What do we imagine when we think about art in the most primal form that it has taken throughout the ages? It is easy to pick out important sculptural works or historic paintings on canvas—but often overlooked is the pureness of paint on a wall. Whether looking back to the age of smearing berries, ash or pigment on a cave wall to the baroque fresco paintings that dominated the Renaissance church walls or contemporary Shepard Fairey graphics on LA building facades, muralistic wall painting has and will continue to dominate large-format art making. The advent of the giant concrete building facilitating urban sprawl coupled with beautifying our urban spaces—plenty of structures exist to be covered with contemporary murals. But how do we actually make those murals contemporary? 

Where does our obsession with the digital world overlap into the hard urban landscape? Easy: augmented reality. With the advent of AR and the access we each have to tiny supercomputers in our pocket, a classic wall painting has the potential to be so much more. A handful of muralists and artists are beginning to use these digital techniques, but artistic duo YANOE X ZOUEH is both originator and current world-record holder for the largest AR mural. 

While the collective’s name is a mouthful, it echoes the graffiti backgrounds of the two artists, Ryan “YANOE” Sarfati and Eric “ZOUEH” Skotnes, who sharpened their artistic chops as street writers in opposing Los Angeles graffiti crews. Their public art now embodies cooperation and facilitates a global reach. 

The two artists now exclusively collaborate to work on a scale that others must struggle to comprehend. Originally setting the record for largest AR mural in the world in 2019 with the 11,000 square-foot piece The Journey in Columbus, OH, the duo has subsequently one-upped themselves during COVID with the new mural The Majestic. Encompassing 15,000 square-feet and wrapping around the façade of the Main Park Plaza garage in Downtown Tulsa, OK, The Majestic stands alone as a formidable art piece in our version of perceived reality.

YANOE X ZOUEH, The Journey, Columbus, OH, (AR). Image Credit: Jessica Miller.

Sheer scale and visual aesthetics only scratch the surface of what this artwork is. Take out your smartphone, scan a QR code, and then everything gets interesting as the artwork begins to manipulate the viewers spatial understanding of the world around it. In physical reality we are confronted with this beautiful and dominating structure, but gaze through the phone in any direction and what you see is no longer that. As the first 360-degree AR mural, portions of the art remain in augmented reality, but the world has taken on a Tim Burtonesque feel with the occasional giant catfish passing while the bustle of the street has transitioned to a serene ocean.

During my LA interview, the team mentioned a change on the horizon—an embracing of both the physical and the digital in experimental ways. Painting, AR, digital and physical sculpting—nothing is off the table. The 2021 work Rise Above in Inglewood, CA, began to embrace this transition by introducing digitally produced sculptural elements to complement the painting. Large acrylic components were engraved and cut from computer files and used to cover portions of the mural. They create an aesthetic component and also function as digital lighting to facilitate night viewing of the AR elements of the work.

From what I gathered, this is just the tip of the iceberg of where this duo plans to push their real world/digital world art practice. With a multitude of public works in line that are awaiting formal announcement, it seems likely that we will see some new boundaries being pushed by YANOE X ZOUEH. Will a robot walk out of the mural in AR and trip over a real-world bronze sculptural element, stand up, shake itself off and hand (transfer) you a custom NFT based on the angle of the sun when you scanned the QR code? With these two artists, it doesn’t seem a stretch.