Adham Faramawy launches a new sculptural augmented reality app

“This is an attempt to make sculpture without form,” says Adham Faramawy, creator of new augmented reality, sculptural app ‘Hi! I’m happy you’re here!’ in which users take a target photograph to circumnavigate a morphing, screen-like ‘sculpture’ in real time, before sharing images via social platforms.

The design seeks to resolve the ethereal nature of digital communication by looking at the physicality of the actual interface, which sounds, and is, all very meta. Faramawy explains: “The affect employed in the work is meant to make an issue out of the viewer’s physical presence, and the idea that the physical site of the sculpture is in the interaction with their device”.

Officially launching at the Royal Academy of Art, on 30 March the app – developed with ErinKo Studios and Hutong Games – looks at what role our communicative devices play in our relationships. “Thinking about my relationships, and the ways I have to mediate myself to maintain them, led to me trying to describe these disembodied states and the physical and emotional relationship I’ve been developing with my phone as a result” says Faramawy.

‘Hi! I’m happy you’re here!’ joins a host of other new digital platforms and services trying to bridge the gap between digitalism and tactility, see Hug or Tworlds. Together they represent a growing discomfort with the intangibility of our interactions played out through digital devices, and attempts to recover a kind of physicality to our communication, or at the very least an awareness of the absence of it.