Author: 
First Impressions and Exploration.
“I declare that the library is endless.” (Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions.
Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3)
After being allocated to the library, a place of almost infinite knowledge and Personal interest as well as having a rich History as the Great Central Warehouse, I knew that research would be first on my agenda. In my quest to know everything there is to know about the library my first stop was, predictably, the library. I spent hours wandering between the shelves, becoming immersed in the book titles, until I began to read them out of context, I was looking at the words as if they were floating in space and not part of the library, noticing that many of them were senseless, or even offensive when taken away from their paper counterparts.
I was particularly caught on a book called White over Black to have these words written in the side of a book is acceptable, but imagine them written across a building, or on a bathroom wall and suddenly the meaning changes. Context was one of the first ideas that hit me and I spent a few days playing with the context of signs around the building and created my own map of the Library using the floor plans but naming the rooms myself. Context took precedence in this exercise, fire doors became gates of hell and the staff room was a place for wizards to store their armaments.
Continuing with exercises to gather as much as I could from the library, I next found a spot on each floor one after the other and sat for half an hour. Splitting that time into ten minute sections where I did the following:
Write down everything I think
Write down everything I hear
Draw everything in my field of view
This was a very interesting exercise in collecting short pieces of writing in raw form about a short, personal experience in the library. Putting the sections together and seeing how they intertwine or sit completely apart helped me to form some interesting ideas regarding live art within the Library. At this early stage I was contemplating heavily the idea of placing cameras with live feeds to televisions around the library, forcing anyone who enters the building to take part in this kind of exercise without them knowing. Possibly formulating a final edited video of several people’s entire library experiences, but this soon became an idea for future pieces as the group formed and our joint efforts took us in a different direction.
The Group and Initial Ideas
We first traded all our gathered research and exploration so we could find where our impressions so far overlapped, thus helping us figure out where to move forward. We had all by this point read about several other pieces to influence our progress. We all mentioned The Surveillance Camera Players, who perform short plays in front of CCTV cameras, in a pro-privacy protest to show “CCTV as unable to offer any useful social function but to violate human rights.” (Govan, E. Nicholson, H. Normington, K. (2007) Making A Performance. Routledge) This was a particularly interesting piece because there are many cameras throughout the entire library, most of which I had never even noticed. We discussed the possibility of using the cameras and live camera feeds which I had been exploring the week previous.
Another key stimulus we found Cardiff and Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) I found the idea of merging two realities through everyday handheld technology fascinating, the way the real world and the pre-recording become one and catch you off guard when the camera moves and people seem to disappear. Instantly I knew that mobile phones and video technology had to be included in this piece.
After a visit to the Lincoln Archives, learning about the history of the building and surrounding area, I was certain that I didn’t want to go any further this way. While the past was good grounding for several early ideas, I was more focused on bringing the books and the library into the future. The group agreed that the past of the building wouldn’t be our focus and from this and we set to work learning about the technology involved in running the Library. This brought our attention to the numerical ordering system of the Library Catalogue, which was the base of our piece.
All the world, in a few little codes
With the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) Still in our minds we put together the two main ideas we had struck, and we planned to have a barcode inside a book in the library which would take you on a tour around the library, taking you to places we would be performing or have installations. Merging the two realities into one. The barcode was the first thing to be cut as they were difficult to make however Ivor lead us to QR codes, easy, free and infinite to make, eventually.
There was a meeting the following week to pitch our ideas to people who could authorise them and also a chance to get feedback. The feedback turned our group upside down, the material we had was vague at best and we realised that we were taking on too much at once so the piece changed and we were now creating a group total of one hundred QR codes, twenty five each, to be placed into books and each leading to a different piece of material, relating to both the book and ourselves. An Interactive Promenade Performance.
QR codes are my worst enemy at this point. Ivor is the only one who understands fully how to use them so we are making the material for him to make the QR codes for. We soon realise that we don’t have the time to continue making them this way so we searched the internet for help and immediately found the website, www.qrstuff.com that will generate a code leading to just about any online material you can create, pictures, videos, pieces of text, websites etc the infinite amount of knowledge held within the libraries books are about to be expanded by a few little codes stuck in their pages, a fantastic opportunity for any artist.
We went our separate ways for a few days as a group to work through the list of books we would use and start to plan what was to hide behind our codes. I started by making simple video and picture link codes and realised I was making them in about 3 minutes, meaning I could focus my time on making the content of the links which was what I was hoping for. We met as a group and looked through the material we had each already made, what we had planned, suggestions for where to find inspiration next and planned when our next meeting would be and what we were hoping to achieve by then.
Reconnecting with the Site
After spending almost a whole week getting to grips with QR codes and attempting to realise their full potential, it was time to get back to the centre point of our piece, the library and its many books. I spent many hours over a week finding and flicking through the twenty five books that will house my codes, all books that have some personal resonance to me; A book about sign language, relating to my father who is deaf and Life Of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, my favourite play, to name a few examples.
For many of the books it was simple to decide what was to go in them, I followed my instincts for many of them as I wanted my code to be a representation of how I feel about a book when judging by its cover. I read a lot from the books on my list to improve the quality of my work but my base idea was always set before I opened the book. The code within the Sign Language book was a slideshow of me signing out the alphabet, as when I saw the book on the shelf, it was the first thing I thought about. The ideas were influenced by and created within the library but each book became its own site.
…And Beyond
Since the beginning we have been constantly reminding ourselves in the library being infinite. It isn’t, it’s simply too immense for us to comprehend so we label it infinite. There is more information there on each topic than most could learn in a lifetime and I planned to expand infinity. An Idea I was set thinking about from reading Borges The Library Of Babel which opens with “The universe (which others call the Library)” (Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3) Much like the universe any library is an infinite but always expanding collection of knowledge and stories. This was stimulus for many of my QR ideas; I wanted to be part of the expansion, leading me to create my QR for How To Succeed In Business Without A Penis. I wanted this QR to offer an alternative source of information, so I scoured every modern student saving grace, Google, until I came across a list of the 50 most powerful women in business. I linked the code directly to this, making the point; if you want to succeed in business, genitals will not stop you if you truly want to succeed. Along this route of being beyond infinity I made my QR for Legacy link to a story posted online from a survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So anyone using this book for research into Chernobyl can read the code and be lead onto a new source of information, of course still relating to me as this was a story I had read a while before and found fascinating.
Error 404: Page not found
A performance that hinges upon technology and online material was destined to run into technical difficulties, most came and went without a problem, but “error 404: Page not found” nearly brought the whole piece crashing to the ground. Nine days before the codes were to go into the books every one of my codes had this issue, thankfully I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting and fixing computers due to my Previous I.T training at AS and GCSE, as well as being the family technology buff. I spent hours trying to find the error, even reading through the http script trying to find where it was stuck and nothing. The next day I was about to start remaking all the codes from scratch, a laborious task which, thankfully, I managed to avoid, I tried one of the old codes one last time and, as is the way with technology sometimes, it worked perfectly, as did all the rest. I presumed this to be an issue with the servers that link the codes to the URLs although truthfully the cause was unknown. The important thing was my codes all worked again although there was always the worry after this that we could put 100 fantastic little pieces all over the library that all linked to “error 404: Page not found” and we would be forced to postpone our grand unveiling. I had no further issues with QR codes after this, however, like an artist with an eternally unfinished painting I kept editing and changing material within the codes and the only way to do that is make a fresh code, by the date of performance I had near 100 QRs myself and choosing which ones to use proved harder in the end than making them.
Evaluation
If I see another QR code I’m going to… Scan it. I have discovered something I simply adore through working on this Site Specific piece, QR codes are so simple to make, rarely have technical problems that don’t fix themselves and can be linked to do just about anything. You can even set a code to send a text from the phone it’s scanned with. I am certain I will be including them in future work and will be experimenting in my free time to hopefully achieve their full potential. What we as a group produced in the end was something I found very exciting, we had done what we set out to do, expand the infinite and insert snippets of our own lives into the library.
Personally I was very pleased with every QR I had made and was excited to get feedback from people who had come and found my work. Feedback was almost entirely positive with the only negative feedback being out of my control, codes not working straight away or books not being in their proper places, which is the nature of the Site and part of the performance, the QR codes were not made to be in the books for a day and then gone, they are there forever now. I felt that reserving the books so they would all be there from day one was to cheat the Site, the Library is a working living space and to have denied students those books for my QRs would have been against what I believe Site Specific work to be about. It’s crucial to me that the Site be compromised as little as possible as the first instance of me changing it to fit my needs it becomes a theatre. One of the most interesting things about this piece for me is the way the audience became the performers. As they stood in the library scanning the codes and not knowing what to expect, people would watch them, wondering why they are holding their phones up to the books and suddenly a fresh performance is created, irrelevant of what is in the codes, the act of finding scanning and watching them becomes a performance in itself as “a distinction is drawn between the watchers and the watched.” (M. Pearson. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. p157) This was another reason for me to not want to compromise the site at all by setting it for performance as a key purpose was to create this watcher and the watched with the audience, I wanted them to search for the books and possibly need to ask for help should they not know how the ordering system works, possibly increasing audience members as whoever helps them may wait to see what they are so desperate to find.
Were I to do this again I would have the practice and time to make all the QR codes myself from scratch rather than trust a website to generate them for me, as there is much less chance of running into server problems and I could claim all credit for the technical work.
I had thought about making the QRs more interesting themselves as you can change colours and make patterns from them etc which would be interesting to experiment with but personally I prefer the simplicity of them. The plain mask helps build the anticipation for whatever you are to be lead to.
As a group I feel we worked together well, there were times when we struggled to communicate properly as tensions were high towards the end and several deadlines and performances all at once got the better of us but we always came together and talked through issues in a professional way. I enjoyed spending time with my colleagues as people and was proud to work with them as an artist and together we made something we are all very proud to leave for people to find for years to come.
Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3
Cardiff. Miller. Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012)
M. Pearson. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan. New York
Govan, E. Nicholson, H. Normington, K. (2007) Making A Performance. Routledge