As a new chapter of the artist’s ongoing series The Fallen Sky Chronicles, Lapse consists of six interwoven components: The Visions & The Collective, a series of publically accessible murals; The Sounds, a GPS-based audio soundscape discoverable on Miami’s downtown MetroMover; The Writings, a virtual walking prose experience in Museum Park; The Sculpture, an augmented experience triggered by a public sculpture; and The Moment, a site-specific exhibition at Locust Projects’ space in the Miami Design District.
Connecting each of these six components is Lapse, a custom mobile application which Depeña created with the help of The Heavy Projects, a software engineering firm based in Southern California. Through groundbreaking augmented reality (AR), technology, Lapse responds to triggers and activates each of the components by revealing virtual and auditory experiences with a mobile device’s camera lens and sound output. The Lapse mobile app can be downloaded onto a devise at www.lapsemiami.com.
Dissolving the boundaries of physical reality and an alternative, virtual world, Lapse furthers The Fallen Sky Chronicles short story narrative, which imagines a disruption of real-world time and space. Confronting a moment of transcendence in human consciousness, Lapse exposes a world where “the delicate stitches holding their realities together, and those of other dimensions, had begun to intertwine and unravel.” (Excerpt from The Fallen Sky Chronicles). Presupposing the inversion of the “singularity”, a term used to define the hypothetical event when artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans, Lapse imagines our brains being fused with technology, revealing an augmented consciousness imbued with images and data. In this way it creates a space to both revere and meditate on our increasingly technologically entwined lives.
