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
 

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….