A waterfall cascading over the former Macy’s skybridge; a kelp forest crawling up the archways at Pacific Science Center; a statue of a Suquamish chief reciting a speech at Tilikum Place. These are some of the augmented reality images that people can view as part of a 2.5-mile augmented reality walking trail that opened this week in downtown Seattle — just in time for World Cup visitors as well as locals. All you need: good walking shoes and a charged smartphone.
“It’s akin to ‘Pokémon Go,’ but it’s filled with beautiful Coast Salish histories, Afrofuturism, a multitude of other cultural stories,” said Yuliya Bruk, founder and executive director of Future Arts, the nonprofit behind the exhibition.
Beginning under the arches at Pacific Science Center on the Seattle Center campus and meandering down to King Street Station, the trail is marked by vinyl decals plastered along the sidewalk that provide guidance on viewing the augmented artwork via smartphone. All you need to do is open your phone camera, scan the QR code located at each “drop” and the artwork will show up automatically on your phone. Many of the art pieces include an audio component that may be optimally experienced through headphones.
“It’s not like virtual reality, where you have a fully immersive headset, and it’s not digital art, where you just look at a flat screen,” Bruk said. Augmented reality “actually overlays a digitally created three-dimensional experience into the real world.”
The pathway showcases nearly 20 augmented reality artworks made by 17 artists, from virtually rendered floral blooms at the entrance of King Street Station to humpback whales and orcas dancing around downtown skyscrapers. The majority of artists are Coast Salish, though in true World Cup spirit, the exhibit also features international participants from Canada, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Tatarstan, a republic of Russia.
The exhibition, titled “Future Arts Way: Other Earth,” serves as a marriage between art and technology, both of which are central to Seattle’s cultural identity. Its primary purpose: to educate viewers on Seattle’s environmental and Indigenous history.
“A lot of people from all around the world come to Seattle to experience the (World Cup) games, but also they experience the city,” said Alina Nazmeeva, a Chicago-based artist from Tatarstan. “We want to introduce them not just to the city itself, the concrete and the buildings, but also to the environment, to the ecosystems that nurture it.”
Nazmeeva has been involved with Future Arts since 2022. For the exhibition, she collaborated with Portland artist and ecologist Alex Kosnett on the piece “Latent Seas,” which is viewable at the Pacific Science Center under the arches. The piece is based on the life cycle and decomposition of salmon, and the species’ critical role in local ecology.
“Salmon is, in a way, a terraforming species, because nitrogen from its DNA can be traced in the trees,” Nazmeeva said. “As we walk through the city, we don’t know that the bodies of thousands of salmon essentially build the soil under our feet. … This visual reminder in the urban space creates that opportunity to see something that we may not be able to see otherwise.”
Artists emphasized that the exhibition is “invisible” in a sense, as have been some of the stories they are striving to tell. One piece called “Welcome to Si’ahl (Seattle)” by TJ WhiteAntelope (Lummi Nation) interacts with the statue of Chief Seattle at Tilikum Place park in Belltown, bringing “to life” a speech he delivered during the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855. He studied the historical collection of Vi Hilbert, an Upper Skagit elder and language conservationist, at the University of Washington, and worked with linguist Ted Kye to incorporate both a translated and close-to-original version of the speech into the artwork.
“The first time that it’s been documented in (Southern Lushootseed) dialect is in this VR, AR experience,” WhiteAntelope said. The audio accompanying the piece is recited in English by the artist’s uncle, a smokehouse ceremonial leader.
In consultation with members of the Suquamish Tribe, which Chief Seattle led, WhiteAntelope determined where to draw an ethical line while preserving the intent of doing justice to the chief’s words and making the speech accessible to the audience.
“We shouldn’t make somebody on the other side ‘come back to life.’ … The version we have now is like a really PG version, but it’s still powerful, hearing my uncle’s voice on it and just all the work on the back end,” WhiteAntelope said. “We want to show people and give them this information so we don’t just make it up and say, “Oh, yeah, he’s a chief, and yeah, he was a great war leader,” when it wasn’t about war. It was about kindness and caring and generosity.”
Future Arts is the brainchild of Bruk, who spent much of her career in the nonprofit arts world, as well as eight years at Amazon where she was a senior art director on the custom advertising team.
“After years in building community arts organizations, it was not working. It was very difficult,” she said. “The tech industry was growing and pricing out a lot of my friends and myself. So I decided to go to the belly of the beast to try to see if we could work together.”
With the goal of bridging the tech and art communities in Seattle, Future Arts was born in 2020. Since then, the organization has experimented with augmented reality art in a multitude of ways using Seattle as a backdrop. An early iteration of the project took place in 2022 in South Lake Union; known as “AUGMENT Seattle,” the pilot exhibit featured an “open air gallery” with artworks gathered through an open call. The new downtown exhibit is an expansion of “AUGMENT,” both in geographic scale as well as the number of participating artists.
The project is primarily financially supported by philanthropic organization Agog Immersive Art Institute, along with additional operational support from King County’s Doors Open cultural access program and the city of Seattle’s office of arts and culture. When starting the project, they set a fundraising goal for $750,000 to cover vinyl printing, artist fees and some short-term contracts; Bruk said they have reached about a fourth of that goal and rely heavily on volunteers. They have also been in search of sponsors for the project.
“It’s hard to get,” she said. “We’re still an arts organization, we’re not a tech organization, so it’s an interesting space for us.”
Though Seattle is not the first city in which augmented reality walking tours have been implemented, Future Arts Way provides a special amalgam of history, ecology, art and technology.
“We’re making the invisible visible, which is kind of wild with this technology,” Bruk said.
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