The project weaves together three different social aspects; digital communication, the square, and public art. Together these form a sculpture that is erected together with a local organization on a specific town square in all of Sweden’s 1979 towns and cities, connecting them through a virtual layer.

The sculpture is experienced through mobile-based augmented reality (AR) in the participants’ smartphones. It consists of text produced by the participants themselves: opinions, poetry and loose thoughts. These messages constitute the building blocks of the sculpture, organised into a cloud of words represented in 3D through AR. The messages are spatially organized within the cloud according to physical laws translated into the world of the attention economy: the attentional weight of a text, ie how much it has been read and answered, affects its gravitational weight within the sculpture, which determines how the texts are positioned in relation to each other.

Friction Planes is planned to be premiered in the spring of 2023