Telstra, one of Australia's main carriers has come up with a good solution to datarate costs when accessing QR code content online. They have created their own "Telstra Mobile Codes" which are just QR codes under another name. However if you are on a Telstra mobile and access a telstra mobile code then the content is free - good marketing ploy! They are also shippng their own telestra reader on ( starting 7th July 2008) three handsets: Nokia 6120, Samsung U900T and Sony Ericsson W760i, otherwise you can download the reader. I used i-nigma to read telstra's codes on my N70 and it works fine, howver I can't use the video link because my IP is a UK one and telstra didn't lilke that!

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?

Wikipedia no longer has an entry for physical world hyperlinking - its been superseded by object hyperlinking! Personally I like the term physical world hyperlinking better. Object hyperlinking sounds very dehumanised. They've now updated the entry  contain more detailed information about such practices and include the term "tagging" as a collective noun, which has been broken down into groups such as RFID, Virtual, text based, SMS and Graphical. So as the ground shifts, nomenclatures are emerging and according to the most current wikipedia update,  my investigation is now into graphical tagging. Interestingly enough wikipedia hasn't got a conclusive list of all the types of graphical tagging out 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.

Becuase my art is about people, and visual sociology has many cross overs with art. Though no doubt the purist in both camps will hate me for such a statemet... I have some research questions and I use art practice to go abut answering them, but I am always asking myself the questions, "what makes me qualified to be the one to make assumptions on behalf of other people? Who am I to say that what I am saying is right?" Perhaps there is no way of really knowing definitive answers like that, but if I look to precedents in related discplines this may help me think through my own answers.

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.

I am a summer school on visual sociology run by the International Visual Sociology Association and the University of Bertinoro. After the absolute nightmare of getting from a smallish town in Scotland to a remote village in Italy yesterady, the first day has been an interesting one. There is a wide mix of people from many places, though the 2 main groups seem to be Italy (as expected) and Americans. To me it is fascinating to see how different cultures intepret things, and here we have a greta mix in a small environment for an intensive period. Should be very intriguing. Already I am seeing how my culture can really blind me to seeing certain things. It's all about the codes and back to semiotics I guess. How have we been taught to decode certain things?

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.

I had my first Thesis Monitoring meeting yesterday and it was very enlightening. Thesis Monitoring is where a couple of academics who aren't your supervisors sit down with you and go through your progress to date. The term "thesis" in this context can be a littel misleading becuase at my stage I've not started my thesis, and since my phd is art practce based, further downt he track it will be about the progress of what I am making as well.  It's supposed ot occur every 6 months during your phd. In my case somehow administratively I had fallen between the cracks, so I had to do a bit of jumping up and down to get mine done....

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.
 

When doing a phd, it is easy to forget that what is all consuming to you, can be inaccessible and difficult to understand for other people. It can be  hard  to unravel the ball of string to sum up in a sentence what it is that you are trying to do before your audience's eyes glaze over in confusion. Today I got an email from the university just asking me if my phd title had changed over the past few months and if, so they needed to update it.

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
 

Working with QR codes and other forms of tagging that are ultimately reliant on databases, I am acutely aware that the tools I am investigating for use in my art practice, can just as easily be adapted for data-mining, tracking people’s movements and infringement of privacy. QR-codes are already being used in Japan on the 90 day entry visas. I got one last December. On one level I feel uncomfortable about this, but on another level, I know that such systems are, for the moment at least reliant on people who can make errors, have poor communication skills or even be downright incompetant.

They keep saying in the media that Britain has the most cctv’s per head of population, that we are captured going about our daily life 300 times a day, and that 1984 is our reality… Or at least that is what they want you to believe, yet the system is faulty.

So if I am watched so often and all my movements traced by camera and database, then with the freedom of information act you would think that when I need to access that information it would be there. Truth is it isn’t. The whole system is smoke and mirrors – and the databases are nigh on useless. The only thing that makes them work is our fear that they actually  DO work. We are being “kept good” by the notion that Big Brother is  really Watching when in actual fact Big Brother is a dumb bully who makes a hell of a lot of human errors.

The NHS, the Home Office and Inland Revenue all have proven this to me, which you can read about by following their links in this sentence.  For each of them, there have been situations where I have relied on my belief in  their databases to set things straight, and they have failed. Not only  because  some of the people working them put two and two together, but also because the databases are actually very rudimentary. Although this has put me through some great annoyance and frustration, I am glad that our imaginings are still worse than the reality. As long as we have a large population and under resourced government departments relying on juniors to lose whole CD’s of unencrypted personal information, Big Brother in his true sense is still a long way off.

Imagine a snow dome that someone has shaken up. Each snowflake is a thought or idea relating to your work. They whirl around and sometimes settle in groups or create intricate patterns caused by storms of thought. Some melt away into nothing while others form crystalline shapes and structures that later  you work into sculptural forms. You show these to other people and this opens up a forum for discussion and debate… The snow dome has been turned again.

This is what it is like to be doing an art phd, one which is based on research through making things and being a practicing artist, rather than one based  on historical  or theoretical research. I’m not a sculptor, but this is the only way I can describe the process… and there are days, like today when the snowdome is such a flurry of inspiration and ideas I don’t know where to start when writing about them. Instead I have to go and make, for words are too slow and can't yet articulate what is going on in my head – I have to go and shape my snowflakes into forms that enable me to communicate with others.

The tagging workshop below has really been a source of ideas, and then yesterday we had “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research” which was a student led symposium done through the Visual Research Centre located in Dundee Contemporary Arts and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. I had a very minor role in helping get it organised, but most of the credit really goes to Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Solfrank. The discourse that came out of it was really thought provoking and when the snowflakes have settled in the snowdome I shall write a little more about it.