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.

Channel 4 (UK) has launched a very cool site where you can take pix with your mobile phone of public art and send them to their server. They are then located on a map. This is an excellent use of locative media, the ubiquity of the camera and social networking.

At the moment most mapped public artworks  are in the UK, then Europe and a few in the US. Would be great to see some Australians posting works there. You can upload via a pc as well. Someone really should take a photo of whatever currently is decorating Taylor Square in Sydney!

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!

The digital camera and mobile phone camera are the latest harbingers of democatising photography... or are they?
 
We know that photography democratised portraiture to some extent, where camera meant you no longer had to be rich enough to commission a painter to have your image immortalised.... And we know that 35mm created another shift in democracy where the photographer didn't have to cart around an unwieldy tripod.... and look how polaroid brought imaging truly into the homes of just about everyone in the western world....

So it would follow that the camera phone, one of the most ubiquitous pieces of technology in the world would seem to follow this trend, but in my opinion it doesn't. Ok, more people may be able to actually take photos, but can more people see them? With all other forms of photography where the output was a printed image, anyone could see it without the need for extra technology.

Now with the digital image, where distribution most often takes place via email, MMS messaging or social networking sites, surely we could see this as reveerting back to elitism? Unless the photographer chooses to print their image, actually viewing it, without extra kit is harder than ever before. What about people who do not have access to these technologies? What about people who live in rural or remote areas where mobile phone signals and broadband are but a whiff on the horizon? What about older people who just can't get their heads around the technology and just don't want to?

What about others like me, who are so immersed in technology day in and day out,  that when they want some low-fi down time, the joy of the printed photograph has become rare?

I've just spent a few exhausting days in the studio, which I haven't done for such a long time. I had forgotten how the printmaking process makes you slow down, be patient and have time to think. I'm so used to zipping impatiently round a computer screen with my mouse that being forced to stop and mull over ideas while waiting for screens to expose has been a good thing.

 t's given me time to collect my thoughts a little more and think about how photography is forging forward into the domain of the 2.0's. We have Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0, so why not Photography 2.0? Given the ubiquity of digital cameras,  social networking and the democratising of the photographic image (though I have my own ideas about this, more later when I have time) , it seens like a natural progression. Not may people yet have coined the term, though it has been used by one marketing company, and I suspect we are on the cusp of it infiltrating the mainstream.