From Doodling to Worlding: Tangle Lab

Led by artist and augmented reality tool-builder Johanna Flato, this session explores how mobile augmented reality (AR) can be used for spatial thinking, embodied expression, and civic imagination. Through a presentation and interactive workshop, Flato frames building with AR as an act of poetic co-authorship—on a potentially global scale.

The session opens with a presentation in which Flato introduces Tangle, the mobile "spatial annotation" app she has developed. Sharing her evolution from doodler to tool-maker, she recalls her drive to reorient our often dissociative relationship with phones into one that fosters deeper connection with our physical environments. With references to a wide range of contemporary artists, Flato demonstrates how Tangle enables intuitive, gesture-driven creation in situ. After establishing a conceptual basis for gestural thinking, the presentation proposes avenues for functional creative adoption, including in architectural practices and community engagement.

In the interactive workshop that follows, participants are invited to come "tangle"—to engage creatively and collaboratively with the world around them using mobile AR. As some of the earliest users of the beta app, participants will have the opportunity to help shape the tool itself. Finally, the session will conclude with a call to imagine the worlding potential of mobile AR—a vision that necessitates that artistic communities build our own technical infrastructures.

This session is ideal for beginners curious about augmented reality and spatial computing, or anyone interested in how we might collectively “write the world” through intuitive, joyful, human-centred tools.

Requirements

Please note: the app is currently available for iOS users only.

Johanna Flato

Johanna Flato (b. San Antonio, TX, USA) is a visual artist and AR tool-builder based in Brooklyn, New York. She investigates the ways in which our sense of ‘site’ — and in turn, locational belonging — is mediated and manipulated through language and technology.

Often research-based, mostly site-specific, and increasingly improvisational, Johanna's work spans conceptual sculpture, generative and interactive installations, performance-lecture, and socially-engaged practice. Flato responds improvisationally to her surroundings — out loud, visually, and alongside others — with curiosity about the articulations of her thoughts, body, and device-appendages through shared space. She is currently building a novel augmented reality app called Tangle — a mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. With this tool, she injects critical friction in this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and provides a playful, collaborative, civic dimension to our tech-mediated environments.

Flato holds degrees from the Royal College of Art (M.A. Contemporary Art Practice) and Yale University (B.A), and her artwork, tools, and performance have been exhibited in group and solo shows internationally, including at Annka Kultys Gallery, Tate Exchange, and the Center for Performance Research. Tangle is currently incubated by the New Museum's NEW INC in partnership with Onassis ONX.