Gray Area presents FREE by Nancy Baker Cahill — a city-scale, participatory augmented reality artwork over Alcatraz Island. Launching on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, FREE invites people worldwide to send messages of solidarity to those held in U.S. detention. Each message — a kite, blessing, spell, poem, or personal story — takes flight as a digital paper plane, transforms into a bird, and joins a growing flock over the island. At a site once built for isolation and confinement, FREE asks who freedom is extended to, and who remains excluded from its promise. 🪶To participate, download the free bilingual 4th Wall app on iOS or Android. You can view the AR artwork from the San Francisco waterfront, or send a message from anywhere in the world.
Audience Role
Experienced from the San Francisco Bay, but messages can be sent from anywhere in the world through the FREE button in the app.
Ages: All ages
Content Advisories
Interaction Advisories
Mobility Advisories
Tags
4
Events
3
Years on EI
About Nancy Baker Cahill
Nancy Baker Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. She creates research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual blockchain projects rooted in the history of drawing. Her monumental augmented reality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting ecological imagination, civics, and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression. Her globally-exhibited geolocated AR installations have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. In 2023, the Georgia Museum of Art exhibited her first solo mid-career survey, which will travel through 2025. The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned and acquired CENTO, the museum’s first participatory AR project co-built by a global audience, on view through 2024. She will premiere her immersive film SEEK in 2024, marking the inaugural art experience at COSM in Los Angeles. Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient, and 2024-5 Harvard metaLAB Affiliate. Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; RFC Art Collection, Miami, FL; and 0x Collection, Prague, CZ.