MoMAR's AR Intervention at MoMA: A Stale Rerun of 2010's WeARinMoMA

The collective MoMAR staged an unauthorized augmented reality (AR) performance titled "Hello, we're from the Internet" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, targeting the Jackson Pollock gallery. Eight artists created AR overlays viewable via smartphone app, transforming Pollock's paintings into interfaces for digital content. The project claims to democratize exhibition spaces by bypassing institutional gatekeepers. However, critic Valentina Tanni notes that the intervention is nearly identical to WeARinMoMA, an AR project by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek at MoMA in 2010 during the Conflux Festival. Other precedents include Manifest.AR at the 2011 Venice Biennale (Veenhof, Skwarek, Tamiko Thiel), the Invisible Pavilion by Simona Lodi and Les Liens Invisibles at the same Biennale, and Thiel's parody homage to Damien Hirst at Tate Modern in 2012. Tanni argues that while mainstream media hailed MoMAR's action as novel, it reveals a lack of historical memory among young artists regarding art-and-technology interventions from the past decade. The performance runs until May 2.