‘Go Outside and Play It!’: A Scenographic Approach to Finding Aura in Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi, Augmented Reality Art Game, Sin Sol/No Sun

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to explore the affordances of certain new media applications for generating environmental affect, and hence possibly effect, in those who use them. It specifically aims to examine the use of augmented reality (AR) and movement/space-sensitive technologies in the science-fiction, climate-fiction, mobile art game Sin Sol/No Sun (2018–2020), made by Latina media and performance artist and theorist micha cárdenas and her team at the Critical Realities Studio at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sidestepping arguments about the nature and degree of immersivity afforded by different media and how this may, or may not, correlate with environmental engagement, it focuses instead on questions of embodiment and the potential for the development of ‘aura’ in spaces mediated by AR, and how these may potentially help promote pro-environmental affect. More specifically it argues that Sin Sol contrives to restore the aura of our environment in a relational way, through a design that is purposefully open to the player’s auratic free associations. It seeks to demonstrate this by means of a provisional, personal, scenographic account of my multi-sited attempts to experience the game to try to tease out the implications of this kind of ecopoetics.