Point your phone at the mural under the Edgewood Avenue bridge — a red face with piercing brown eyes set against a background of boldy colored flora, — and the e underpass changes. A second layer blooms over the first. “Edgewood Embers,” an AI/AR installation by filmmaker Nicki Lynch transforms ARRRTaddict’s “Somos Borincanos” mural into what Lynch calls a “digital sanctuary.” Visitors who scan the piece can add a name to a glowing constellation of ancestors, set to a custom 60 BPM track blending lo-fi hip-hop, gospel and Latin conga rhythms.
It’s one of the stops on an Atlanta AR mural tour called Altera Art: ATL. Eight murals across the city. Each carrying an invisible second life that only a smartphone camera can see. No app, no ticket, no download. Just a phone and a willingness to stand still a little longer than usual.
The premise sounds like a contradiction on its face. Murals are about as analog as art gets — slow to make, fixed in place, weathered by whatever the season throws at them. Augmented reality is the opposite of all that: generated, temporary, gone the instant you look away.
That tension isn’t lost on Natalia Gonzalez, founder of Altera, the AI-focused media company behind the tour. It’s the whole reason Altera produced the tour. Gonzalez had seen AR used to animate static work at a museum and thought the same idea might work on murals that had already been part of the city for years, as a way “to bring them into life in a new, fresh way.”
Every layer went up with the original muralist’s permission. The technology extends the work, Gonzalez says, rather than overriding it. “At the core of it, they’re both stories, and they’re both art,” she says.
Creating cross-medium collaboration
The tour grew out of a fellowship. Over four days in late April, roughly 50 people, many with no technical background, sat through eight-hour workshops learning 8th Wall alongside generative media and storytelling craft. The cohort spent May building, in direct conversation with the muralists whose walls they’d be augmenting, before eight winning pieces made the final cut. Each winner earned $1,000 and a spot on a trail timed to Atlanta’s World Cup summer.
In Cabbagetown, a landmark mural by FoxySwine depicts a psychedelic Cheshire cat on Wylie Street. Scan the wall now, and it springs to life: the cat coughs up a soccer ball, and Wonderland predicts the World Cup’s winner. That’s “We’re All Mad Here,” a new AR layer by Mikey DiCenso. FoxySwine’s dragon mural at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Midtown also got the AR/AI treatment, transforming into “Dancing Dragon” under AR artist Domitri Parker.
In Inman Park, the “WE ♥ ATL” mural by YikYak and olive47 gets its own pulse: point a phone at it, and AR artist Dr. Ric Mathis’s film, “Heartbeat,” plays. At Sweet Auburn Trail Stop #12, a marker becomes a resurrection: scan it, and “Women of Auburn,” Dana Xavier Dojnik’s AR layer, raises the Auburn Branch Carnegie Library — Atlanta’s first public library for African Americans, demolished in 1960 — back into view. Near the heart of Little Five Points, TeMika Grooms’s two-sided “Digital Remix Signal Box” unlocks an interactive AR game under artist James Lindsay — tap to begin, scan, hunt for hidden tokens, beat the challenge — under the title “The Flow.” And Killamari Yo!’s mural marking AAPI Heritage Month now carries a playful AR layer from Winston Mayo called “Music Princess,” letting visitors hear the muralist tell the piece’s story alongside a comedy short about the characters woven through it.
Also in Little Five Points, a separate ARRRTaddict mural now unfolds as a six-part AR journey through Taíno culture — from ancestor spirituality to the coquí frog to the community’s modern legacy in Atlanta — built by Connor Wright using 8th Wall, Blender, Meshy and Suno.
Innovation and impact
Gonzalez was struck by what her fellows pulled off with almost no runway. “I was still kind of like, ‘Oh gosh, this is really difficult,’” she says of learning some of the tools alongside participants. “When I saw them submit their work and it’s functional and it tells the story and it looks awesome, I was like, ‘Wow, this is so cool!’”
Read More:
• Mayor appoints Atlanta’s first-ever senior tech advisor
• Atlanta Beltline approves $265 million budget for 2027
The tour was built in partnership with the City of Atlanta, Invest Atlanta, Atlanta Tech Hub and Avant South. Donnie Beamer, senior technology advisor to Mayor Andre Dickens, presented the tour’s awards at Altera’s Opening Night in June, framing the project in civic terms: “This becomes more than a competition. It’s an opportunity to leave a long-lasting creative mark on the city.”
The Altera Art: ATL tour runs through July 31. Whether it will extend beyond that is still being worked out, but Gonzalez says the format’s bigger ambitions are already taking shape. Altera is expanding into what she calls Altera Media, with more experiences and studio work in the pipeline. Asked which piece most changed how she thinks about what these tools can do, Gonzalez points to Dojnik’s “Women of Auburn” without hesitation: “The power of these tools helped bring their story to life,” she says of the librarians it resurrects, “and will solidify these nine Black women in Atlanta history.”
