[INTERVIEW]
Virtual Monuments
We interviewed Idris Brewster—artist, technologist, and founder of Kinfolk Tech— to discuss how augmented reality can reclaim space, rewrite history, and restore erased narratives. From guerrilla monuments to mobile-first digital archives, Brewster explores how Kinfolk is reshaping the cultural landscape by building a decentralized, community-driven platform for collective memory. At the intersection of activism, art, and immersive tech, Kinfolk challenges what a museum can be—and who it’s for.
How do you explain your work to people who may not be familiar with it?
There's a need right now to build a more representative collective memory, as it has the power to shape our ideals, values, visions of the future, and relationships to others. Unfortunately, when it comes to Black, Indigenous, Latinx and queer folks, our collective memory has often been intentionally fractured and erased. How can we rebuild it and retake control of our stories?
Relying on media or government to do that has not worked. One of the ways that we see this come about in the world is through our monuments, which are pillars of our ideals, our values, of who we-as a society-look up to and admire. And existing monuments are, quite frankly, racist and oppressive in America, Europe, South America, and elsewhere. I think this is a global phenomenon.
In the US, there are 48,170 monuments that exist, but less than 300 are focused on Black and Brown folks, which is less than one percent. That shows how large the problem is. It happens in our school systems when this history is not being taught or brought forward. It happens in our public spaces when our historical markers aren't identifying these spaces. So there's a large problem, but we can't build 48,000 million-dollar monuments to fix it.
So we asked: What are the ways that we can work outside of these legacy institutions to build these structures? And it all comes down to art serving as a vehicle to have these conversations. When we started in 2017, Mayor de Blasio in New York City was considering what to do with these monuments, specifically Christopher Columbus. We specifically wanted the Christopher Columbus monument taken down and so we built these AR installations where you could see the true story of Christopher Columbus by pointing your iPad at a canvas. That was a project that started to get traction and we moved into museums, into other residencies, and started to grow thanks to the support of a lot of community members, funders, and artists.
We created a mobile-first digital archival platform where we work with communities, artists, archivists, institutions to visually represent our histories, stories, and archives in the form of digital art. It's partially a location-based experience where you can walk around New York City and see some of these monuments in public space. That’s how I describe it: It's a digital, living archive that also inhabits space. It's populated by the voices of our communities. In the future, we're really trying to be a space that can really collect, connect and share our memories in multiple dynamic and immersive ways.
The Signature Monument Series exhibit was Kinfolk’s first public augmented reality exhibit in NYC, featuring digital monuments by multidisciplinary artists Derrick Adams, Hank Willis Thomas, Pamela Council, and Tourmaline that reframed the past, present, and future of our public memory.
Where do you see this technology going? How do you see your own personal roadmap playing out?
What I see playing out and what I want to play out are two different things. What I think will play out will be the continuation of extractive technologies that are isolating us from each other. There's a reliance on big technology platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where a lot of our time and attention is being brought and I think there is a push for things like AI, immersive goggles, glasses, etc, where the hardware is definitely going to be moving in the future. We will see more focus on questions like how the information we engage with can become more 3D and more integrated within our environment. But these changes seem ten years away to me.
I think the underlying systemic issue is that these technologies are being run by organizations that have a lot of money, but are not being regulated. For instance, OpenAI just raised the biggest VC round ever and that is definitely an issue in terms of how our technology gets developed. I think we're over-innovating ourselves in a lot of spaces and I would like to see some guardrails put in place. We’ve built VR experiences for HoloLens, Apple Vision Pro, and Oculus, but I think the mobile device isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's the medium which we engage with the most. If that's where the people are at, that's what we're going to build for. That's why we've been focusing on mobile device AR as a way to meet people where they're at.
And while we are going to continue developing and see a roadmap where we can fill out our cities with this archival information, these monuments and these stories, part of the short term roadmap will involve figuring out how we can make the technology more accessible. How can we have other kinds of media, like audio or video that people are used to engaging with? Because I think what we've noticed is that AR can only be so accessible. The goal of our roadmap is, how do we scale up? How do we get more awareness, more reach of our technology platform in the communities that we're working with to build out this collective memory.
We want to create a movement amongst the already existing cultural memory workers around the country, and be able to use our technology and our organization as sort of a glue: to really help make sure that that work is happening in spaces where it usually doesn't happen. But there's a lot of internal work that needs to be done for us to be able to support that at a national level. There's also global interest to work with us, so it's also about getting our model and our team makeup right so that we can support the demand that's currently existing for us.
“We want to figure out how we can create a physical space that can really be a bearer of culture and that can really immerse the museum-goer in several different ways.”
— Idris Brewster
One of the barriers is probably that existing monuments or museums have a kind of object permanence to them. How do you go about raising awareness or building that community around these artifacts that need a certain application to be downloaded, a certain process to be followed in order to access them?
There are a lot of institutions who are recognizing their role in that and want to partner with us for these reasons. We've worked with multiple museums like the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, which was doing a community based public art project around the historically Black neighborhood of 10th Street neighborhood in Dallas, which is currently being gentrified. We created a walking tour in partnership with the institution and the artist Vicki Meek in order to uplift that history. We worked with the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center to uplift the stories of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, which haven't been as talked about in terms of the mothers of the STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which is an important organization in the history of Stonewall. We've collaborated with multiple such institutions and are looking to really scale that up, especially as institutions have archives that need to be accessible and shared.
Another way is building our own, right? There are a lot of familial archives and oral history stories that need to be shared and collected, so we need to build up our infrastructure to collect and share these stories and archives. I think it's a combination of partnering with institutions, but then also pairing that with our own collection process and building inroads and commute and relationships with communities that are already existing and doing this work.
How do you see this technology reshaping or changing the way museums present history, especially when it comes to underrepresented narratives?
Creating physical changes to a museum can be expensive. AR is a good medium to bring new layers of a space or collection to life. I can also see this being a medium where museums are trying to get the work that typically lives inside the museum out into the public. This could also be an outlet for them to continually do programming to engage and build with the communities while their collections and buildings are being renovated and closed down. I think it can also serve as an outlet to promote their collections for people to come inside. I also think this sort of technology creates a two way street of engagement that hopefully produces a better connection with the community.
I think we will see more museums transition into immersive exhibitions, installations and spaces like TeamLab in Japan. I definitely see more of that coming into play and it’s something that we're also interested in for our roadmap. We want to figure out how we can create a physical space that can really be a bearer of culture and that can really immerse the museum-goer in several different ways. That's a gap that I see right now in the US. There is the Meow Wolf as a model, and I see these institutions probably trying to incorporate more of that into their exhibitions.
What kind of technological training do artists need to create the kind of works that you're presenting? And is that in itself, a barrier to create?
That's definitely a barrier for the medium. Luckily, they have gotten smaller over time. When I started this work, it cost $800-$1,000 to even get a computer to be able to do this stuff, let alone the cost to buy the software. But we have built a 3D team on our side and we work closely with artists.
I've realized that, especially when it comes to artists who are mid-career and beyond, digital is a part of their process. It’s not always the end result, but they do engage with it at some point during the process.
What are some of the more current challenges that you're having to deal with and what do you foresee as future challenges?
I think one of the big challenges is still accessibility. You need a newer iPhone to run AR experiences, and Androids are a whole other issue. For example, in our monument with Wangechi Mutu, we wanted to create an animation but we encountered many issues regarding the processing power of the devices that we were working with. We need to explain these limitations to artists who are dreaming of every single possibility under the sun, and so that's another layer we're working through, but somehow, it always works out.
I think the biggest challenge for us is turning Kinfolk into a platform. How can local public art activation serve a wider need? How do we balance people engaging with these monuments in space versus learning about them at home? And how do we build a product and technology that also maintains the artistic side of these works? And then gaining awareness of this is also the thing we really need to build. We've been building services and programming in order to create more of a community around our monuments.
We say that we make the invisible visible, but it'll stay invisible unless people see some sort of physical structure. Right now, you have to have the app, you have to know about it on social media, or you have to read an article to know that an exhibition lives in a certain place. And so we want to create more ways for people to know that the work is going to happen and that it’s there in space. We're doing an exhibition with Brooklyn Bridge Park this year, and they'll be putting signage around the park for five of our monuments.
Do you consider Kinfolk to be a museum in itself?
I do and I don't. We don't brand it as that, but I do really think of this as the future of what a museum could be. A museum may be without a physical space, a museum that engages, a museum for the people by the people. And there's a lot that needs to be done to support that. I call it an open air museum sometimes, because it's just using our world as the canvas and activating within it. But how can a digital space facilitate a museum experience? That's something that we're working through.
Idris Brewster is a Brooklyn-born artist and creative technologist who challenges traditional narratives through immersive spatial experiences that merge historical archives, public spaces, and technology. As the Executive Director of Kinfolk Foundation, he empowers Black and Brown communities by turning augmented reality into a tool for monument-making and historical preservation. Before Kinfolk, Idris developed Google’s Code Next program, which introduces Black and Brown youth to computer science and STEAM fields. His innovative work has earned him accolades from Forbes 30 Under 30, Sundance, Tribeca, New Museum, Eyebeam, the United Nations, and the Museum of Modern Art.