablet, visitors scan a QR code and witness digital interventions layered within Central Park, Boulder. Animated objects and text appear to be moving, bounding, growing or shrinking between the fields, trees, creek, and rocks—each shape referencing results from community workshops I led in collaboration with BMoCA and the Carnegie Library.
This project responds to Archivist, Nicole Docimo’s, work with Archival Silences at the Carnegie. Silences in the archive are often the result of negligence, systemic bias, or deliberate erasure. I became curious: what shape does silence take, make, fill in, or drain?
I held three workshops between March and April 2025: one with Jeanne Quinn’s Ceramics Seminar and two at BMoCA, where I asked participants to reflect on silencing, being silenced, and silence. Different drawing prompts guided participants to reflect in different ways on how one approaches silence, experience silence, or inflicts silence. The goal of each workshop was to visually explore the expression of something that is missing. How can a negated essence, the lack of noise, the lack of voice be represented? The shapes drawn from participants became the raw data for the AR work.
Using AI tools, I translated the drawings into digital 3 dimensional .obj files, I generated textures or colors for each object, and animated them using blender. Once rigged and animated, the objects are placed in the geolocation of Boulder’s Central Park using Adobe’s Aero Software. With that software I am able to set different types of triggers allow for AR viewers to interact with each object.
When experiencing the AR, viewers look through the camera of their smart device as animated objects appear and allow for the viewer to walk around it, investigate it deeper, tap to trigger animations, enter or exit proximity to trigger objects appearing or disappearing, and more.
Shapes of Silence is not only a virtual intervention—it’s an act of collective imagining. In resisting erasure, it reclaims space through collaborative storytelling and speculative imagery.
Special thanks to Jeanne Quinn and Julie Poitras Santos for leading the Grad Ceramics Seminar that was the catalyst for this project. Thank you to BMoCA & Staff for helping me organize workshops and exhibiting the AR piece. Many many thanks to the participants who contributed drawings and thoughts on silence and potential shapes it can make!!
