Futuresonic is happening in Manchester from the 13th – 17th of May and I am very tempted to go… except that I am so heartily sick of travelling now, and with a would so dearly love to stay put. But there is so much good stuff on there. Of particular interest is artist Yuri Suzuki whose Graffitti Radio artwork utilising 2D barcodes will be featured.

The blurb for the futuresonic website states: “A music project played by scanning 2D barcode graffiti across the city. The artist sprays a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. People who find the graffiti around the city take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone. This then triggers music - in the form of an internet radio stream created by the artist - on the internet enabled phones.”

The promo photo looks like a QR-code, but the link on the page is to yet another type of tag: okotag. The okotag website is pretty thin on information, and I am yet to see why this is better than any of the many other readers out there. Graffitti Radio looks like an interesting project and it would be great to see it in action which will be citywide around Manchester, from the 13th- 16th of May. Suzuki is also speaking at the Futuresonic conference in the afternoon of the 14th of May on the “Distant Encounters in the Social Space” panel at 4 – 4:40pm in Space 2 of the Contact Theatre, Manchester.