QueRy This

From WRTwiki

Rhizome Application 2006-2007 here

Contents 1 Summary 2 Concept 3 Project Description 3.1 The Set Up 3.2 The Story 3.3 Encoding the Story: The Transformation 3.4 Distributing the Story on QR-Encoded Stickers 3.4.1 Managing the collection of pieces: The Player's Journey 3.4.1.1 Possibilities for discovering the work 3.4.1.2 Playing with the QR 3.4.1.3 Decoding the QR 3.4.1.4 Enter Text 4 Timeline 5 Budget 5.1 Needs 6 Artists 6.1 Jeremy Douglass 6.2 Mark Marino 6.3 Christy Dena 7 Previous Projects

Summary

QueRy is a viral distributed art project that uses coded messages to call forth a community of shared literacy.

QueRy is a net artwork that uses QR codes (2D barcode patterns) to embed textual messages in an "unreadable" digital form. In the traditions of both viral marketing and graffiti / sticker art, readers discover the striking QR code fragments on websites or on street corners, and decode the images using the decoding website, through software-enabled cameraphones, or by uploading photos of the image to a decoding website. While all QR codes work in this way, QueRy codes embed paragraphs of prose in a format that doubles as an ASCII image. Individual images can be assembled to form a larger work (a complete short story) and a larger image (a map).

Our first work with QueRy is "QueRy: The Gold Bug," a participatory net artwork that plays with the idea of unreadable digital text and encoding, and riffs on the emerging phenomenon of Locative Arts and Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). We take the public domain work "The Gold Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe (a treasure hunt story featuring the step-by-step breaking of a cryptographic message) and embed it in QR codes of a series of simple maps. Any reader who encounters a QR-encoded fragment brings it to the site to decode it and may upload it to the site *along with a photo of it as it was found* in order to get a "bug." The reader-contributed photos form the background of the total map as it develops, and each reader is recorded as a collaborator in the finished artwork map - a "gold bug," after which the map is archived and the process restarts for new readers.

For a complete description of QR Code and our process see: http://wrt.ucr.edu/query/poe/

Concept

We are tired of being used by viral marketers. We are tired of being tracked by unseen codes. We are tired of coporations talking behind our backs in patterns of lines that we cannot decypher. QueRy is our response.

While traversing space (cyber or physical), the citizen of the networld encounters messages she can read while others circulate just under beyond reach. It is this second set of messages that controls her life and dogs her steps. These codes trace her movement and communicate her position. Author of Control Freedom, Wendy Chun explains the illusory control of the interactor on the Internet:

Browsing the Web and reading a "page" focuses attention on the text and the images pulsing from the screen, rather than on the ways in which you are coded and cirucalted numerically, invisibly, nonvolitionally.

In our online selves, we perceive our roles as super readers, those who call a page into being with our browser, but as in the rest of information culture, we have already been tagged and tracked like so many migrating dolphins. Certainly on and off the Web, the citizen is never unwatched, as the recent Bush administration wire-tapping and search-engine subpoenaing have proven.

The unreadable codes in culture and commerce form seize upon every purchase and her transaction. Our lives are being written in barcodes, time-stamps, and all that wonderful information on the magnetic strips we swipe through scanners. More than ever before, we have become processable numbers, known not by name byt by National ID, driver's licence, Social Security numbers, and IP address. Supermarket clubs and governments give us incentives and dicentives for using these. If we leave our number, they give us a coupon. If we register our product, they will let us know if it is recalled.

How can we as artists respond to these codes? We can take them and transform them.

Our project will reflect and critique this system by creating a series of encoded texts, which when translated through the help of a networked community, will lead to more information.

Literacy gives one means of power over the these codes. Often that literacy comes incrementally and with the help of a social network of information, a community who can enable the process of literacy. Here our project is analogous to some of the goals of the Web 2.0.

Every marketer and major corporation is trying to harvest some work from these interactors by making them carriers of product information. This project reappropriates this viral marketting for the purposes of building a netork of decoders.

Project Description

The Set Up

Essentailly, the project is a treasure hunt that plays on a motif of collaborative decoding. Participants will track down the stickers, decode them, and then together with other participants, find and decode more. The project throws participants into an ergodic reading encounter in which they are confronted with issues of the many "unreadable signs" around us as well as the networks we form to crack their codes.

The project involves three phases:

1. Encoding the Story
2. Distributing the Story on QR-encoded stickers
3. Managing the collection of the pieces

The Story

Edgar Allan Poe's cryptological tale of a treasure hunt serves as our base text. Poe's tale links the process of interpretation with the process of decoding. His protagonist becomes literate in the realm of codes in order to recover the treasure.

However, Poe's demonstration of his trademark "ratiocination" places the entire decoding process in the genius of one person. In the spirit of the Web 2.0 and distributed intelligence, we are encoding our story for the collaborations of code-breakers (as seen below). In this way, QueRy will encourage the formation of new social networks in the pursuit of mastery of these mysterious codes.

Encoding the Story: The Transformation

(For more on this process: see our documentation: For a complete description of QR Code and our process see: http://wrt.ucr.edu/query/poe/

The transformation of the story involves 2 processes

1. Encoding the story in ASCII ART: The text of the story will be converted through an ASCII art translator into a map, which will indicate the "final destination" of the hunt.
2. Encoding the ASCII ART into QR code: The ASCII ART map will be divided up into panels which will each be converted into individual QR blocks.

Here is a sample image in which the text of Poe's tale has been translated into a rudimentary map of Paris with the words "Louvre" and "Beneath the Glass Pyramid" written as a legend. Of course, this will not be the actual map (since we hope Rhizome reviewers will join the game). However it does demonstrate the basic method of transforming the text of the tale into an image.

Note: We will ensure that the actual location (unlike this sample) is one that is accessible to the public beyond the Knights Templar.

Distributing the Story on QR-Encoded Stickers

Once the QR blocks have been produced, they will be printed on stickers and distributed across the globe. Only a portion of the blocks will be distributed, so others will be reserved for those who participate by finding and uploading their clues. Some of the first set of stickers will also be "hidden" on the Web for those who do not have access to the geographic locations of the first set of stickers.

Managing the collection of pieces: The Player's Journey

Goal: To form a social network to collect all the pieces of the tale and find the "treasure"

Process: Level 1:

• Participant A discovers a QR code in the real world or online
• Participant A brings it to the site after (or before) to decode it
• Participant A puts the picture into our decoder and receives ASCII

Now, the site asks, "Where did you find this? Do you have a photo of it? Can you get one?" Most people will have the photo (cameraphone, etc.)-- and some won't, but can go get it. Participant A now uploads the photo. (Now we have the map frag and a streetcorner photo with the QR code on it.)

Reward: A bug, another QR code with another portion of the tale.

New Challenge: "You and x could team up to find the silver bug."

Level 2:

• Participant A contacts Participant X who also got a bug
• These players post their bug somewhere.
• The two take pictures of their bugs posted somewhere and then both upload their photos with the translation and the site replies, "Great! you and x get a silver bug!

Reward: A new bug.

New Challenge: "A and X, get in touch with Y and Z to find The Platinum Bug!"

Level 3:

When the four of you get together and upload four pictures then the 12 pics you've taken total

form part of the map.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat:

• The cycles continue until the entire map is complete. The map becomes a page in our project - code on the foreground, photos on the background and the image: a giant bug (i.e. the fabled gold bug).

The game runs over and over - anyone can join anytime, and the more people play, the more people find them. QRcode "bugs" get left lying around as a byproduct of the activity

Possibilities for discovering the work

Street: A person is walking down they street and sees a strange QR sticker on a pole

Web: A person finds the website www.whateveristheurl.org and then goes to a site where a sticker is listed as being

Postcard: A person receives a postcard in the mail with the QR code on it

Playing with the QR

Street: The person in the street sees that the sticker has a website on it, they note it, or take of photo of it and go home to check it out, they then discover that it is a code and either uploads it to convert right then or goes back and takes a photo and decodes it, perhaps with the software they no have from the website;

Web: The person takes a photo of the sticker with the software they downloaded from the website and decodes the message;

Postcard: The person goes to the website listed on the postcard and is prompted to find the clue in the QR, takes a photo of the postcard and uploads it to our site for decoding

Decoding the QR

Street: The person in the street has decoded the message, it is in a text message on their phone. It says: POE fragment? /and/or/ You are need to submit this text at URL

Web: The person gets the text message and is prompted to go the website and enter in the text they have to get to the next stage.

Post: They then copy & paste that text into the prompt on the website and that gives them access to the next level. Now they must send the clue to someone else who can then help them access more pieces (more bugs) somewhere in meat or cyberspace.

Enter Text

Each enters the text and this gets them to the next level, deeper.

The game recalls the position of John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind":

Though visual hallucinations do not suggest schizophrenia but indicate other acute and toxic illnesses, the cinematic device provides a vivid and useful experience. These imaginary playmates, which are what they most resemble, turn nasty. They join forces with an imaginary CIA agent (Ed Harris) who enlists Nash's aid to decode Soviet messages hidden in such periodicals as Time and Life. Instead of communicating with aliens, the fictional Nash is crazed but patriotically fighting the Cold War. Delusions and hallucination, like ideas of reference, put the self at the center of the world. This is perhaps the greatest mischief in Akiva Goldsman's fictionalization. He has eliminated the driven egocentricity—the drama of the self; Crowe's fictional paranoia is an altruism gone berserk.

From this site: http://bostonreview.net/BR27.2/stone.html

The total text then creates a map, the text of the Manifesto is in a container of some kind. People need to fill it up with text to see the map emerge. The map has longitudes & latitudes in different areas, payoffs for different stages, that are to locations in different locations. When figured out the person/people go to the site (ala The Masquerade), and get the prize. But then they only get the prize and the others who didn’t turn up but contributed didn’t.

Timeline

Timeline: 6 months

• month 1: Software development/QR translation
• month 2: QA Software; physical production of stickers.
• month 3: Disseminate stickers
• month 4: Disseminate stickers
• month 5: Respond to inquiries; Finish Documentation; Compose report

Budget

• URL Registration: $15
• Hosting for Site: $27
• QR code SDK: $300
• Sticker production: $125
• Sticker distribution: $400

Labor:

• Douglass: $250
• Dena: $250
• Marino: $250

Needs

The site needs to have:

• MySQL/PHP
• Image Magick (free)
• at least 100MB account, expandable
• file upload enabled

We will also install:

• Custom scripts for image processing
• Forum software (free, such as phpBB)
• QR encoder and decoder software (encoder free, decoder SDK not yet priced)
• Software that allows people to add text that is hyperlinked back to the originator (whole text hyperlinked)
• Banner, with, “I’m Decoding the Illusion” or “I’ve been plagarised, Join in!” or something.
• Links to QR converter software to upload to phones;

Artists

Jeremy Douglass

Jeremy Douglass is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB profile). His research focuses on interactive fiction and reader response to textual new media. Jeremy is also a database and web developer for numerous projects, including the academic search engine Voice of the Shuttle. Contact: jdouglass@umail.ucsb.edu

Mark Marino

Mark C. Marino is a Ph.D. from UC Riverside, who creates and analyzes chatbots, electronic literature, net.art, games, and other doodads. He is editor of Bunk Magazine, an online humor magazine, which specializes in satirical hacktavism and mash-ups. He began his work in literary hypertext, studying under George Landow at Brown. Since then, he earned an MFA from Notre Dame and an MA at Loyola Marymount University. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California. He is co-editor of Writer Response Theory.

Christy Dena

Christy Dena is a cross-media practitioner, mentor and researcher. She creates cross-media stories that are distributed over print and the web. She is studying for a PhD in cross-media entertainment at the University of Sydney, Australia. She mentors film and television practitioners at the Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, Australia Film, Television and Radio School. She lectures and tutors in new media arts theory, game design and media studies at Universities. She is co-editor of www.WriterResponseTheory.org and manages her own research blog www.Cross-MediaEntertainment.com.

Previous Projects

• Benchmark Fiction: A series of translations of "The Lady, or The tiger" by Frank Stockton using a variety of web applications.

• Grand Thieves Audio Modologues: A series of .mp3s for use in hijacking the audio of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The monologues reappropriate the game space, turning the trope of carjacking back on the system itself.

• 'The Villager Girl and the Teenbot': a cross-media story distributed over print and a conversational agent on the web. Written by Christy Dena, it has a print component that will be published in the Talk Fiction Anthology mid 2006, the online component is online at: www.WhatHappensNext.org. It was selected for discussion on the panel ‘Original Hypermedia, Net.Art, Mods, Flash’ at the disjunctions 2005: Theory Reloaded conference, University of California, Riverside.

• 'Coma Clown' is a short story written by Christy Dena for print. It won 2nd prize for Prose in the University of Melbourne Creative Writing Competition in late 2005, was included in the printed anthology, Muse, & selected for reading at the launch.

• Christy Dena also creates mini Alternate Reality Games for film & TV industry events. Online documentation.