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• 1 media/pachuco_art_bw.png 2015-06-05T10:00:48-07:00 Prototype 2. Augmented Reality Rituals 24 AR Tour project description plain 163265 2015-06-29T08:00:52-07:00 Walking along South Broadway, a traveler will find evidence of the street’s informal networks; for instance, posts advertising jobs in the garment industry, or stall rentals, or discounts on mobile phones and calling cards. Focusing on the street level, one is also more likely to detect how at the end of the day garment workers emerge from the ANJAC Fashion Building or from the back staircases of the Broadway Trade Center. Or one might notice how some street vendors appear to hide merchandise deep in their carts, covered by black plastic bags, sometimes filled with nuts or other such inconspicuous commodities as decoy goods, while displaying certain merchandise only at specific moments, in particular encounters. Paying attention to how these financial exchanges function within the street’s local economy, this rerouting of the tour form aspires to a simultaneously more embodied and informed understanding of how cinema’s infrastructure has been preserved on South Broadway.
   
  The experimental design of this tour prototype pushes against the conventions of the augmented reality tour experience. Augmented reality (AR), an audio-visual platform facilitated by smartphone, especially for consumer applications, can be a restrictive medium to design for: users must have smartphones, some familiarity with new technologies, and potentially high data plans to use the tour. I became interested in how a tour could be complemented or supplemented by other practices and gestures connected to mediation that already augment the lived reality of experiencing South Broadway’s streetscape. One important association between AR and gestures organically observed on South Broadway is the consumerist impulse of advertisement.