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 webslinky: the world of stickers
This week, stick at it. Animated GIFs then. Last week's Webslinky mentioned one of their traditional manifestations, the Under Construction sign, and since then the badly-aliased eyesores have been intruding on my consciousness, blinking at me when I try to sleep and gently rotating in my peripheral vision.Fatigue-induced apparitions aside, the humble bumper sticker is surely the animated GIF of the real world. The relatively low printing cost means that anyone can make one, which explains America’s fad for notoriously awful bumper decoration, but also makes it possible for memes (that’s “ideas” to you, granddad) such as I Park Like An Idiot and Thomas Scott's “Trapped in Sticker Factory, Send Help” to come to life. For some, however, stickers are more than another kind of badge. Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg used stickers for Implementation, an exploration of “distributed narrative”. Distributed narrative is a device you may already have experienced, if you’ve played a videogame in which story details are scattered throughout the game’s environment and absorbed in a non-linear fashion. In this instance, the narrative was a novel. And it really was distributed about the physical world. Speaking of games, do you remember Barcode Battler, the electronic toy whose “fighters” were generated from barcodes? If you do, you’ll recall that it was rubbish. But barcodes are back, baby, and soon you’ll be sticking them on anything with a surface area. It seems the recent craze for keyword tagging has leaked out of the internet and made it to the real world: use the Semacode website to generate peculiar square barcodes and print them onto sheets of sticker paper. These stickers can then be used to “tag” physical objects and, if someone else happens to have a web-capable cameraphone that runs the Semacode software, their phone will direct them to a web URL when they take a picture of it. That might not sound very remarkable, but while most people don’t yet have a phone with those kinds of interbells and e-whistles, it’s only a matter of time. Once they do, perhaps the full potential of this kind of technology will become apparent.
David Thair
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related info
 useful linksthomasscott: sticker nickm: implementation consoledatabase: barcode battler semacode.org
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see also
 webslinky #092internet archives  webslinky #091adventure  webslinky #090omg!  webslinky #089aspirations  webslinky #088web of deceit  webslinkyarchive books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. art  art archive Watch artist interviews and see images from British exhibitions. |
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