With app developer Drive Studios, Nancy Baker Cahill, artist and Creative Director of 4th Wall, founded the app to challenge traditional experiences of public art, and to increase access to fine art through AR.
Baker Cahill named the app "4th Wall" because it both exists in and transitions from one boundary into another. Blending the physical and virtual worlds enables new creative possibilities and combinations--the potential of which she finds conceptually limitless. 4th Wall serves as a way to collectively share an augmented experience without expensive or inaccessible VR headsets and technology.
In the app, she offers her dimensional drawings translated from VR into AR to users so that they can create their own context and content with the works, locating them anywhere in the world.
The app has since grown to include curated and site-specific AR public art exhibitions through the COORDINATES project.
Users can scale, rotate, move through, place and record Nancy Baker Cahill's dimensional drawings in 360 degrees and are invited to view, record and tag art experiences anywhere in the world.
By pressing the COORDINATES button, users are directed to site-specific, collaborative public art exhibitions, which are intended to activate ideas and prompt thoughtful discourse around the pairing of image to location. For those that cannot experience these pairings in person, all exhibitions will be recorded and presented through 4thwallapp.org in the drop-down menu under COORDINATES.