For six years now, the LICHTER Filmfest has been presenting VR cinema: films that don't fit on a conventional screen, no matter how big it is. Although our hearts still beat for the classic cinema in the dark room, the moving images have long since left their birthplace. They first traveled to our homes via a picture tube and later to all corners of the world via smartphone and internet. Augmented reality (AR) is therefore only the logical next step - images that overlap with our actual reality and are close to leaving the frame of the screen altogether.

A first step towards accompanying and depicting this process is Augmented LICHTER, an open-air exhibition that the LICHTER Filmfest is presenting in collaboration with freitagsküche and the Frankfurt experimental filmmaker Gunter Deller during and after the LICHTER Filmfest. Deller's films, in which urban observations are spontaneously and intuitively assembled into short diary-like cinematic poems, are presented in augmented reality installations distributed at five locations in the city center. Originally conceived for Instagram, these flickering "short films" have since found their way onto festival screens and online galleries. For the Lichter presentation, they are grouped into one-minute cycles.

The following quote from Walter Benjamin captures the intention of Deller's cinematic approach to urban space: "Our pubs and metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railway stations and factories seemed hopelessly enclosed. Then film came along and blew up this dungeon world with the dynamite of tenths fractions of a second, so that now we are serenely adventuring among its scattered wreckage."

For Augmented LICHTER, the potential of augmented reality is now to be exploited in the sense of an "expanded" and "enriched" cinematic perception of reality in order to embark on the journey evoked by Benjamin between Deller's precise cinematic micro-observations of urban life, the urban space as well as the festival visitors and the residents of Frankfurt by means of AR.

Augmented LICHTER is part of the long-term research project AUGMENTED BAHNHOFSVIERTEL by freitagsküche and Maiken Laackmann and developer Tobias Still on questions of digital public space, which explores the non-commercial possibilities of augmented reality in urban space.

www.broadcastfromthekitchen.de