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.

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?

According to Wikipedia:

"A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional code....

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone's browser to launch and redirect to the website embedded in the code"

Why am I looking at them? Well as you can see from the entry above, at the moment they are mostly being used in commercial and advertising scenarios, as yet to my knowledge, no one is utilsing their full capabilities in art. The nice thing about creating artworks is that the process is about experimentation and exploration. Something, that is quite a luxury in the commercial world.  

The way a user interacts with a qr code is similar to taking a photograph. Its easy to do, and rewarding for the user. Not like trying to type a url on a mobile phone. I am so crap at typing on my phone keypad, I accidentally offend those who send me texts because I don't reply soon enough (or at all).... and I'm not even a ludite! My works are about imbuing handheld mobile experiences with an element of playfulness. And I'm not talking about gaming/ games etc, I'm talking about playfulness that results in delight and a smile.