After considering the licensing needed for a turfed area in the council owned high street we decided to develop a previous idea with a heavier use of technology to reflect upon pervasive media. The use of QR codes in our performance would be more interactive for the audience but also would directly relate to our brief on exploring pervasive media but also the theme of liberation

Building upon our idea of using QR coding in our performance we began discussing what QR codes are commonly used for. Marketing techniques use QR codes for commercial and on-line advertising to spread their product across a different platform other than one dimensional paper advertising. Therefore, our site the high street is the perfect space for QR advertising to take place. It is a highly commercial space filled with advertising material and the handing over of money, things that a QR code is commonly associated with. Therefore we wanted to warp the common use of a QR code by advertising the code on t-shirts, but having the content be unrelated to the commercial industry.

After reading “Wandering and wondering” where Gorman describes her experience of being on an audio tour titled ‘Missing Voice’ in an area of London, we wanted to disrupt the audience’s view of the space by reducing the high street to just another collective urban space in a world greater and in need of more than a street of shops. Gorman writes “During my own experience of doing the ‘Missing Voice’ walk I felt that a certain sense of complacency about the nature of the urban street had been destabilized. My perceptions of the street activity, the sounds around me and my sense of belonging in that environment were heightened.”(Gorman, 2003, 168) Gorman experienced a change of perception toward the significance of the commercial space during the audio tour and the ‘sense of belonging’ that she found suggests she began to have a deeper more human experience of the site where the people in the environment confirmed to her the sense that “life must go on”(Gorman, 2003, 168).

We wanted to achieve something similar by putting audio content in our QR codes that removed the listener from the space completely, reducing its importance.

Gorman, S. (2003) Wandering and Wondering. Performance Research. 8 (1) 167-178