“The idea of an augmented or virtual reality is inherent in any drawing—it’s almost the definition of a drawing,” the artist Christoph Niemann says. “If you create a world on paper, you create a window. Usually, you just break the surface with your mind, but you always have the feeling of: What if you could step into that world or if something could come out of it?” Niemann’s work “On the Go” appears—in a first for the magazine—on both the front and the back covers of this week’s Innovators Issue. In another first, his images are the prompt for an animated three-dimensional city that is revealed when you look at either cover on your tablet or phone through an app. Niemann says of the concept, “In a drawing, the barrier between the real world and the made-up world is the surface, so at the very beginning I thought of an elevator with its doors closing. But then I realized that the subway is even better, because it really does take you to a different world. The closing doors are a flat surface that separates two worlds, and so are the covers of a magazine—separating before you read it and after you read it, what you know and don’t know, how your views change. So between the front and the back cover, and the experience created by the app, I like that we could show essentially two different angles on the same world. Like stepping through a mirror.”
To make “On the Go” come alive, first download the free UNCOVR App from the Google Play or Apple App store. Then, open the app and point your tablet or phone at the magazine. Move your device around the cover to explore the animated cityscape—and see if you can spot the surprises.
