AR Linocuts

Zenka has been using augmented reality overlays in her prints, installations, sculptures, and street art since 2012. The AR Linocut series is the central thread.

Each piece begins as a hand-carved linoleum block and a hand-pulled print on paper. The image stands on its own as a piece of figurative work, often depicting figures in motion, leaping, flying, breaking free of frames. Then the augmented reality layer activates: point a phone or tablet at the print, and the figure begins to move, the line work animates, the still becomes alive.

The series was first shown publicly at the Ink & Clay 42 exhibition at Cal Poly Pomona in 2016-17, and again in Ink & Clay 43. From there it traveled to TEDx Jackson Hole as a stage installation, the Hololens Hackathon in Los Angeles, the Rothenberg Building installation, and the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts, before becoming the foundation of an NFT release in 2022.

The technical premise is straightforward: pair a permanent physical art object with a digital animation triggered by computer vision. The deeper premise is what Zenka calls aliveness: the idea that the line between a still image and a moving image, or between an object and a being, is thinner than we have been trained to believe.

“Permanent on paper. Alive through a phone.”