After much debate and consideration our group have finally settled on an idea for our site-specific performance. We are going to complete a durational piece, in the high street we will construct an installation and take it down on the same day. We intend to cover the now empty Phoenix Health Centre building with pages upon pages of QR codes. What will be interesting and innovative about this is that we will be printing off the codes in the high street too; the audience can witness us producing the pages and see us putting them up.

This idea of seeing the production, I think, links quite well to the high street. As a society we are rarely privy to the way things are made we just see the finished product, there for purchase. It’s not something we think about, so by putting the production in front of an audience it questions our perceptions.

From the beginning we wanted to use QR codes, we liked the idea that though they are used for advertisement in the high street, we could then contort that and make it something completely different. This links to our groups title of Questioning Retail (which is a twist on what QR really means). The codes we will be putting up will be one of five themes: environmental, activism, histories, social interactions and the process itself. This will give our piece some substance and depth.

Because we are using a relatively new form of pervasive media there is very little precedence. This is both a blessing and a curse. It gives us no restrictions and more room for ideas, however it is difficult to narrow that thought process as we don’t know what works and what doesn’t. There is, however, precedence of installations that may help us in our piece. Claire Blundell is one example of a performer who has used installations. One of her pieces, entitled Fences, is similar to ours in that she used the exterior of locations to put up her work.

This is one of the fences that Blundell fashioned.

Her concept was “Each fence represents the communities that co-exist in the Wick area: residencial, industrial and the new regenerational Olympics.” So here we can see that the use of installations can be very effective because they are so very overt, a passer-by can’t help but notice. If we get one person to pause in the street to wonder what we mean with all our QR codes. If we get them to break out of their consumerist  lives for just one moment I will consider our piece a success.

Blundell, C. (2009).Fences.Available:http://www.claireblundelljones.co.uk/teaching.html. Last accessed 13th Mar 2015.