Introduction and Framing Statement
‘I initially took site as an actual location, a tangible reality ‘its identity composed of a unique combination of physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and shape of walls and rooms; scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks; existing conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topography –cal features, and so forth.’ (Kwon 2004, p. 11)
Our site specific performance space is based in the University Library; we have configured an idea that is an interactive promenade named QRious, this name stemmed from the curiosity we had with creating and using personal QR codes for the performance. The process of our ideas started from researching the library for inspiration and from first entering the building you notice the library use a barcode system in order for students to enter and leave the library, and to scan books in and out of the building. With further research we also noticed the use of QR codes throughout the library very subtly on posters to advertise websites. Having discussed the use of QR codes in the library, a group member then informed us that they had further knowledge into making them, this then led to us all learning how to make our own personal QR codes. At first this seemed an impossible for us to learn, however we quickly learnt how to use the website to make them which was easier than we firstly realised however it is very time consuming.
My immediate initial thoughts when the Library was assigned as our performance site specific space, I was at first almost disappointed as I was expecting a site that I was not familiar with that would be a new and exciting experience. The library for the majority of students is a place very familiar to us; therefore I could not imagine the library to be inspiring for new ideas. However further explanation was given about how we can visit for inspiration and rehearse in the library 24 hours a day which gave us a great opportunity to research and develop ideas at any time. The library for me is a place that I find inspirational; it is full with knowledge and history and could be compared to an archive. To gain more knowledge about the Library and hopefully inspire us with our performance and do the location justice we decided to take a trip to the Lincolnshire Archives, which sadly I could not attend. However Ivor and Francesca came to the conclusion that the Archive is basically a different form of a library where knowledge is stored and maintained. An archive contains historical artefacts however both buildings allow the users to gain knowledge of past events. I started to view the library as a site containing a wide variety of knowledge and information that was many years old, yet still developing in modern ways with technology. ‘A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere.’ (Pavis, 1998) Researching the library would be crucial to understanding the history and nature of the building, before we started looking at practitioners and gathering our first ideas for the final performance.
In regards to influences I soon discovered that the building itself is still growing; it is a very modern beautiful piece of designed architecture with a mixture of the original historic elements which then influenced one of my first photographs that I captured to transfer into QR codes of the Lincoln Cathedral which would inspire my further work. I then found myself taking inspiration from other elements around me that linked to my surroundings and history, a piece of artwork in a museum in London really linked to this so I tried to capture this with two people looking at the artwork to show their love of art as well as mine. My inspiration took a change in direction when I decided I wanted my QR’s to hold personal events in my life, therefore I started researching books that linked to my ideas of collecting photographs of family remembers and my partner and I together so I could show a personal link to the book through the QR codes. I was inspired by a book that was based about Head Injuries and the effects it has on the sufferer and family members, to link to a photograph of my father when he had an accident on a ladder five years ago. I also found myself researching into communication in a variety of ways which influenced a video recording of me delivering a sentence in sign language which is a subject very personal to me. This process has been very time consuming, hard work and enjoyable but mostly it has taught me to look beyond what we think is the obvious and with the media content of the QR codes, we had to think deeper into just taking multi-media for the sake of putting them into books. We had to learn to think out the box and link the books to our personal QR codes which links back to creating a relationship with the site we have. These are the first QR codes I personally created after we learnt how to use the website, please scan with an app named ‘redlaser’ and enjoy:
Site Specific practitioners were very crucial for our inspirations and development process along the way in this module, as we took great influences from Blast Theory, Janet Cardiff, Govan and may others. I also did my own research into a practitioner that influenced one of my photographs for a QR code which is famous street artist Banksy who specialized in street art and political messages.
On the 7th May our final performance was ready to be viewed by audience members including the examiners that were analyzing over a four day period to view all of the one hundred QR codes that were placed in the books around the library and to recognize a sense of atmosphere and infinite styled performance. We decided our performance is infinite because the QR codes are installed in the library books with the intention to stay there for an unlimited amount time to be viewed and experienced by anyone that locates them. Our performance consisted on the ground floor for the introduction of the performance for the audience, and then to tour the first and second floors of the library which was where the QR codes were located in the books. The concept of the experience and atmosphere of the performance relied heavily on the audience searching and locating the chosen books which is an everyday event, this suites the site specific purpose of no acting, therefore a book list was located on the ground floor which is a tested system already used in the library for students, and therefore was simple enough for an audience member to understand. Audience members played a huge part within our performance due to being an interactive promenade performance, their interactive involvement consists of them having to achieve their own trail of experience which would give them an opinion of the atmosphere it created for them personally, without their interaction of scanning QR codes, the performance is lost in a book. Our performance is not conventional as it does not include seating or staging therefore audience members cannot watch acting throughout the performance. The performance is in the books waiting to be scanned to then play a type of media through technology that is not live. Therefore, one of the biggest risks we took as a group was to depend and rely on the whether the technology of smart phones, a QR code scanner and we depended on the media to work on the day. Media is included in most modern performances; however we focused highly on technology for it to be a technical focused interactive performance. Site Specific is about creating a performance experience; our group focused to involve the history and technology of the library to create an interesting and inventive experience for the audience. When thinking about the library as not the obvious performance space, it influenced ideas to take risks and rebel against library rules.
Process and Development
Our group consists of Scott Bishop, Ivor Mallatratt and Francesca Betts and I. The first thing we instantly agreed on was that we wanted to show the development of the library with a technical aspect to it. After discovering the past of the library as a warehouse, we wanted to challenge peoples’ opinions on what the library is now and what it originally was intended for. The process and development of our performance has transformed from our original idea which was to have a promenade performance which involves audience members to tour the site and to have one member of the group to assist the audience though particular rooms and floors to discover various elements for example, body art, a life-size/human dictionary and a room full of CCTV cameras, this concept was about rebelling against the library rules. This idea has been altered due to having too many ideas that did not link together which was too complex. A kept idea was to use a barcode or QR scanning system when entering the library performance, we wanted the performance to be as similar as using a library as possible. One idea was to create our own version of the Find it at Lincoln system, this idea was too complex so we decided to keep the QR code idea and to develop it further, which then led us to using QR codes throughout the whole performance. Therefore our first ideas could 
then be used through the QR codes through multi-media technology for example, video recordings, audio recordings and photographs. Our group received some criticism during the presentation for our original idea; however advice was given about how the idea of using technology as a way to allow people to obtain knowledge in a different way really intrigued them. This then led our group to create all of our ideas based on QR codes. For our performance we wanted the audience members to pick up a leaflet and scan the first
QR codes to start and welcome them to the performance (scan QR code on the right).
Further discussion as a group was that we needed a wide variety of books between us for the performance so all one hundred QR codes would be interesting, creative and imaginative and all different from each other’s QR codes.
Our initial research started with looking at practitioners for inspiration, to help us grasp the concept of a good and imaginative site specific performance. One of the first practitioners that really inspired us was Janet Cardiff and her performance called ‘Alter Bahnhof video walk’ which was an individual audio tour performance at a train station where one audience member explored the train station live and through video recording, with headphones. ‘Participants are able to borrow an iPod and headphones from a check-out booth. They are then directed by Cardiff and Miller through the station. An alternate world opens up where reality and fiction meld in a disturbing and uncanny way that has been referred to as “physical cinema”’(Cardiff, J. Burges, M, 2012)
From watching this audio video walk, this inspired our own performance to rely heavily on using technology such as an iPhone or a smartphone in the library for the audience members to use while they search for the QR codes, we also thought about using headphones however this idea changed when we thought about taking risks in performance, therefore when the audience scan a QR code, a video or an audio would play out loud which could be seen as controversial as a library should quiet and peaceful however this will not be the case when our performance is in process. Blast theory was another influence for our performance due to the media element of their performances ‘Can you see me now?’ is ‘a chase game played online and on the streets, was succeeded by Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) in which players searched through the streets for Uncle Roy using handheld computers and a virtual city. As Thinkers In Residence in Adelaide the group created I Like Frank (2004), the world’s first mixed reality game for 3G phones.’(Blast Theory, 2006)
This idea of the site having a hidden identity being unmasked through technology, allowing us to explore its hidden information, felt like it would fit extremely well with the idea of the library having this hidden/extended information of QR codes in the books that only technology can allow participants to obtain. A personal influence was a famous street artist named Banksy who uses Graffiti to broadcast political messages to the world and the environment it is set in through art. I took the style of Banksy and created my own adaptation of one of his pieces of art ‘Social Media’ which pokes fun at today’s society and the public’s dependence on friends on social network websites.
Banksy’s Social media photography:
My recreation of Banksy’s photograph:
‘Revisioning Place’ by Govan was another influence to us ‘I can take any empty space and make a bare stage’ (Brooke 1972: 11) Peter brook once famously announced this in the beginning of his influential book The Empty Space. Brook was interested in performances that were beyond the conventions of the average performance on a proscenium arch Theatre stage and experimented with other performance sites. When reading the ‘Revisoning Place’ by Govan, it sparked some ideas
instantly, thinking about the possibilities that we could create for our performance, knowing we had the library as our site we wanted to key in on areas that we take for granted in the library.
The QR codes that I have created, whether it be a photograph, video or a voice recording are all personal. My life holds history up to now which the library does as it holds so many historical information and we are creating history by installing QR codes that will be infinite, like the library information. This can be related to Kaprow and his Fluids (1997) performance that was help in LA saw him building structures from ice in twenty sites around Los Angeles and leaving them to melt which audience members could come and watch the development over time and are free to interact with the performance, as an almost infinite performance until the ice completely melted. Our performance is a piece that audience members are free to come and discover whenever they pick up a book and find a QR code in them. When the performance time is over, our QR codes will infinitely stay in every book waiting to be scanned by the next person to pick up the books. When we sourced the books that connected to our personal media, we made the QR codes from a website that was free and simple to use however, it was very time consuming to make all twenty five pieces of media in QR form. The last tasks we needed to carry out was to source the books again to put the QR codes in and place back on the library shelves ready for the performance. We also printed out posters to guide the audience where to find the leaflets they needed and to make sure everything was set up and ready for the audience members to tour the library and discover. (http://www.qrstuff.com/)
Evaluation of QRious Performance
Evaluating our QRious performance is very hard because we do not know what all the audience thought of our performance as the audience members can be independent of when they would like to come to the QRious performance. Some friends and family have seen the performance and have spoken to us and told us that they enjoyed touring the library, almost like a treasure hunt for QR codes, and when you find it, you are treated with another piece of media that is personal to one of our group members life. We decided that the audience could have the period of four days starting from 10am on Wednesday 7th May to have the opportunity to come along to experience the performance of QRious. Audience members are not restricted to a number of people that can come and scan the QR codes, as they could share one smart phone or iPad to scan the QR codes and walk around as they wish. We chose not to count or limit the audience members as we wanted the experience to be at natural as using a library as possible, as using a library is a task in everyday life.
The only task for the group on the day was to prep the performance so it was ready and as organized as possible with making sure the QR codes were printed and ready, to cut and put into all the books which we sourced and found and then put back all before 10am. However this unfortunately did not happen because we did not expect the prepping for the performance to take three hours as we arrived at the library at 7.45am and the performance did not start until 12pm. If we could have the chance to improve and alter our performance then we would change the type of media we used to record and take photographs, instead of using an iPhone I would have a SLR camera, a good quality video recorder and audio recorder because the multi-media would be cleared and look more professional. I would also pay for Photoshop for editing all my media to a better standard then free editing websites such as Instagram and photo gallery editor on my laptop. We would have also laminated all of the posters and leaflets, after using a website like Vista Print to print the leaflets and posters professionally would also be something we could have done; all of this would have been carried out if we had a larger budget.
We are very grateful for technical runs, especially when our performance is all based on technology, we ran into a problem when fellow students were testing our site performance. This problem was that the QR codes were not actually being read on certain smart phones that were not iPhone’s. However, after researching why this might have been a problem it seemed to be that some QR codes were ‘static’ addresses instead of the ‘dynamic’ address on the website, which basically allows you to modify the address and will load up information on any type of smart phone. I feel that QR codes represent something about the library and the expansion of the library will continue to develop as it is a new system they can use more in the future. They can use QR codes in books to give more information or websites that relate to that particular book. This shows the contrast between developing the history of the library and the technology will keep developing in time. We wanted to represent the growth of technology in the library and, with the codes being in the book, it merges the old and the new in the library. They also allow a reader to pick up the books and consume information in ways a traditional text based book could not provide. Expansion and infinite are key words we have focused on throughout this process, we wanted to expand the knowledge found in a book for it to become infinite for anyone to see which is why our performance links to the site, therefore the information the QR codes hold will always be everlasting, just like the past of the library.
Work Cited
Blast Theory (2006) Can You See Me Now? [Blog entry] 3rd May. Available from http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/our-history-approach/ [Accessed 3rd May 2014].
Cardiff, J. Burges, M.(2012) Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. [Blog entry] 2nd May. Available from
http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/bahnhof.html[Accessed 2nd May 2014].
Kwon, M (2004) One Place after Another. Cambridge: MIT Press
Pavis, P (1998) Dictionary of the theatre: terms, concepts, and analysis. Toronto: University Of Toronto Press.