I’ve just spent the last 2 days in a workshop with Branded Meeting Places project at Edinburgh University. They have been great!! I met with a diverse group of people from a range of disciplines, yet we all had interests in common which made the group a very inspiring one.

We’d been brought  together for a workshop on tagging, looking at how these may be utilised in linking the physical world with the virtual. I’d been invited on account of my work with QR codes, and it has definitely given me a great food for thought with my own research. In particular The Branded Meeting Places group have been collaborating with Mobile Acuity who create image recognition software, to come up with Spellbinder which on their website is described as:

“..a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors”

The creative scope for this is really limitless, especially when I think of it in the context of my own art practice.

On the first day we brainstormed ideas surrounding tagging. In groups we came up with possible applications of tagging and presented them to a vote to take one forward to build overnight. As it was 2 ideas were melded and three dedicated programmers worked through the night and morning to give us a working application to pay with.

The application that was built was called “Vocal Thumbs” which enables people to voice their opinions in a way which facilitates social networking via mobile phone. We were hoping to use audio, but that was not possible in the short turnaround time, but “Vocal Thumbs” worked via text messaging, so we all went out, tagged parts of Edinburgh, found each other’s tags and tested the system.

This very intensive group working to come up with a concept, build it and test it in 2 days is a very productive way of testing a concept and gaining feedback in a very short time frame. I think though, it is very reliant on the mix of people involved. Everyone there was positive,  committed to research and motivated in coming up with new ideas, and this enthusiasm was contagious. That is not to say however, at the end of each day we were a bit tired, but that good kind of tired where you feel like you’ve achieved something.

 

 

The Signals in the City symposium went well, and it was a very interesting day over all. I was really inspired by the first talk of the day by Jen Southern of Running Stitch. Running Stitch is a group of  collaborators: Jen Southern, Jen Hamilton and Chris St Amand  working with GPS to create artworks which map out the paths that people take through a city. Participants are given a  GPS enabled device (in this case a Nokia phone) which has their software loaded onto it. The path the participants take as they walk around a city is mapped via the GPS and then projected onto a large canvas in the gallery space where volunteers stitch the path taken by the person walking. By the end of the exhibition an intricate and abstract tapestry of people’s journeys has evolved.  

For me the intrigue in this work is not in the final piece, but actually in the processes taken to get to the “finished artwork”. I like the idea of working with people who are part of a place, and the stories that emerge from people’s journeys. Jen’s discussion of how Running Stitch’s projects have evolved over the years also was really interesting, and helps me put my own development and work into realistic perspective. These things take a long time – they took 3 years to develop the software needed to create the works…..

The other really interesting talk at the symposium was that of Chaos Computer Club, which is basically a whole bunch of devoted hackers who though hacking into systems create some great stuff. The talk was mostly focused on Blinken Lights  which started off as a project in an old building in Berlin. The windows of the building emulate pixels and are lit up to create different images. The idea is not unique, but the way in which is was done is exceptionally clever. I think the thing that resonated with me the most was that just by coincidence the day it started was 9/11 and Chaos Computer Club, in a desire to comfort people and make them feel safer displayed a beating heart for a few days… so the cynics of the world may think this tacky, but at a time like that I think that it was the best thing they could have done. As the project progressed, Chaos Computer Club invited the public to create animations for the windows, created by turning on and off a light – which in my opinion really screams Emperor’s New Clothes at Martin Creed’s Turner prize winning ridiculous light.

A couple of weeks ago I attend a course on Free Choice Profilng which is a research method enabling qualitative data to be quantified more “scientifically"  <! --cynical thought:  because scientific enquiry always seems to have more credibility than any other…>

Free Choice profiling was devised to determine perceived  flavours in cheeses and ports, where tasters created lists of descriptive words which they then later ranked for each cheese/ port. Rather than being a yes/ no questionnaire or having terms defined by the researcher, the participants determined the terms to be used (hence the term “free choice profiling). This then has the potential to have a wider range of definitions and terms which may not occur to the researcher. The results are then calculated using GenStat (statistics package) with some customised software to establish areas of consensus amongst participants.

This method can be seen as wholistic rather than reductionist because the results process looks at areas of consensus as opposed to areas of difference. If you think of the classic placebo effect tests, they are usually searching for differences in the participants results to ascertain whether there is anything of significance going on.
But of course you can’t apply such methods to things like tasting wine and cheese, where it make more sense to work on  areas of consensuses where a critical mass of participants are holding similar views.

Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder has been a pioneer in using this methodology, particularly in areas of animal welfare, with the use of videos of livestock animals. Whilst I still have my reservations about the use of the technique in this way being anthropomorphic (attributing human emotions to animals), the actual process and Wemelsfelder’s use of visual material is for me an excellent  means finding answers to some questions my research has been asking.

Although I am an artist, I am the type of person who wants to be able to have repeatable results to illustrate my points. Free Choice Profiling is perhaps one way I can do this, given that the nature of my work is so subjective and based on people’s interpretations and emotional responses to images.

I’m doing a presentation on the 1st of May about my work for the Signals in the City exhibition and its forced me to think about qr-codes on a deeper level than most people seem to engage with. I've come to the conclusion that  looking at qr-codes just by themselves or just in terms of their technical aspects is a rather superfical approach.

The thing about qr-codes that really interests me is that they are physical world hyperlinks: how does this affect people? what impact does this have on social activities mediated by computers/ handheld devices?  It is this linking between physical and virtual spaces that I find intriguing, not the advertising, or the idea that I could call a taxi just by taking a photo of it (with its qr-code emblazoned on its side), not the idea of buying a bottle of coke just by taking a photo of the vending machine that it is in. Although these are amazing ideas this is where most people stop because these ideas in themselves are money making and sometimes I think that this can limit people’s ability to push an idea to its limits.

We need to think about how a user interacts with a mobile phone, their expectations when they take a photograph, what it means to be “in the world” physically while interacting in virtual space. People multitask when they use mobile phones, their attention spans are short and usually data rates are an issue. How do these affect all affect the experience of the user?

Going back to the physical word hyperlinking, if we stop for a moment and question the semiotics of such an act there is so much in this it could be a book in itself. In the 3^rd year of my undergrad degree I did performance studies, and the most informative aspect of the whole year was a research project I did on the Semiotics of the Theatre Experience. I never thought such a project would be useful now, but it is – semiotics of space, breaking down of actor vs audience space could be related to breaking down of virtual vs physical space where the audience belongs to the physical world and the actors to the virtual….

Well, that's what this bib says! Would it be wrong to send this to my brother who has an 11 month old baby daughter?  or perhaps ! bypass him and send it straight to my niece the for her very first birthday...

The QR code momentum does seem to be gathering and people are starting to cash in. The bib in question comes from the QR- Store sporting  the tagline - "turning ink into bits" (personally I like "turning your bits into bytes".... just don't visualise).

The stuff for sale at the QR-store reminds me of when those hypercolour t-shirts first came out,  but oh how emebarrasing they were when people realised just exactly what got hot, and when....and then in the early 90's people wandered around with text like http://weosldkghslkhl@guspdjgslkj. com and thought they were really cool and trendy cos they had an "URL" on their front, when in fact it was just a pile of gobbledy-gook that made them look like wannabe geeks. That said , the baby bib is rather amuisng... yes it'll date but it is for a baby and its made for dribblling muck on anyway, unlike the rest of the selection at the QR-store which is disturbingly cheesy.

 Other QR sites of the day are:

QR Me: QR code you or your business 

 and a posted to me by a  good friend

Creative Review Blog  and  We Made This: Linksplats

I've been doing more reading for the Thinkng Through Craft book review and Chapter 2 on Material, unlike chapter 1 has been pretty hard going:This chapter is about the relationship that a craftsperson has with the materials in which they work, and how this can define the work itself. The points that the author raises are thought provoking, but there always seems to be an inferiority complex on behalf on craft by the author and he spends much time justifying craft in the context of contemporary/ modern art.

Considering the calibre of artists/craftspeople he is discussing this is rather irrelevant. We know he is  not discussing little old ladies on Sundays crocheting macramé pot holders, who would have no interest in entering into conceptual debates of the materiality of craft as they sup their tea and biscuits. Hasn’t the “establishment” matured enough to realise that the craft-art debate is rather moot these days?

The notion of Process Art is explored and contrasted with notions of “opticality” and this makes for a very interesting discourse on the intentions of the maker. I am using the term “maker” now because I am not sure whether the author is defining the people he discusses as “artists” or “craftspeople”. I get the feeling that they are not sure themselves. He makes an interesting point that although the intentions of Process Art (where the art is defined my the process undergone to create it) and Opticality (where the focus is on the way the physical object appears to us), the resultant works had many similarities.

An inproportional amount of discussion was devoted to the material of clay manifest through a number of artists,  but less was said about the nature of materials such as glass, textiles, metalwork or wood. Adamson’s discussion of Voulko’s relationship to ceramics/ pottery excellently illustrates the maker’s debates about the material they may use, but it gets bogged down by extraneous biographical details which make this a  rather unfocused digression.

 

His discussion about Yagi Kazuo (pictured left) was much more enlightening and more focused where Kazuo’s work with chieokore no kodomo (translated as young people who are slow to develop understanding) highlights the joy of clay as material. Their experiences highlight the way in which the intrinsic qualities of the material are for many the catalyst for making in the first place. This discussion reminds us that this book has been written by an art historian, rather than a practicioner. Such a viewpoint may be why one gets the feeling of someone on the outside looking in, rather than expression from someone who is  so embedded in the making of work, attempting to articulate their  tacit understandings.

The chapter ends with a rather truncated discussion on glass artists Dale Chihuly (at top of entry)  and Emma Woffenden. which one feels could have been expanded much further and related back to the discussion on clay.  Adamson discusses Chihuly’s mass appeal in a way that makes the reader wonder whether craft can only be elevated to the status of art worthwhile when it is uncomfortable, difficult and incomprehensible by those without an art degree. While Emma Woffenden’s work is treated with more sympathy, and this is a discourse that would have been much more fulfilling had it been longer (and the discussion on clay shorter). The chapter on Material is so different in style, structure and focus from the first chapter that one wonders if this were written at an earlier/ later stage and was added quite late on in the editing process.
 

Channel 4 (UK) has launched a very cool site where you can take pix with your mobile phone of public art and send them to their server. They are then located on a map. This is an excellent use of locative media, the ubiquity of the camera and social networking.

At the moment most mapped public artworks  are in the UK, then Europe and a few in the US. Would be great to see some Australians posting works there. You can upload via a pc as well. Someone really should take a photo of whatever currently is decorating Taylor Square in Sydney!

Just discovered these irksome articles online... Is the British public that unadventurous that the Sun has to resort to these tactics so we aren't  light years behind places like Japan? *wry expression* I guess it is, when the main reason video became so big was because of porn...