And what’s wrong with rainbow weavies?!?! *grin*

Code resolves to www.greenwire.nl.

Via @bruces ‘s Flickrstream.

I’m lying on the gum-specked pavement, ignoring the other people reaching into their pockets after smart phones for their own un-trusting reasons. From here I see strange markings. Calling them hieroglyphics is granting them too much signifier, as graphemes clearly look like things, and what these most resemble are splashes of paint. In fact, they are splashes of paint. Orbits of drips, scattered across the pavement like interstellar dust caught in the filaments of micro-gravity embossed into the fabric of space-time. Scribbles of silver paint marker, visibly more steady-handed and intentional than the markings in a toddler’s coloring book, but their meaning no less obscure. Postal Service Priority labels re-purposed into personal branding stickers, marking phone booths, newspaper boxes, and other paleo-infrastructural fixtures in a dense, overlapping network of clots fixed from past decades’ own obsolete life-blood. Scrapings of keys or other metal blades into plexiglass rain barriers; photographs of electron orbits around the molecular statements of anonymous graffiti artists. “Graffiti artist” may not be a controversial term anymore, but applying the phrase to any and every defacement of public space does not necessarily follow. And yet, I’m seeing the larger code again, and the streets are looking better. *

TMI:

You have a dozen lovers names tattooed on your bicep. And every piece of art has its own billboard to alert you of its existence. How many appliances in your house have a digital chime? Can you tell them apart? What do you gain from recognizing the voice of your coffee grinder, your toaster oven, and your iron? What are they telling you that you could not have gleaned from the smell of ground coffee, fresh toast, or a burned shirt? *

And this bit of wonderfulosity:

We are constantly overwhelmed by our internally autonomous odd-dot astrology, picking apart apopheniac patterns that we have constructed between the brick facades, the mirrored windows, the unplanned drips of paint, and the magic marker vector geometry that grows extremophilic over the surface of our perceivable world. I long for the day when you not only need to present your verified address to buy a QR sticker printer as you do a can of spray paint, but proof of age, as when you enter that kind of club. As if any such control would stop technology from seeking out its desires, when technology like this is the most rampant evidence that our cities are departing from a Technological Victorianism to return to a gorgeous, sleazy, semiotic burlesque. Technologies like QR codes are the beat that gets our society’s machines tapping their feet. From the gaping maw of our technological future comes ugly, distorted, beautiful music, singing out loudly from bricked and re-bricked exteriors, from rusting, twisting pipes, from arcing buss fuse boxes, as our constructions slowly devolve back into the calciferous strata from which their concrete was originally mined, and our culture rediscovers what it used to do to have a good time. *

All here.

A t-shirt (ava here) with a QR-encoded easter egg punch line? I bought one instantly.

Living in the middle means that our limited human sensoriums and their specialised, superhuman robotic senses will overlap, combine and contrast.

Wavelengths we can’t see can be overlaid on those we can – creating messages for both of us. *

Via @warrenellis.

The most frightening QR Hobo Code – Bad Coffee:

*

We present QR_STENCILER, a free, fully-automated utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. Additionally, we present QR_HOBO_CODES, a series of one hundred QR stencil designs which, covertly marked in urban spaces, may be used to warn people about danger or clue them into good situations.*

Via @doingitwrong.

]]> http://mtoynbee.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=215 0 http://mtoynbee.com/blog/?p=207 http://mtoynbee.com/blog/?p=207#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:52:15 +0000 dr.hypercube http://mtoynbee.com/blog/?p=207

*

According to Arnadottir, “Beads have been used as a communication tool and to express individual identity in African culture and we also use “beads” (pixels) in the digital culture as a communication tool and to express our identities online.” *

Via +Justin Pickard on Google+.

Photo by Adam Greenfield, Urbanscale

Update: I stand corrected. Sharper-eyed Flickrer Vidiot detects the scanable QRCode buried in the designed-up larger version – look at the center of the square at 7 o’clock. Looks like a hella long URL (yes, I know, I’m ass-covering).

*

Each Nerdlepoint canvas is a unique QRcode marked on a piece of 13-count Zweigart “orange stripe” mono canvas. (It doesn’t really need all those adjectives, but I like describing the canvas as though it were a blued-steel submachine gun in a pompous 80s spy novel.)

Each canvas contains a unique QRcode. When you buy the pattern, you get a passcode that lets you redirect that QRcoded URL anywhere you like. The back-end platform is the same as the one I use for www.p8tch.com.

Available for purchase here.

We here at The Local East Village wanted to know how many people in our community were using QR codes. To find out, over the next several days we will be distributing Local East Village flyers – on brightly colored paper – to local businesses. When the code is scanned, your smart phone visits a site that we run so we can keep a tally of visitors and then is directed to The Local East Village. We are distributing four different versions of our flyer so that we can see how many people are using QR codes in different areas. We’ll publish our findings in a few weeks and share our data with you. If you see one of our flyers be sure to scan it so you can take part.

Via @jayrosen_nyu