Who owns augmented realities?

Last year, a seldom-discussed event started to raise important questions about augmented reality’s geographic boundaries. A group of artists digitally “vandalized” Snapchat’s AR overlays of Jeff Koons’ sculptures throughout Central Park. It turns out that the AR revolution has revolutionaries.

To be clear, they didn’t hack Snap servers to vandalize the graphics within Snapchat’s UI. Rather, they re-created and altered a separate static image. The protest was nonetheless to illustrate a point that public spaces shouldn’t be an open canvas for private companies to affix AR graphics.