On October 1, 2024, the Augmented Reality portion of Body Politic can only be experienced through the free 4th Wall App.

Scan the QR code to download the 4th Wall App for your phone. Select “Allow all permissions” (4th Wall does not collect user data)  

Apple Store / IOS

Google Play / Android

Body Politic, by Nancy Baker Cahill is a two-part public artwork existing in 3-dimensions along Sunset Boulevard. Body Politic premieres on October 1, 2024, and runs until February 28, 2025 

At the top of every hour, the ten-minute digital artwork will be on view on the face of the multiple digital billboards on the world-famous Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, CA. The second part of the work will exist in augmented reality, 3-dimensional space, above and around the billboards at 8743 and 8775 Sunset. The augmented reality experience extends the video artwork on the 8743 and 8775 Sunset billboards and will only be visible in person through the 4th Wall app, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform. The historic exhibition—part of the City of West Hollywood’s “Get out the Vote” initiative— is the first time an augmented reality experience will interconnect with an artwork on full-motion billboard. 

Body Politic centers around the themes of body sovereignty, data rights/privacy, voting rights, and basic human rights. The title refers to both the infractions on individual liberties and the responsibility and promise of a voting collective. The film is divided into three phases, each phase has a corresponding branch of government represented to underscore the role that government plays in protecting or infringing on these freedoms.

When Body Politic begins Baker Cahill presents us with a twinkling orb, reminiscent of the earth, a seed, the beginning of life. As we move through the artwork, the glowing mass unites the narrative, ultimately growing past the boundaries of the billboard. The final phase of Body Politic is an accelerating sequence of news media headlines. These headlines are culled from news organizations that reflect a variety of viewpoints. The authenticity of the headlines has been confirmed and they symbolize the stakes of elections in the United States. The film concludes with a single neon sign with the direct call to action: VOTE. 

To underscore the dissolution of rights and the threat to individual liberties on a cellular level, Baker Cahill also created an unprecedented Augmented Reality intervention on the top of two billboards that illustrates democracy in action, in real time. It also amplifies and extends the aesthetics and conceptual territory of the video. Through Baker Cahill’s free 4th Wall App, viewers on location will experience a monumental AR animation of dancing human figures under a huge disco ball that, like the bodies, will register every vote cast and morph and shift in real time. These figures, their bodies made up of ballots, will alternately appear from invisibility to visibility signaling the erasure of rights and agency, and the power of embodied resistance. 

As a global audience “votes,” by choosing one of twelve rights offered in the app (each with its own assigned color and texture)*, the disco ball will change and evolve in real time, filling with the respective colors of those who have contributed to co-building a body (or bodies) politic. Voting can be done anywhere but experiencing the work as it evolves requires being physically present on site in West Hollywood. This collective experience not only models an immediate visualization of democracy in action; it goes one step further. After voting in the app, an automatic link will appear for further direct action on behalf of the right that is listed. This is the first such intervention of its kind. 

“With Body Politic, we are asking an unknown global public to be a part of a larger, participatory civic discourse. We will witness their votes—their prioritization of human rights—changing the constitutive elements of the artwork in real time. In this historic moment, artistic interventions can play a critical role in provoking meaningful public discourse and action. Public digital billboards offer an aesthetic and conceptual opportunity to engage the town square through mesmerizing visual content and rigorous messaging, inspiring people to use their voices and show up at the ballot box to assert their constitutional right to vote and to enact change. Participatory, co-built AR experiences allow us to include audiences local and global, and model the democratic process in real time” comments Baker Cahill. 

Twelve rights on which participants can vote: 

Right to vote 

Right to own your data 

Right to clean water 

Right to education 

Right to safe shelter 

Right to be treated equally under the law 

Right to bodily autonomy 

Right to a separated church and state 

Right to personal safety 

Right to a healthy planet 

Right to freedom of expression 

Right to protest peacefully 

Nancy Baker Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body through ecological thinking. She creates research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual blockchain projects rooted in the history of drawing. Her monumental, augmented -eality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting civics and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression.  

Her globally exhibited, geolocated AR installations have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. In 2023, the Georgia Museum of Art exhibited her first solo mid-career survey, which will travel through 2025. The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned and acquired CENTO, the museum’s first participatory AR project co-built by a global audience, on view through 2024. She premiered her groundbreaking immersive film SEEK in July 2024 at Cosm Los Angeles, marking the venue's inaugural art experience.  

Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient, and 2024-5 Harvard metaLAB Affiliate.  

Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; RFC Art Collection, Miami, FL; and 0x Collection, Prague, CZ.

West Hollywood Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA)

MIMA (me-ma) is an exhibition series administered by the City of West Hollywood and is presented as part of the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program. The MIMA Program presents 3 artists and licensed artworks, to rotate every 4 months, on each digital billboard, every year. Body Politic, the first city commission for the city and represents the first time the organization will do a full takeover of all digital billboards with one artwork. 

MIMA is a digital art program presenting moving image media artworks on multiple digital billboards at various locations along Sunset Boulevard. The program features licensed and newly commissioned, moving image digital artworks created by an inclusive roster of emerging, mid-career, and world-famous artists, filmmakers, and visionary creators. MIMA is a fluid framework to engage diverse perspectives, challenge the status quo, and recommit the Sunset Strip as a dynamic, artistic, and cultural destination within the rich context of the City of West Hollywood. The exhibition series offers artists the opportunity, and the funding, to create immediate, remarkable, and ambitious works of art that engage with the unique visual landscape of the world-famous Sunset Strip, and experiment with the state-of-the-art technology of high-definition digital signage. MIMA enables artists to occupy, contest, and play with the boundaries and uses of public space and manifest moments of connection and awe.