Jsut Code is an installation where viewers are invited to decode electronic texts written by a collective of distributed writers. Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images.
Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code (a matrix bar code). The QR code “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader. Participants are invited to decode these images through the use of a smart phone or QR reader.
In this work the artists set up a structure of an evolving database in which the activities of reading and writing by human and machine are explicitly collaborative and distributed. Jsut Code performs questions about automated production, ‘collective’ intelligence and the value of labour and artistic production. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating database, which moves beyond and between languages.
To scan QR Codes, you need a QR scanner App on your mobile device. Go to your phone’s app store and search for “QR” or “QR readers. Once you download a QR reader, open up the reader and scan a QR code.
「Jsut Code」 是一個集體創作的裝置藝術作品。現場參與者將被邀拆解由來自四面八方協作者合作完成的電子文本代碼。
透過這件作品，作者建構了一個讓人類與機器共同參與的寫作和閱讀經驗。電腦搜尋來自社交網站TWITTER的文字，即時收集包含’生’ 與’死’關鍵字的留言，再把文字即時編譯成幾何圖案標誌-QR碼，參觀者將置身於一個充滿幾何符號的環境之中，他們可以智能手機的解碼軟件，直接參與解讀這些電子文本 。
代碼既是圖案和信息，但本身卻可以號召行動，並同時促使指令的執行。「Jsut Code」 的閱讀行動，是人、機器與代碼的合作演出 。 透過翻譯QR碼而進行解讀及重新編碼，再加上觀眾的主觀性認知去重新解讀信息。裝置探索文字在語言轉換（電腦和人類語言）的過程中所產生的演化和變異。
- 2016, No References: Videotage/ISEA 2016, Hong Kong
- 2012, Future Everybody, Future Everything: Manchester, United Kingdom
- 2012, Hong Kong Art Fair (by Pure Art Foundations), Hong Kong
- 2012, The 17th IFVA: Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong
- 2011, Writing Machine Collective | Computational Thinking in Various Art Forms: Youth Square, Hong Kong
The work was first commissioned by the Hong Kong Writing Machine Collective and won the silver award for interactive art in Asia in 2012 at the Incubator for Film and Visual Media in Asia, awards, presented by Lars Nittve . In 2014 jsut Code appeared on a BBC News feature about Britain’s pioneering new digital artists. And in 2016 was selected as part of 'No References: A Revist of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985' at Videotage, Cattle Depot Artist Village, Hong Kong.
The exhibition celebrated the pioneering video artists who attempted to self-organise and inspire each other in their collective goal of developing media art in Hong Kong from the 1980s onward, when no artistic precedent existed.
The curators explain that the development of media and video art occurred in parallel with, and so is inextricably linked to, the upheavals in Hong Kong society and culture: it was the city’s unique political developments that triggered artists to ponder upon the relationship between the past and the present, the individual and the society, and art and real life.
- Interview from Aarhus University, 2016 – There are always research elements in my artworks.
- Coverage from Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016 – Digital artists’ life and death twitter installation picked for Hong Kong media art retrospective.
- Coverage from BBC, 2014 – Code masters: Meet Britain’s new digital artists.
- Coverage from 科藝派對 ARTECH Printed Magazine (p.11), Dec 2013.
- Future Everybody, Future Everything Report, Edited by Drew Hemment and Charlie Gere, 2014.
“We are familiar with works about Social Media Site or those using QR code. This film is a mix of forms of installation and the characters of QR code. One scene that interests me is when the audience take out their mobile phones searching around like doing kind of performing art. But they are in fact having interactions through the words of the real and virtual spaces. The way to match the statements collected in this film well with the forms of representation or the thematic ideas has to be further developed” Ng Tsz-Kwan, Executive Creative Director of yU+co. [Lab], 2012.
"Soon and Pritchard playfully and industriously encode, decode and re-code message on Twitter to subvert and stretch the limits of ‘meaningful’ messages”. Dr. Linda Lai, Associate Professor in School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, 2011.