If Your Cell Phone Is Ringing, You Are Dead: New Media Interaction for Annotated Space by Paige Saez, Contemporary Art Theory
Elena, the winner of the First QR-Kill game played in Barcelona, January 22, 2008
QR-Kill is a Spanish mobile game, played using cell phones and signs with QR codes on them. The object is to pick other players out of a big crowd (in this case downtown Madrid) capture their QR codes with camera phones, then text them. If you are playing the game and receive a text then you have been killed, and you are out of the game. Novel in its use of QR codes to track and kill other players, the game itself is otherwise fairly typical for massive multiplayer games.
“Today we went to Corte Inglés (Barcelona Shopping Center) and we played the 1st QR-Kill match in history. Urban game based on cameraphones and the use QR-Codes. …B efore the match starts players are to decide a scenario, a modality and a meeting-point. Players will stick in their back a QR-Code with his/her telephone and name embedded. They will have to kill each other capturing the code and sending an SMS. http://www.qrkill.com
QR codes (or Quick Read codes) are one of many consumer-facing 2-D barcodes available for encoding URLs, phone numbers, or text into an image that can be read with a camera phone and translated back into what was originally written. Popular in Asia, they are used for everything from encoding URLs for nutritional information on cheeseburger wrappers at McDonalds, to seat assignments on airplanes. Over the last two years, QR Code popularity has skyrocketed worldwide, although adoption in the US has been slow. Artists and are using QR codes and other physical hyperlinks, to start conversations about annotated space. Augmented reality games like QR-Kill are exploiting the interactive narrative that physical hyperlinks embody.
An emerging system of mark making at the core of ubiquitous computing, QR codes and other kinds of physical hyperlinks, are examples of how the structure of the web is remediating our notions of place. This remediation is making contextual border crossings between the virtual and the physical common. Whether its through the Situationist-Assassin game of QR-Kill, the almost dictatorial tagging of Semapedia’s (http://www.semapedia.org) aim “to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space,” through Wikipedia articles, or in the altruistic goals of creating paths for dialogue between forbidden art and artists. (Jung Von Matt, http://www.nextwall.net/content/main/)
Human to Device/Device to Human
With mobile phone adoption rates approaching 100% of the population in numerous countries, technological advances in mobile technology such as component miniaturization have enabled development of gadgets that have more features and computing power than ever before. Integrating cameras, motion sensors, and radio frequency identification (RFID) or barcode readers. (User Perceptions on Mobile Interactions, 2006)
In 2002, Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs emphasized the potential of mobile communications to create a social revolution by enabling new forms of cooperation. He describes emergent behavior exhibited by thumb tribes of connected teenagers: “the term ‘swarming’ was frequently used by the people I met in Helsinki to describe the cyber-negotiated public flocking behavior of texting adolescents.” Rheingold notes that mobile devices enable groups of people to act in concert even if they don’t know each other and cites numerous examples of peaceful (and not so peaceful) public demonstrations from Manila to Seattle in which tens of thousands of protestors were mobilized and coordinated by cell phones and waves of text messages. (Morville 2005, 69)
When we apply the scenarios that Smart Mobs presents us with to the available, lightweight technology that hacks like QR Codes, it is easy to imagine what might be if this kind of mark-making was adopted by the public rather than enforced. Imagine a city overlaid with more than just street-signs, stoplights and corporate directives. Imagine a city annotated, block-by-block, with the stories of its inhabitants. Billboards and telephone poles swathed in painstaking layered digital graffiti. This city already exists in our memories and in our stories only most of us cannot see it.
Hyperlinks: Future-proof Architecture
Physical Hyperlinks have the potential to shift architecture, democratizing public space and bringing graffiti, public art and cultural histories to forefront of discussions about place and its heritage.
“HTML, hyperlinks, frames, and meta-tags are the essential building blocks of the web. They combine to create a highly associative, endlessly referential and contingent environment that provides an expanse of information at the same time that it subverts any claim to authority, since another view is just a click away.” (Peter Lurie, 2003)
Lurie’s description of the architecture of the web describes a networked fabric of information and context, inherently non-hierarchical. When we apply this deconstructionist approach to the real world we incorporate a nonlinear, colloquial, and narrative approach to public space. Lurie details how the webs’ structural agnosticism is re-framing how digital natives will learn overall.
“For those who grow up reading online, reading will come to seem a game, one that endlessly plays out in unlimited directions. The web, in providing link after associative link, commentary upon every picture and paragraph, allows, indeed requires, users to engage in a postmodernist inquiry.”(Lurie, 2003)
This postmodernist inquiry will soon become the ordinary, and instead of grasping for ways to describe randomness and non-linear structures we will struggle for personal narrative.
All of these new experiences with our devices are going to be sold to us under the guise of mediated, networked sharing. Remote controls capable of "zapping things" into being, mobile platforms will continue to be exploited to create new experiences. Our devices will catalog our networked experiences for us as a courtesy and a side-affect of our agreed upon mediation. Our memories will be categorized and archived, backed up to private memory palaces, downloadable via pdf. Anytime we click our physical hyperlinks we will be recorded, but not always voluntarily.
Border crossings, between digital and physical, online and off are in their infancy. We are encouraged to re-examine our surroundings using these devices only at the precipice of what will ultimately be their use. Today our phones and computers are connected to the net, tomorrow our clothes, our food and our environments will be. The key to distribute ownership of our hypermediated environments lies in the networks of today. Much like collaborative hypermedia systems and standards enable people to establish formal and informal collaboration patterns across the Internet, collaborative hyperlinking will help establish similar frameworks offline. Game playing is one way the adoption of QR codes, and other new technologies become a part of our cultural framework.
QR Codes and Real-World Hacks
Mobile and embedded devices are becoming experiential in their increasing ubiquity. Furthermore they are capable of new kinds of presence in their utility as record keepers, entertainers, tools, and communication mediums. Making traditional computing obsolete, our devices will soon be networked to us, the web, and to the people around us inherently. We will rely on them in their capacity as translators and instigators. Mobile devices and physical hyperlinks provide us with more than just new web pages or new information. They anchor context and distribute meaning. Music, games, diary entries, historical facts and pedagogies are all hard linked to things. Imagine downloading a favorite song from a sticker on an apple? Receiving the latest political gossip from your coffee mug? Imagine not understanding that these things are not the way things used to be.
Sources
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