Messaging

A while back, I was on the thesis committee of a RISD grad student who was working with QR codes. I had never hever heard of them at the time, but was definitely intrigued, both by the technology and his work with it. I’m not sure what ever came of his projects, but I was pretty interested in seeing another take on using such codes in the context of consumer objects: A Parsons student named Julia Vallera converted chunks of her diary into the code, and printed it on a T-shirt. If you have, say, a mobile phone with the right technology, you can use it

to scan the barcode on the shirt. The scan will translate the barcode to reveal the profile of the person wearing the shirt. You can see the person’s age, name, interests, or whatever they chose as their profile.

All the QR codes used in this project are excerpts from my diary. I printed them on tee shirts and bags knowing they would be seen by hundreds of people. The idea of presenting something as private as a diary to the public in a code that requires specific technology to read is a contradiction. The message here is still private to a certain level, but presented in a very public way.

That’s from her explanation of the project, here. (She points to QR code generators here and here, and mentions this company, I guess in Milan, that does something similar, but I found their site too annoying to deal with.) According to her site, she’ll make you a QR code shirt, based your 250-word-max entry, for $20.

Personally, what interests me about this project (and that RISD student’s exploration of these codes) is that I think it kind of neatly encapsulates a lot of things about contemporary consumption in general these days. In an era of underground brands and so on, a lot of logos are becoming less like conspicuous symbols, and more like secret codes — exactly the kind of secret codes that the consumer wants to be asked about, in fact. Public/private, if you see what I mean. Using actual QR codes just makes the process more explicit.
Anyway, this was part of a Parsons class dealing with mobile phones and identity. Via Textually.