Mel bourne’s city centre will be invaded by guerrilla sculptures this week. The twist is, you won’t be able to see them.

The sculptures, by Australian and international artists, are virtual and can be revealed only by using smartphones loaded with an app that makes 3D installations appear to materialise in real-world locations.

Curated by new media artist Warren Armstrong, using the so-called Layar Reality Browser app, (Un)seen Sculptures opens a new frontier in modern art. “You can walk around the works with your phone and see them from different angles,” explains Armstrong. “You can press a button and call up the artist statement, and even interact with a couple of them. Some have sound attached, including Portuguese roosters that crow at you.”

A new direction that makes Banksy look old-school, the first outing of the app driven tehcnology invaded New York’s Museum of Modern Art last October, populating it with invisible installations made visible by smartphone users in the know, without the museum’s permission.

“The organisers basically decided they wanted to put on a show there, then located 3D artwork in and around the gallery so people could just turn up and see it,” says Armstrong, who admits he doesn’t have explicit permission from any of the locations in Melbourne, either.

Locations playing host, unofficially, to (Un)seen Sculptures include the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Victoria and Federation Square.

“It’s a very affordable way of doing it,” Armstrong says. “There’s a DIY section on the website with all the free tools you need to make 3D art. It costs nothing to set up your own channel of works and display them, and there are plenty of online tools to help if you’re not au fait with the fiddly back end programming.”

With a population of 22 million in Australia, and almost 25 million mobile subscriptions, mobile phones are a national obsession that’s here to stay, and one that the art world must embrace. “It’s a new way of looking at these devices we carry around with us all day, using it for different forms of creative expression.

It doesn’t have to be just a personal organiser. The technology is getting more and more accessible and the capacity of these phones is increasing all the time. Who knows where it will go.”