“Fishing in the Sky” is truly an art piece of the digital age. Located on the Lawn on D in South Boston—a recently built public entertainment space—the augmented reality art piece is available to the visitor through the use of technology. By installing a mobile application called Layer, which activates the program Skywrite AR, a viewer will be able to see art in the sky. 

Created by Will Pappenheimer, a professor in the art department at Pace University in New York, and Zachary Brady, the partner and director of technology at Suits & Sandals, LLC, the application allows visitors to hold their cell phone up to the sky and view the piece through the phone’s camera.  

Images featured in the sky include a small picture of a house, the inside of which reads “ART LIVES HERE” and “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which is the text included in the piece “Treachery of Images” by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. The experience is a magical one—seeing art that had not previously existed through the lens of a smartphone. 

The Lawn on D’s website describes the phrases used, noting that they are “common sayings rewritten to evoke the area’s history, economic aspirations and possible future sea changes, appear as if they were written by a skywriting plane.” According to the application’s website, new images will be added daily. For special events, visitors will be able to use the mobile application to draw their own images to imprint on the sky. 

The most interesting thing about the piece is that the images in the sky seem to be fixed in space, even though they are not actually physical features. The images change depending on the viewer’s location on Lawn on D. 

There is a certain aspect of awe in the discovery of new images while walking through the park. As one of the phrases in the piece says in reference to the title of the piece, “YOU ARE FISHING IN THE SKY.”