By way of illustrating my chosen method, consider for a moment Jonathan Weiss’ adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. Warning: contains some strong content. Warning: NSFW.
The Atrocity Exhibition
////Curious about QR codes- ‘QRious’
//The main focus on QR codes came from the influence of the Library using barcodes within there system. With further analysis of the library system we noticed that the library has also tried to incorporate QR codes into there system. This then led to a discussion about the possibility of us as a group using QR codes. Therefore it was our curiosity for QR codes, which is what the name QRious came out of. We also delved into other ways QR codes are being used in today’s society. The company ‘Apple’ use QR codes quite a lot in there advertisement of there products. QR’s are also used a lot for promoting either nightclubs or offers related to retail. It is clear that QR codes are becoming more popular in today’s society as a use of technology within advertisement and delivering information, so we thought… why can’t we take this and use QR’s to create a performance? This is what we did which led to our final performance of QRious.
Thinking about our audience.
//Site Specific Performance written by Mike Pearson is very influential in helping to start our development process. The key points I picked up from this reading was to think outside the box, that with Site you could take risks. As a new field of Drama and performance for me to be a part of, I have learnt that my project is a to be a live art so we will not be acting but doing. As a reading the book provides a basis to devlop an appreciation for Site Speciic work to explore further.
‘Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves as ‘audience’ as a collective with common attributes. All three sets of relationships performer/performer, performer/spectator, sepctator/spectaor, become part of an active matrix of interaction and available for negociation:momentary and durable, individual and collective.’ (Pearson, p.175) Our perfomance space will be in the University Library Freezone so thinking about this space as a live art instalation will be the way forward for our piece.
Freezone University of Lincoln Library Mar ch 2014
‘Site specific performance can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remembering and forming a community for at least two reasons. First its Location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to eveole specific past times related to the place and a time of performance and fascilitating a negociation between the meaning of those times. A memory is invested in and stimulated by sites’ (Harvie, 2005, p.44)
Harvie, J. (2005) Staging the UK (Manchester :Manchester University Press)
Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance (King’s Lynn, UK: Palgrave Macmillan)
Influences and Inspiration.
//As a group we looked into certain practitioners such as, Blast Theory, Duncan Speaksman, Lone Twin and Forced Entertainment. These are all practitioners who produce Site Specific pieces of work. However they all relate to our final Idea of basing a whole performance around QR codes. For example Blast Theory have the ethos,
‘ Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.’ (Blast Theory, 2014)
We connect with this ethos as a group as we want to challenge ourselves with producing a technically focused interactive piece of work, which focuses on QR codes. We are also inspired by Duncan Speaksman as his ethos is about bringing an audience together, connecting people through a performance, this could be an element to our idea, as we have the idea to have no restrictions on how many people view one piece of material at a time. However with Forced Entertainment they inspired through there ethos of,
‘Forced Entertainment, like many other contemporary devising companies, directly engages with site and the issue of social space-making within everyday life’
(E, Govan, H, Nicholson, K, Normington, 2007, p122)
This being a relevant quote to our work as the Library already had its every day to day use so we intend to work with this.
A Developing Idea
//The development of our performance is transforming everyday…
Our group have many ideas, yet we are struggling to create an idea that links together and that links to our site. We know and have agreed as a group that we want 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.
However, this idea has needs to be altered due to having too many ideas that did not link together which are too complex. One idea of ours that we like is to somehow use a barcode or QR code scanning system when entering the library performance, we wanted the performance to be as similar as using a library as possible, we also like to idea to create our own version of the Find it at Lincoln system however this may be difficult!
Our group received some constructive 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 decide that we want our performance to be based all on QR codes. This idea was just going to be part of our performance, rather than basing it all on the performance however we would like to develop it further, and see if we can work out how to create QR codes and research into them more, if this is possible, we may be have a concept for our final performance, our first ideas could then be used through the QR codes through multi-media technology for example, video recordings, audio recordings and photographs!
I’m hoping for our group that we can manage to create QR codes successfully by finding a good website, if this happens I feel that we will be able to start creating and testing our performance.