“Free the Love” AR App from BAMPFA and Adobe Fills the Air
with Messages of Love
Augmented-reality app compliments BAMPFA’s new exhibition Hippie Modernism: The
Struggle for Utopia with a Bay Area “Love Tour”
Users can release personalized messages of love into the air
(Berkeley, CA) February 8, 2017—To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is bringing the spirit of the ’60s into the tech age. In conjunction with its new exhibition, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia
(February 8–May 21), BAMPFA joined forces with Adobe and award-winning advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to create Free the Love, an augmented-reality app.
Launching February 8, the app enables users to release augmented-reality “love balloons” into the skies across the Bay Area, with personal messages of peace, love, and togetherness inside. Using the app, people can write messages and leave their own love balloons
throughout San Francisco and beyond. Using their phones’ cameras, users can also search the skies for love balloons released by others.
“We could all use a little more love, especially these days,” said Jeff Gillette, creative director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners. “The Free the Love app turns the skies into a celebration of love. What could be more modern—or more hippie—than that?”
The app’s design was inspired by many of the pieces of art in the Hippie Modernism exhibit, several of which are featured in the app’s educational “Love Tour.” Developed in partnership with the California Historical Society, the Love Tour highlights historical hippie sites of the Bay Area.
Locations on the Love Tour include Wurster Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, People’s Park in Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, the site of the first Earth Day, the Matrix nightclub in San Francisco, and the site of the Human Be-In, among others.
Download the App
The app is available for iOS on February 6, 2017 and for Android shortly after. The app is available at the App Store and Google Play by searching for “BAMPFA.” It enables users to create messages and release “love balloons” into the air across the Bay Area, with personalized messages inside. The balloons, which will remain in geolocatable virtual space throughout 2017, can be seen through mobile phones using the Free the Love app. The app also enables users to take and share pictures of their messages of love.
About the Exhibition
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will present Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, a major exhibition exploring the intersection of the radical art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s and the
resonance of these innovations today. A traveling exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center and assembled with the assistance of BAMPFA, Hippie Modernism will be on view in Berkeley from February 8 through May 21, 2017. The exhibition will coincide with the first
anniversary of BAMPFA’s new Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed building in downtown Berkeley and the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love.
The curators of the Berkeley presentation—BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder and UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Architecture Greg Castillo—have added nearly 75 works to the exhibition, expanding its scope to highlight the key role the Bay Area, and especially Berkeley, played in the counterculture movement. Many artists, architects and designers in this period were searching for a new kind of utopia as an implicit critique of society; however, in the Bay Area many hoped to go beyond mere critique to create actual change—technological, political and ecological—on the streets, in the classroom and in government policy.
Support
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia is organized by the Walker Art Center in association with BAMPFA. The exhibition was curated by Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum. The BAMPFA presentation is organized by Director and Chief Curator
Lawrence Rinder and guest curator Greg Castillo, associate professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
The exhibition is made possible with support from the Martin and Brown Foundation, the Prospect Creek Foundation, Annette and John Whaley, and Audrey and Zygi Wilf. Support for the exhibition catalog is provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine
Arts and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the Walker Art Center publications. The BAMPFA presentation is made possible with generous support from an anonymous supporter; Goodby Silverstein & Partners; Coleman Fung; Frances Hellman and
Warren Breslau; Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman; Adobe; Chip Conley Foundation; Beth Rudin DeWoody; Carla and David Crane; Alexis and Trevor Traina; Donna and Gary Freedman; Gyöngy Laky and Thomas Layton; Greg Castillo and Gary Brown; Chris Desser and
Kirk Marckwald; and Joyce and Mark Hulbert.
Visitor Information
Address:
2155 Center Street Berkeley, California 94704
Hours:
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Fridays and Saturdays, 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Information:
bampfa.org
(510) 642-0808
Gallery admission price:
$12: general admission
$10: non–UC Berkeley students, disabled, 65+
Free: BAMPFA members; UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff and retirees; 18 and under plus
one accompanying adult
Free for everyone the first Thursday of each month
Social Media
facebook.com/bampfa
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Hashtag: #HippieModernism #BAMPFA
About BAMPFA
Internationally recognized for its art and film programming, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is a platform for cultural experiences that transform individuals, engage communities and advance the local, national and global discourse on art and film.
BAMPFA is UC Berkeley’s primary visual-arts venue with its screenings of some 450 films and presentations of up to twenty exhibitions annually. BAMPFA’s mission is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film.
The institution’s collection of over 19,000 works of art dates from 3,000 BCE to the present day and includes important holdings of Neolithic Chinese ceramics, Ming and Qing Dynasty Chinese painting, Old Master works on paper, Italian Baroque painting, early American painting, Abstract Expressionist painting, contemporary photography and Conceptual art. BAMPFA’s collection also includes over 17,500 films and videos, including the largest collection of Japanese cinema outside of Japan, impressive holdings of Soviet cinema, West Coast avantgarde
film, seminal video art, as well as hundreds of thousands of articles, reviews, posters and other ephemera related to the history of film—many of which are digitally scanned and accessible online.