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Wikipedia no longer has an entry for physical world hyperlinking - its been superseded by object hyperlinking!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.

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.

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….

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...

QR code add ons and widgets are popping up everywhere it seems. Though what people are actually doing with them I have no idea. Two "barcode" readers have been developed for Firefox: The Barcode 0.1.2 developed by Duncan Sample and James Carter, and the Mobile Barcoder by Geek Shadow.

 I've downloaded The Barcode 0.1.2 which when I roll over the word "Barcode" that now appears on the bottom left corner of my browser, a QR code appears, but really it is quite useless - I can't screen grab it to actually use anywhere else,  and I can't see what the point is. Perhaps its not working properly on my setup (MacBook Pro latest version of Firefox). I mean I'm hardly going to surf the internet on my mobile phone at the same time as on my laptop, so I don't get it.... I've not yet tried the Mobile Barcoder, but since it says its experimental and so far only 3 people have downloaded it. I don't think I've fallen behind the game yet...

Mobilebarco.de is a German company who have developed a wordpress QR widget and they've also created a facebook app, which I have just added to my account. It provides a QR code of your facebook profile, and displays it on your profile page, which of course is redundant since you are already there anyway. Though, at least with the facebook app, you can download the image from facebook and have a .png file to use with other media. I've set my privacy pretty high on facebook, and I wonder whether the QR code profile link is really that secure. I am thinking that it would have to be... surely...  but then again developers overlook the simplest things sometimes... shall test it and see.

 I'm sure there are more out there, so shall do some trawling and see what I come up with. Any suggestions welcome!

A friend just posted me a link to this story about QR codes being used to tombstones. Hmmm, ok, nice idea...maybe...  but what if your dearly beloved departs from this world and you become administrator for their QR code linked site, and what if... posthumously they really piss you off (like giving all their millions to a cat instead of you), you could post all kinds of defamation up there, and think, no retribution!! Unless of course you believe in ghosts...or hell.  Oh,  I can really see this being a quagmire for all sorts of ethical arguments.

Wild imagingings aside and on a more practical level; as yet QR code technologies haven't really been future-proofed. They may not be around say, in a few hundred years. I can just imagine future archaelogists stumbling across a whole graveyard of QR code tombstones and thinking WTF? then making up some wierd theories to try and explain what all these  black and white squares are.

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.