Lets see how they take off in Australia which is a little slow in the uptake, but may benefit from  learning from everyone's mistakes. They have a dedicated website to the release of telstra mobile codes, but not being on the ground in Australia, I'm not sure how it is infiltrating through the mass media and whether the average Australian on the street is aware of this pending revoltuion. Can anyone in Australia let me know what is happening on the ground there?

 
One type of tagging  that looks quite cool is Shotcode, which was developed by Cambridge University. They are not as prolific as QR-codes and I am not sure what the future for them is, but the artist in me says" hmm... they look pretty", which no doubt is too flippant for many tecchies, but ultimately if you want people to use the technology you develop, you've got to make it appealing.... and currently much of it is so user-unfriendly it is not at all appealing. On the left is the shotcode tag for my blog, and the reader does seem to support a much wider range of mobile handsets than the i-nigma reader for QR-codes does.

Its about methodology for me. How can I use what I am creating in a way that is effective in eliciting answers to my research questions? I've not studied sociology so I need to know the lay of the land before I go out there like a bull in a china shop. So far what we have been doing has been reaffirming my own approaches, rather than teaching me anything new, but this is good. I need the reality check that what I am doing is sane and there are precedents out there.  It's interesting being here with a whole bunch of sociologists and a few anthropologists, and finding that neither is able to articulate succintly what the difference between the two actually is. This is another question that may never be answered, because everyone seems to have their own interpretation on it.

I don't know why, but I really (clearly naively) thought that there might be at least a couple of artists here but no, to my knowledege not a soul. Yet artists are often looking at the same things that  visual sociologists are looing at, just from a different point of view, so it would make sense to combine forces. Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting. Why isn't there more interdiscplinary communication? Are we really so protective of our own fields we don't want to help the others out? In discussions and group work, I find myself having to remind the people that I am with that what we are doing is visual, not just theoretical, and that we can use images for more than just evidence that something is happening.... and I am learning from the sociologists alot more about people,  how they behave, their representations and the ways in which others who do not have an art background interpret images, which is invaluable. The relationship is symbiotic.

So much of the "participatory" methods that have been discussed and theorised as novel ways of research are what community artists have been doing for decades. The difference I can see though is that whilst the artists facilitate ways of empowerment though art for communities, I've not observed so much of the products of community art then being used as artefacts which can articulate research outcomes. I guess this is because community artists are not going in with an agenda of elicitiing information, instead they are facilitating creativity and self expression. But, what a great team a visual sociologist and a community artist could make.... incidentally I am neither and do not have any desire to fill this niche  myself, but I can still recognise the potentials that are there.

Out fieldwork is based in Bertinoro, which I think is a little unfair to the locals - they'll be "specimens" for 6 different groups of researchers, poor them. We are just skating along the surface of their culture and there is an objectification in that which I feel uncomfortable with. On the other hand, it is nice in that even with my ropey Italian I have managed to strike up conversations with people, and I like being able to do that. We're doing work in groups and our group is looking at social gathering spaces in Bertinoro.

Time is different in Italy to in Britain or even Australia. Things are more laid back and it takes a while to get used to. Like many mediterranean cultures there is a siesta time in the afternoon and at night the village becomes more alive. This means for my group our fieldwork will be done more often in the evenings. I quite enjoyed this evening's fieldwork in a local bar....

There is a football match on, Italy v Netherlands, so this was a key reason to be out. Though my observations were that the activity was fairly mail dominated - being football I guess this is hardly surprising, but I liked looking at what the women who were out were doing. There was a cafe/ bar that had been set up for everyone to watch the TV. It wasn't like in the UK where it is fairly ad hoc and people sit around talking. All the seats had been set up to face the televison and everyone was very orderly and well behaved. But note in the picture (left) the audience is mostly men and most of them older. 

In the images here  I have focused on the 2 main women in the scene. 

The woman in the window is clearly not interested in the football and is reading a paper. The woman with her partner leans over to speak to him, but his is involved in watching the game. All the men's attention is very intent. We have to note that this was just this place. Two of use broke away from the main group, feeling we were less intrusive as a twosome, and found out where the younger locals were haning out. From the outside one never would have guessed it was a bar - it looked like someone's home, but there was alot of activitiy going and and it behaviour was more distracted. Since everyone was speaking Italian, and it DID look like someone's home we felt rather intrusive so didn't go in, but gathering from the subdued dissapation of the group soon after, we assumed that Italy lost.

It was pointed out to me in thesis monitoring that my current title is really dense and there is alot in it. I don't mind people pullng my work apart critically. It needs to be done, and I have been craving ANY kind of critical feedback on my work, so this was great. Every word in my current title is loaded with its own set of concepts and yes, looking at it, it could be very difficult to work out the main focus.  I think possibly that semiotics is a theme underpinning what I do, but not neccessarily the main driver. Signs and symbols are definately important to what I am doing, not only how they are evidenced in images, but actually what a person's behviour or their environment may signify.

Its funny, the thesis and wirting up is still a long way off, but if one has a title then there is something to hang things off when talking to others.... even thoough the title will probably change a million times before the final hand-in. I guess, its a bit like a focal point, something solid in that shifting snowdome of ideas.

I was thinking the title s more along the lines of: Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of photography but then again if I think about it properly, photography is just one area, even though it is one of my main areas. My work is about people too.. it's about how people act and respond to images and the spaces in which they view them. People are very important in what I do. I want to somehow make life a bit lighter, happier, interesting through my art. We're all too jaded these days. Perhaps a better title is something like:

Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of image practices.
 

This made me realise  that nowhere on my blog have I actually been that clear and stated my title.  To put my digital whitterings into context, currently my phd title is:

Visual Dialogues: The Semiotics of mobile interaction and convergence in the context of print based art
 

“..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 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.