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.

I'm working on a book review at the moment for the AHRC: Past, Present and Future Craft Research project that the Visual Research Centre at  Dundee University is undertaking. The book is called Thinking Through Craft  by Glenn Adamson, and although I am not really a craft practitioner I thought it would be interesting to do the review. Its an internal review and needs to be 3,000 words, so I'm being very diligent in trying to absorb it all. 

I'm not that far in really, only the first chapter, but already there are concepts that really resonate with me. Adamson introduces the notion that  the finished work (be it art, craft or design) is supplemental to the concept behind the work. Its the idea that the really important thing is the idea or concept, but for it to be communicated it must take on a form eg painting, design, sculpture etc, and these are forms which give physical presence and exploration to an idea. It is almost as if the artwork is a frame for the idea

He uses the excellent example of a music score. The score itself is not what audiences enjoy, it is what the score denotes and gives rise to that is is important.  Adamson takes the debate further exploring the notion of jewellery, saying it is slightly different to other forms because the human body becomes the frame for the works, and one can view jewellery also a small sculptures.

He discusses Margaret De Patta (featured left)  who left commercial design in 1941 to work with Lazlo Maholy-Nagy at the School of Design in Chicago. There Maholy-Nagy told her to free the stones from their settings, and this lead to works which challenged conventional notions of jewellery design at the time.