We all carry a phone in our pocket or bag – a small computer with a display, camera, microphone, and speaker. A device that encompasses essential technologies for media interpretation, reproduction, and participation. The QRchestra performance uses this interface in a concert and listening setting. Its participants take on the role of players in an orchestra, which doesn’t play from sheet music but from QR (Quick Response) codes.
With each performance, a new group of participants emerges, along with a new constellation of relationships with their personal devices. This symbiosis of human and machine includes us collectively as viewers, listeners, performers, and authors, but also as campers, hikers, tourists, excavators, farmers, cyclists, and city dwellers. In using mobile phones, we create new systems of orientation. We navigate their informational space of data flows as if moving through city streets. Whether at a crossroads, by a campfire in the forest, or in a cave, we remain in the ether, surrounded by kilobytes of a vibrating media field.
