The Arts Supports You
The Arts Supports You is a project thought up by some fellow students and I at the University of Windsor. The project aims to occupy certain spaces for a period of time in which we hold an oversized QR scanning code for passers by (or people situated in the space) to scan. One of the places in which this was done was in the seating at a Windsor women’s hockey game, and the other (not pictured), being in front the University of Windsor School of Music building, facing the intersection of Sunset Avenue, and Wyandotte.
The set up was rather simple: We projected the QR onto some foam core, and taped off the white areas, painting over all the exposed parts. We created our own personalized handles on the backsides, and attached each panel with velcro so that the whole 8 pieces cold fold into one, and unfold into a large piece.
The QR code takes you to a link that has a nice little image depicting the message, and a link to a facebook page that explains the project in more detail.
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I was wondering about the context of this project and I kept forgetting to ask Jessica. Pretty neat, Kevin!
Hey Rosina,
Originally we thought of the project because we were tasked to think of an assignment/art project where we would be utilizing old and new medias. We thought that the communication that signage gives is a pretty old media with quite a heavy baggage of history, and that utilizing a new media like a QR scan code went well together.
We thought that we could present a message to a crowd and someone brought up that there was a women’s hockey game coming up. The message we came up with seemed to fit the bill well as far as political, and just all around friendly statements go.
Nice to see this posted, Kevin. Any thoughts on making it public?
will do sir!
The arts support… the 32.8% of Canadians (as of March 2011) with smartphones?
If you could have just as easily printed/painted the actual graphic onto the banner, what “message” can somebody possibly take from this other than “We hold that the arts support an exclusive in-group (of which we, the banner-holders are members), and we can’t be bothered to so much as let the remaining 67.2% of you, our purported audience, know the extent to which you’re not included”? I saw Mike post the photos weeks ago, and only just now got let in on the “actual” content of the work—it was annoying not to know what I was allegedly meant to read, but, knowing now, I’m actually just straight-up offended.
QR codes are neat or whatever, but it really doesn’t seem like you guys thought through how they would work as a medium for this particular message. If the 32.8% you were targeting with the intervention was a random selection of the population, the whole thing would have been simply misguided; when that 32.8% is defined by considerable privilege, both in terms of income and access to (in this country, anyway) a predominantly urban telecommunications infrastructure, it becomes terribly mean-spirited.
Also, I apologize for being such a colossal grouch.
Excellent work sir Kevin.
I think the issues brought up by Steven are important to address. Though the context of the project is a class assignment that needs to include a “new” technology. The work acts as a kind of experiment in communication. For many people who engage with an online world almost as much as “real” life, a kind of virtual gesture like this might hold a kind of affection that is somewhat rare in the often “cold” digital world.
nice to see BCL doing something in Windsor again, seems you guys have been all over Canada lately!