“I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom,” Andy Warhol once said. Imagine what he would have thought about the monitoring capabilities of smart phones. Especially with a new LBS app that connects fans of art–or of Pop–with all things Warhol within 1,000 miles.
True to the eccentric cultural icon, the app is called Augmented Reality and was created by the ad agency Brunner. Users’ phones, utilizing location-based technology, can find points of interest “from Warhol’s early career, life, and death in Pittsburgh to his work, friends, life, and celebrity in NYC,” according to a release. Technology from Layar lets a user point a mobile phone camera at a place or object and receive digital information on top of the image. The app integrates the Google Maps API to find both the user’s location and the points of interest, and offers text and image content to explain things like “frozen hot chocolate parties at Serendipity Café with guests Marilyn and Jackie O.”
Technically the app finds locations in a 1,000-mile radius. But in reality it just works for points of interest in New York, Warhol’s famous playground, and Pittsburgh, his hometown. So I guess as long as you’re east of the Mississippi River, you’ll be able to read about the artist’s studios and party venues if you’re so inclined.
It’s a creative way for The Andy Warhol Museum to market itself. Moreover it’s especially apt, considering the subject himself valued The Experience as much as the direct result of him putting a paintbrush onto canvas. (And thus irking art appraisers who don’t believe, as Warhol did, that his signing of a piece created by others makes it a true Warhol.) Whether or not anyone agreed, he would probably have called the app a masterpiece of pop culture and art.