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Artist Scott Spencer Creates Public Poetry With QR Codes

Augmented artworks will explore forgotten spaces within the city.

When you see the black and white blocky pattern of a QR code sitting on a new film poster or staring out at you from the back of a magazine, do you immediately grab your phone to access the wonders that lie in wait? No, not many of us do. But if you saw an anamorphic code stretched out in the street before you, would you be inclined to find out what it might reveal?

Artist Scott Spencer has created a series of AR artworks for the Overlap festival taking place across Liverpool that can be unveiled via anamorphic QR codes. The codes will be dotted around various locations in the city, so anyone who chances upon them can take a picture to reveal a “playful collage, remixing personal and social histories to create poetic juxtapositions in real contexts across the city.” Sounds intriguing, so we fired off a few questions to the artist to find out more.

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The Creators Project: The event you're doing is described as Augmented Poetry. How is it going to work?
Scott Spencer: The poem is read by using the camera on your smartphone. By pointing your camera at a marker the text will appear on your smartphone’s screen. The markers will be on the sides of buildings and pavements around Liverpool city centre and the AR text will become street furniture or appendages to objects in the environment. I've used the necessity to be present in a location and that the poem is spread over various plots in an area to formulate the text.

What was the reason behind using anamorphic QR codes?
QR codes are around but they aren't reaching people’s curiosity in a way you might expect. We've all reached for our phones to capture some random spectacle and share it with our friends, so in this way I'm hoping anamorphosis may offer enough of a spectacle to engage people and encourage them to try it out. In sixteenth and seventeenth century painting, anamorphosis was used to hide coded messages that revealed themselves when the viewer was in a specific position. As AR also utilises location, I saw this was a good fit and could aid my piece.

What did you find appealing about working in the medium of AR?
The scale. In my practice as an artist I'm used to working on flat surfaces. For this project, my canvas is a chunk of the city and it's occupied, it's living, it has a past and a future—I've found that fascinating. The combination of AR with QR codes also allows me to direct the viewer into a particular position and notice a view of the city they haven't seen before.

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And what were its limitations?
At the present moment you can almost touch the perceived potential of these things but in many cases the technology isn't quite there yet. Of course, this opens up other avenues. At the moment to achieve solid positioning for AR I believe you still need a marker of some kind. I didn't want to build an app specifically for this project—once the project is done that app is just sitting on your device taking up space, this is why we got together with Daqri. What Daqri is doing is closer to what I imagined what QR codes and AR would deliver at this time.

What do you hope people will take away from the experience?
I'd be overjoyed if I turned one or two people’s attention to their relationship with the city and its diversity and hopefully become more connected to it, its people and the history they share with it, effectively get a sense of place and involvement and be encouraged. Be entertained at least.

What would be your fantasy AR project, regardless of technological or monetary limitations?
Ha! That's a question, one we could chat about for a long time. I'd like to do something where your environment tries to talk to you through smells, light, movement and sound, so you're aware of it and it's aware of you. The project I'm working on at the moment is part research and experiment—it's in its first phase and will expand and develop with the technology over the next year, which, as an artist, is a fantasy opportunity.

_Visit mercyonline.co.uk for more information on Mercy’s Overlap series and _Augmented Poetry_. You can see _Augmented Poetry_ in sites around Liverpool from mid-November._