This AR documentary is hiding inside Snapchat

Picture this: some ordinary kid is at the dinner table, tooling around on Snapchat instead of politely answering questions about midterms or band practice or eczema or something, when mom rips out his airpods. "Listen to your elders!" she scolds — and end scene on one very 2019 domestic cliché.

Now, imagine mom let it slide. Instead, the kid keeps swiping through lenses until a video of someone who looks a lot like nana and/or pop-pop mysteriously appears. The face of that elderly storyteller starts merging with theirs, thanks to the everyday magic of Snap's augmented reality features. And for the next 15 seconds, the stranger shares some wisdom.

It's unlikely. But it could happen. Because earlier this month, Toronto-based artist Karen Vanderborght launched Grey Matter AR, an interactive documentary project about 10 Canadian seniors.

They're a broad range of folks — there's a musician, a housewife, a politician (Anne Cools, Canada's first Black senator), a martial arts instructor. And in short interviews, the group reflects on resilience, time, memory, aging, love and regret, among other universal themes.

To experience it, you'll need Snapchat. That's the app that Vanderborght used to build the show thanks to its free toolkit for designers, Lens Studio, and Grey Matter AR is essentially comprised of 50 custom Snap "lenses." (That's the brand's proprietary name for their interactive masks.)

Each of those lenses includes about 15 seconds of interview footage plus AR visuals — interactive graphics that interpret the speaker's life lessons as a mutated sort of selfie. Every lens is unique, some more abstracted than others. They're also currently available on Snapchat if you search "Image Fatale" through the app's Lens Explorer.

To experience one for yourself, open Snapchat and scan the code below.

"From the start, my idea was to bring elders back as confidantes, counsels — people that pass on knowledge or tradition, which they do in a lot of cultures," says Vanderborght. An artist and documentary filmmaker, she began developing the project in 2015. "That was the main idea behind it: to make a connection between the younger world and the pre-app generation, the older people."

Snapchat, of all the social media platforms, has a rep for skewing young, though technically Instagram inched past it to become the top teen choice last fall. "The people I want to reach out to are using it. It's quite open. I mean, they make these tools [available]," Vanderborght says, referring to Snap's Lens Studio. Once a lens is designed, she says it can be made public within minutes, and she says that was an advantage over other apps' AR studios, namely Facebook's. And provided you have the skills to muck around with the software, what you build is only limited by your imagination. "It doesn't only have to be funny bunny ears," she laughs.

Finding seniors to interview was an entirely different challenge, but through outreach to a variety of community organizations — plus appeals to friends and friends-of-friends — she found her cast. "I knew I wanted people from different social classes, different cultural backgrounds," she says. "I looked a little bit also at the population of Canada, where the origins of a lot of people are, and that was my guide to find people. I told them it was a video for a smartphone. Even for people half their age, it was sometimes really complicated to try to explain it."

"They're all really different, they've all had very different lives, but in the end, when you go through the 50 scenes, they all kind of come to the same conclusion."

"It's showing that whatever culture you're coming from, whether you're Black or white or you're a man or a woman, in the end, we all have to go through the same things — and at the end, we all need to make peace with our lives and with the same things."

That simple, uplifting message didn't come as a surprise, she admits. "It's something that I felt would probably be the case," she laughs.

"So that is, I guess, a comfort. If you go through the 50 scenes, that might be something you'll notice, as well."

From March 21-28, visitors to Toronto's Trinity-Square Video could experience the project IRL. (Posters of the Snapcodes were installed in the gallery.) Now, it's waiting to be discovered on the app in perpetuity.

The idea that it's hiding in plain sight among user-built lenses — flower crowns and hamster faces and more flower crowns — has some appeal to Vanderborght. "That's my artist practice, basically — to use tools and then tell stories with them, even if they're not necessarily developed specifically for that. It's a way of dropping in what I hope is meaningful content in a very superficial sphere."

Scan these Snapcodes to experience Grey Matter AR.

New to Snapchat? Here's how to unlock a lens:

• Before you open Snapchat, double check that your phone's sound is turned on. (Headphones recommended!)
• Point your camera at the Snapcode.
• To scan, tap and hold the Snapcode on your screen.