Artists Tin Nguyen and Ed Cutting have created ‘United Visions’, an augmented reality world for Apple’s Brompton Road store that brings the chaotic inner world of poet William Blake to life
‘Blake had these visions and hallucinations and that is such a perfect marriage for AR,’ says Nguyen. ‘AR is about taking what is in someone’s head and bringing it into the physical space in a way that’s really immersive, that could be real and there but maybe only you can see it. It’s a very hallucinatory medium.’
You suspect that for Blake, a visionary poet, painter and printmaker, these angels, demons, and strange hybrids were a constant and very real presence. The United Visions app is a perfect insight into his dream-fevered imagination as these apparitions form and unform, with limbs appearing out of walls and forked tongues out of thin air, all in a way that’s specific to your environment.