During Western Lights, a local artist Wesley McQuillen pulled off a quiet little stunt: he slipped an unauthorized augmented reality art installation into the middle of the festival and let people assume it belonged there.
The setup was low-tech on the surface. A handful of posters with QR codes were printed, dropped into freestanding sign holders, and placed around the festival footprint like they were just another part of the programming. But once people scanned them, the street opened up into something else. Digital sculptures appeared on their phone screens, hovering in real space through AR, right there in the middle of the event.
And people scanned. A lot. Backend analytics showed around 1,500 scans over the course of the night.
The signs didn’t stay put, either. They were moved around throughout the evening, chasing foot traffic, bottlenecks, and lines — basically following the crowd and testing where curiosity spikes when people have a second to stop and look. One of the best spots turned out to be outside the projection-mapping dome, where people were stuck waiting anyway and more willing to pull out their phones.
The best part came later: one of the festival board members apparently saw the signs and assumed they were official.
Which, honestly, says everything.
That was the whole play. Not just to sneak work into a public event, but to test how easily something can pass as sanctioned culture if it looks polished enough, sits in the right place, and borrows the language of institutional programming.
Call it guerrilla public art. Call it experiential media. Call it culture jamming with a QR code.
The posters themselves didn’t exactly hide the joke. At the bottom, in plain text, they read: “This is unauthorized culture jamming. To learn more, read some Guy Debord.” Subtle enough to be missed, obvious enough to be funny.
The actual AR works came from four artists working in GLB and other 3D formats — the kind of work that almost never gets shown in public unless it’s flattened, repackaged, or forced into somebody else’s platform. This gave it a street-level exhibition space, even if only temporarily. So the project ended up doing two things at once: creating an impromptu public art experience and sneaking a conversation about access, authorship, and legitimacy into the middle of a civic light festival.
No permits. No invitation. No official logo. Just a smart intervention dropped into the flow of the night, where it blended in long enough to make its point.
And maybe that’s the real artwork: not just the sculptures, but the moment people couldn’t tell the difference between sanctioned spectacle and someone messing with the script.
Art pieces:
CONTENTSLOP by
davidvnun
https://objkt.com/tokens/KT1Si5ZGs5mEDWNcZaC91ULkNqmNuQNjUnXd/8
DEYES ASCENDED #187 by
Coldie
https://opensea.io/item/ethereum/0x4118de6b2007403f2570c3c8b86a8427244e9ba5/1
BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DIME by
Rebecca Rose
https://superrare.com/artwork/eth/0x2bc455b0D44dB89648E9B90A097Af1070f50A111/9
GLITCHED FAE by
Marjan Moghaddam
https://coeuretart.com/marjan-moghaddam-russian-doll-of-virtual-reality/