Gordon

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2018

In 2017, Novak developed Gordon with Nick Young, a Visualisation Engineer at the University of Auckland Centre for eResearch. Novak began experimenting with AR through the use of smartphone enabled AR in 2013, creating virtual overlays and sculptures in space that would appear when a viewer held their mobile device toward a specific object, or stood in a specific location. Gordon was the next step, removing the need for a handheld device by using an AR headset, in this case the Microsoft HoloLens (released in 2016).

Gordon, named after New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, was first exhibited in 2018 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as part of The Expanded Gallery. It was a three dimensional virtual sculpture the audience could interact with using gestures and voice commands. The viewer would put the headset on and see the sculpture floating in gallery space and be able to walk around it, examining it from any angle as you would a physical sculpture. They could then change the size and location of the sculpture using hand gestures in the air and change the appearance of the sculpture using voice commands. For example, visitors could say “change to pink” or “change to green” to change the colour of the sculpture. If the viewer said “Gordon”, the sculpture would light up and play an audio composition developed by Novak. More than one viewer could engage with the sculpture at a time.

Beyond its technological innovation, Gordon offers a poignant metaphor for those who feel marginalised or unseen by society. Just as the vibrant, interactive sculpture exists fully in the room but remains invisible until the viewer puts on the right lens, people pushed to the fringes hold rich, complex realities waiting to be acknowledged. The work reminds us that invisibility is rarely an absence of substance; it is often just a limitation of the observer's tools, requiring a lens of empathy and intentionality to finally see what has been there all along.