Projects
Exploring Augmented Reality: Portals Within the Painting
Exploring Augmented Reality: Portals Within the Painting
This project explores how augmented reality can function as a subtle extension of my architectural paintings, using image-based overlays to reveal hidden spatial and narrative layers. Through a series of rapid prototypes, I will test AR as a “portal” mechanism that deepens illusion and perception without overshadowing the physical artwork.
This project explores augmented reality as a spatial extension of my architectural paintings and sculptures. Rather than producing a standalone digital artwork, I am testing AR as a subtle overlay that reveals hidden structures, glyphs and fragments of narrative embedded within existing physical works. The intention is to treat AR as a perceptual device - a way of opening a secondary layer of space that sits within or behind the surface of the painting.
Explore
£5,000
I will develop a series of lightweight digital “interventions” that sit within or behind physical works, functioning as portals that reveal hidden structures, glyphs, and fragments of text or sound.
Aims of the project
Working through a series of rapid prototypes, I will experiment with image-based anchoring and lightweight visual interventions, examining how scale, alignment and movement affect the illusion.
The focus is on process and testing: understanding what AR does to perception, where it strengthens the work, and where it becomes intrusive.
The outcome will be a set of experimental AR sketches and a clearer framework for integrating augmented reality into my wider practice without allowing the technology to dominate it.
Meet the artist
David Kenney
Artist
he/him
David Kenney is an artist working across painting, sculpture, installation and speculative narrative. His practice centres on imagined architectures and constructed worlds, exploring illusion, perception, and the psychological space between structure and belief. Through a long-term project titled The Constant State, he builds interconnected environments that combine physical artworks with written accounts, sound and spatial interventions. Influenced by architectural drawing, forced perspective and impossible geometry, his work often blurs the boundary between built form and fiction. He is interested in how environments shape meaning, and how subtle shifts in scale or perspective can destabilise what appears solid and certain.
