During the creative process of producing our site-specific piece, we struggled to find the boundary between performance and theatre. Understanding the difference was necessary in order to devise an effective site-specific performance. We began to think of our piece as a Happening. Exploring the notion that a happening is when “the performer merely carries out a task” (Sandford et all, 1995, 7) we began to consider a performative installation or process rather than a piece of theatre.

By using the form of a Happening as inspiration, we stripped our creative ideas down to the simplest ideas in order to create the feeling of a performative act rather than a performance. We took our desire to disrupt the flow of the high street literally and started to find a way to distract the audience (the public) from their rhythm of movement through the high street. We wanted the installation to be big enough and eye catching enough to make them look up and pay attention to the space around them for a moment, questioning the retail space of the high street. We also needed to fit the brief of using technology and liberate the audience and ourselves from something during the piece. We decided we wanted to liberate all involved from the superficial view of retail spaces that we all hold; that it is merely a space of consumerism designed for our own materialistic gain. Our aim to reinvent the meaning and purpose of the space using technology enabled us to reverse the use of QR codes, to create a wall installation of QR codes that ‘Question retail’.

Having explored Happenings, it has enabled us to see our piece as similar to one, in which “the choices are up to the performer, but he does not work to create anything. The creation was done by the artist when he formulated the idea of the action.” (Sandford et all, 1995, 8) Thus, our process of creating the QR codes on the day during the performance, will be the most important part of the creative process.

Sandford, M R. (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts. London: Routledge.

With the confirmation from the tenants of the building located on Speakers corner that we could perform there, we re-visited the site to take a list of the items we would need to make the piece possible. For example we wanted to document our process on the day and therefore we needed to consider getting a table, a printer and a device to research and print out the codes. Also, we needed to consider getting power and the weather. Although it would take place in May we needed to make sure we weather proofed our piece whilst also arranging a risk assessment. We then contacted the council to confirm that the far side of this building (non-glass) also had permission.

Meanwhile, we began dividing areas of research and clarifying our intentions for the piece.

My subject area is the history of the site, the historical incarnations of retail (previous ideas of high streets), the origins of the space and future visions of retail environments (one of which could be Lincoln) and how this impacts our perceptions of the space. By doing this and transforming the links in to QR codes, we will be liberating the audience from their superficial view of the street as a retail environment and adding a new dimension to their understanding. We will also be liberating the code itself, from it’s common purpose; for advertising.

By expanding our performance piece beyond Lincoln high street and to Urban spaces around the country, we will be reflecting the universality of QR codes and technology but also retail. This, in itself, responds effectively to Lincoln as our chosen urban space for a site-specific performance and questions the growing consumerism of our city spaces.

The content in our QR codes for our performance will take a number of different forms. I will research the history of the site and how that information can be juxtaposed with the site’s current use. However, at this stage I feel that simply giving the audience an audio tour or video tour of the history of the site would not be engaging enough and so I will be using the process to find information about the high street that will question its current use for retail purposes and bring in information about the people throughout the towns past. This will aim to open audience member’s eyes to the deeper dimensions of the high street that we pass through and ignore everyday.
My first step was to search for a timeline of the city on the internet and found a concised but informative summary of the past, available at http://www.localhistories.org/lincolntime.html which has helped me develop my own new perception of the high street and its past.
This has then inspired me to look further in to individual areas of the high street that had particular growths in industry or important events that caused the city to grow the way it has through out the years. My next step will also involve visiting the Library archives to find more specific research to include in our performance.

In order to develop content to store within the QR codes we started considering ways in which we will perform the codes. Firstly, we decided to use t-shirts with a printed code on each, exploring and questioning retail through an audio script and a video of the high street and the people that visit the space. However, being a member of a bigger group the impact and connection to the site and the audience was not as strong by dividing the content on t-shirts. Therefore we began considering a wider format to present our performance on whilst considering how the audience will access our piece. We took inspiration from Claire Blundell-Jones’ 2011 gallery installation described by her as, five weeks, 150 sheets of paper with the sentence ‘Crow didn’t know…’ 150 people finished these sentences which I then illustrated.” (Blundell-Jones, 2011) This use of a durational performance involving the audience and taking the stimulus of paper we began considering creating an art installation in which our process of creating the art will be the performative aspect of our piece.
We referred once again to Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities, this time developing upon his twenty first instruction of wallpapering a car park. In order to reverse the negatives perceptions we have of a concrete, decrepit car park, the wallpaper covers that initial view of the building and gives it an alternative meaning, wrapped up like a gift for the visitors using it. Therefore we developed an idea reflecting this.

We aim to take an abandoned shop in the centre of the market square in Lincoln’s high street and cover it in paper. Each piece of paper would have a QR code on it that would hold the key to information that we feel is relevant in furthering our understanding of the high street space and which continues to question retail in both a personal and political way. For example a number of the QR codes will depict the process of us creating the installation in order to contrast with and question how, within the retail industry, the process the products on the shelves have gone through to arrive in our shops is often hidden from view. Other QR codes will direct the reader to research found during our process exploring the ethical, controversial process in which some products are made for example in sweat shops in lower economically developed countries. Taking care we are not bias towards or against a certain view of the high street we want to provide the audience member with a deeper view of the high street around them in order to take them out of their day to day, surface level interaction with the space. On a wider scale we are also transforming the physical buildings within our space by covering a retail building (that is privately owned) with codes that are normally associated with advertising, yet we will be rejecting this common perception as we will not be using them for advertising purposes. Also by performing in a space that is extremely public we will invite people to follow our performance by scanning the codes during the live process rejecting the spaces’ usual activity of strangers passing one another daily without interaction.

Blundell-Jones, C (2011) The crow that didn’t know, installation. Claire Blundell Jones. [online] available from: http://www.claireblundelljones.co.uk/archipelago.html [accessed on 10th March 2015]

Lavery, C (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25 (3) 229-236

The term QR code stands for a “Quick Response code: a code consisting of a pattern of black and white squares which can be read by a mobile device or computer. QR codes are used to provide further information about something” (Macmillan Dictionary, 2009)

Taking this definition further we started stripping our idea down to the basics by starting to create a working title for our piece. We decided that the elements of the site we wanted to focus on as part of our performance was the commercialisation  of the urban space and the people that use the site and the present day usage of the site, as a retail strip.

Ideas such as Quiet Reflection and Quantifying Reality came in to discussion in order to spark ideas of breaking the flow of the busy street in order to make people reflect on their own habits towards spending money and the monetary value we place on our lives.
However, we began to narrow our title further and decided upon Questioning Retail a much more specific title for us to work from. Moving away from the theme of pervasive media, we started designing other aspects of our performance. As we wanted to have a great impact on the high street for our performance we decided it would be a durational performance (lasting longer than 3 hours) and so we listed words that we associated with the high street such as busy, repetitive, cattle, ignorance, money and dehumanised. This made us very aware of how we were viewing the high street but also what we wanted to develop further within our development process. For example the idea of viewing the visitors to the high street as cattle really made us open our eyes to how other people perceive the high street. A retail space is usually advertised as a positive one and yet there are numerous cases of money being lost or wasted on material things whilst people are herded along the street through the crowds. These negative experiences we witnessed from standing in the space and viewing the people as cattle, made us ‘question retail’ ourselves.

Macmillan Dictionary (2009) QR Codes. [online] Available from: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/qr-code [Accessed on 8th March 2015]