Description
This project explores the potential of image-making in Augmented Reality (AR) technologies as means of designing quality peace futures - unfuturing peace. Employing the methodology of compositional interpretation and the conceptual tool ‘futures images’, the project develops an essay of originally designed marker-based Augmented Reality Posters in Support of Ukraine. The posters feature such topics as (physical) integrity of Ukraine and its national symbols, global food security and the security of the LGBTQI+ community in Ukraine (chosen with reference to the dynamics of Ukraine’s defence and Ukraine’s development as a country at the time those images were created - July-August 2022). The technological-artistic process/outcomes of this AR image-making experiment and their relation to power layouts in peacebuilding form the bases for theorizing how AR quality futures design could facilitate “guerrilla peacebuilding” in war-affected communities. In outlining theoretical and practical premises of guerilla peacebuilding, the project intersects Augmented Reality Posters in Support of Ukraine with explorations of guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency efforts leading to the 2016 Havana Peace Agreements in Colombia. The project finds guerrilla peacebuilding to have the potential to offer to peacebuilders the strategic advantages of enhanced through AR/digital media/branding ontological security, territorially-nuanced peace, and unsuspended-in-time peacebuilding.
