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….

Note to self: installation idea for artwork, remensicent of Gormley's Blind Light, but decidedly more mischevious! Perhaps too mischevious for the art establishment... *grin*

My artworks, for the Signals in the City Exhibition have been up for 2 weeks at the Hannah Maclure Centre, and it is only now that I can think about it, and reflect on the processes. After the flurry of getting everything done, not only was I exhausted, but I just had no more room left in my head for any of it.

At the private view, it was interesting to see the way that people interacted with my works. We have precedents or accepted ways of behaving in certain situations, when works like mine sit across different modes of interaction, some people don't know what to do. The works were print based and hanging on the wall, so one would first of all assume traditional modes of viewing... but you are invited to pick up a nearby phone to interact with it... but we use phones to listen, not to see.... and in gallery spaces people have been taught to look but no touch... and in mobile phone stores everything is chained down. So my works broke many conventions that people subconsciously have learned to abide by.

After the shock of being allowed to play, experiment and explore most people were very diligent in engaging with the works. Unfortunately the slicker designed 6300 phones were the ones which users gravitated towards to use, when in fact they don't work as well as the N70's. Goes to show how important good device design is.  Once over the fear of breaking the technology, and getting it to work, many users spent a rather long time with the works. Much more time than I would have expected. They really examined the content quite closely and referred back to original images, particularly in the home.html series, which I am quite chuffed by.

Although the medium I am working in is non-linear, and I jump in and out of my works in a non-linear fashion, viewers in the gallery looking at my works do not seem to. They work through the series of works, from the place where the pedestal with the handsets is, along the wall of images, just like people do in conventional gallery spaces. It has never ceased to amaze me (and sometimes annoy me) the way people shuffle along from one image to the next in a gallery space in one big long queue, which can be a bit boring if it is crowded and you have stopped in front of a blank wall.  Whenever I walk into a room, be it a gallery space, lounge room, lecture theatre, I survey the whole room, and then zero in on the aspects that appeal to me. So in a gallery space I stand back look at all the images then go straight for the ones I like the look of. I may ignore some things all together, while spend especially long times with other works, probably much to the annoyance of the shuffling sheep who like to follow the linear structure defined by the curator.

Perhaps I am a little odd not going in the correct order; I'd love to know -  what do other people do/ think when they go into a gallery space?

I truly have been dreaming of mobile phones; 9 have taken up temporary residence in our flat, along with the 2 landlines. Don't try calling, by the time we work out which phone is ringing it probably will have gone to voicemail.

At least now, the works are in the gallery, and the phones for the most part are working! The N70's that is, have given up on the 6300's working with the RGB series.Had probs with gettting the phones over to Orange from Vodafone, as the internet setting messages just wouldn't come through! Customer service at Orange, well meaning as they were, and clearly reading from a script tried to help me do it manually, but when I asked a particualry tricky question, they had to go away to find out, so they said they'd ring me back. In the meantime, I worked out that they were telling me to configure the wrong part of the phone that the browsers were not reading, so used all their config settings in the right area and got it all to work.When Orange rang back with the answers (which were just the same as before) I decided - perhaps a bit cheekily - that I knew more than they do on how to solve my particular problem adn didn't need them. Besides it was knock off time in their call centre in India (3am to be exact).

Perhaps after all of these technical dramas I can get back to what I prefer to be doing which is actually making artworks and exploring critical concepts, rather than doing DIY-Mobile-IT-Support.

I knew that working with mobile technologies was a writhing mess of conflicting systems, lack of standards and evil telcos, but nothing has prepared me for the utter utter frustration of trying to embed QR-codes into artworks and make them readable by more than one individual phone!

 The cheapie Nokia N70 that I got from ebay has a wide lattitude in terms of what it will recognise as a code, which I wrongly asumed was the way all phones work. Totally not the case - Orange are kindly providing 3 x Nokia 6300's and £250 credit per phone for the exhibition, opening in 2 days, but when we tested them on my artworks they didn't work!!! The do work on standard codes.... sometimes.... though no indication why they stop reading a code they read 5 min ago, but they don't have the same lattitude as the N70.

I don't like the mechanical structure of QR or data-matrix codes, so for the series RGB , I altered the codes to make them more organic and fluid. I was testing continually on the N70 to ensure that they still worked when I altered them... and they did. But the 6300 doesn't recognise them as QR codes. Both phones have 2 megapixel cameras, but the N70 has a much wider lens and it also seems to handle a wider variety of lighting conditions... But who knows perhaps its not the camera...  perhaps it is the operating system N70's are symbian, 6300's are Nokia's own OS, or perhaps it an issue with the telco software, my N70 is on Vodafone.

 The most frustrating thing is that there seems to be no one out there between dumb sales person who knows nothing and ultra geek who can't communicate, and I am finding it difficult to work out where a telephone OS ends and the telco software starts.... and ultimately I'm not a programmer, I only want to know so can work out where the boundaries are. I can't even seem to find this out. I emailed i-nigma who created the QR-code reader and they rather rudely have not replied. I can tell they really care about research and really pushing the boundaries of technology *pursed lip and narrowed - eyed angy glare at developer who did not reply to my email*

Ironicallly my whole reason for working with QR codes and print based artworks is to create artworks which, when the technology fails, or the electricity goes, still have some physical form which can be viewed in its own right. Yet when the technology goes right can create an enhanced experience of the artwork.... and now I seem to be falling bak on that default mode, where the technology has gone belly-up.

I had a breakthrough this week with getting the QR code reader to work on my test phone (a Nokia N70 I picked up cheaply on ebay) !!! I've been producing new works for an exhibition at The Hannah Maclure Centre called "Signals in the City" opening on the 29th of February 2008.

It was about the 5th bit of software that I had tried from all these free downloads and I was close to giving up and thinking the whole idea was a stupid one. The website that I downloaded the software from had a whole list of phones that work with it, (though the list needs to be updated). www.i-nigma.mobi has a phone detect on it which is great, cos it then serves the right version to your phone.

The phones listed have a particular combination of features needed for my artworks.Not all phones support the software listed, so these models are  the important ones and prob not interchangeable with others unless tested.

Features:
•    Camera – needed to scan codes
•    i-nigma software – this is the qr code reader needed for users to interact with the artworks. If you go to www.i-nigma.mobi when on one of these the site should pick up the model number and provide the correct version of the software to download.
•    flash lite – supports flash websites for mobile phones
•    Symbian OS – smart phone operating system allows more functionality for future development.

1st choice: Nokia 6120 classic £100 from 3  (2mpx camera, runs i-nigma, flash lite and is symbian os) OR
2nd choice: Nokia 6300 £69 from T-mobile, carphonewarehouse, Orange, Tesco (2mpx camera , runs i-nigma & flash lite, but NOT symbian os) OR
3rd choice: have I lost time, (1.3 mpx camera, runs i-nigma, but not flash lite or symbian os)