Visual Mixtapes: qrcodelove
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Essay from the book: written 04/10/08
This Book is a Collection of Songs Embedded in Images- a Visual Mixtape
As a teenager I would spend hours meticulously composing mixtapes and creating elaborate cases for the tapes that would then be exchanged or given away. These days, if I want to exchange my mixtapes with friends I can do it almost instantaneously and traditional mixtapes are rare to find and even harder to share.
The term ‘mixtape’ is still used, though now it is a metaphor to denote any collection of songs composed together, and the physicality of the object will soon be forgotten. This book is a digital mixtape, a collection of songs embedded in visual codes.
Digital mixtapes are common but lack the experiential nature of the original analog tapes in two ways: One, the time that it took to make a mixtape was real time, a person has to listen to the tape to make the tape and this was inherently understood in the exchange. Two, the physicality of the tape necessitated that the exchange happened in real time and so the packaging of the experience became a valuable extension of the tape itself. The original mixtape carried a temporal and physical weight that current digital mixtapes do not convey.
And somehow this makes even the music sound different. It has no material form and takes up no physical space—but why should that matter?
I still lug stacks of records, cassette tapes, and CD's with me every time I move. When I moved again last month, I thought to myself, “I haven’t owned a cassette tape player for years. So why am I still carrying milk crates of old tapes around?”
I realized that I had come to rely on the music. I whole-heartedly felt that the music represented a part of my personal history, and in order to be me, I was obligated to keep these things.
My memories were intertwined with the cassette tapes — both in music and object. The simple act of holding a particular tape triggers memories of people, places and who I used to be.
I fear the loss of the emotional space these physical objects possess; I fear the loss of their power as well. These things that take up space and are heavy to carry —in some small bothersome way that I don’t like to think about— they are me.
As we transition from an analog culture to a digital one, our music and our memories are moving to hard-drives, device-drives, servers, and other seemingly obtuse, yet convenient forms of safe-keeping. What we lose in materiality we make up with ubiquity and a seamless permanence that only digital reproduction offers. My music is now accessible wherever and whenever I may be; it will not age or get misplaced.
Physical hyperlink is a neologism that refers to extending the Internet to objects and locations in the real world.
"Currently the Internet does not extend beyond the electronic world. Physical hyperlinking aims to extend the Internet to the real world by attaching tags with URLs to tangible objects or locations. The tags are read by a wireless mobile device and information about the objects and their location are retrieved and displayed on the device." [Wikipedia]
Simply put, physical hyperlinks aim to link objects to information, activating a psycho-geographical experience for the viewer. I created this visual mixtape using one of many intermediary tools for this kind of interaction. The codes are physical hyperlinks to the songs.
For the maker of the mixtape, the potential is created for blending the memory of the music into the very space of its experience; for the listener of the mixtape, the potential is created to listen to and experience the music though unexpected ways.
Using the QR Code generator I built for this project, I have encoded a series of 14 songs into 14 stickers that I placed around different parts of Portland that I associate with those songs. Locating these songs spatially at the exact place that the song synesthetically exists for me I complicate and extend the memory of the song.
By extending the memory of a song into physical space, I invite other people to participate in the experience. The potential is there for other people to attach meaning to the relationship between each song and location.
By creating a book of song-images and labeling it a visual mixtape I conflate analog and digital in an open-ended and subjective manner. This book is a digital mixtape in its capacity to represent permanent, ubiquitous access to music through the use of a code, but the book itself has a physicality and linear nature that is finite.
By creating a physical manifestation of my digital memory I reinterpret what initially appeared to be a loss of objecthood and therefore a loss of me. I am used to locating myself, and my memories, in the singular and the finite. Locating these songs spatially at the exact place that the song synesthetically exists for me I complicate and extend the memory of the song.
By extending the memory of a song into physical space, I invite other people to participate in the experience. The potential is there for other people to attach meaning to the relationship between each song and location.
By creating a book of song-images and labeling it a visual mixtape I conflate analog and digital in an open-ended and subjective manner. This book is a digital mixtape in its capacity to represent permanent, ubiquitous access to music through the use of a code, but the book itself has a physicality and linear nature that is finite.
By creating a physical manifestation of my digital memory I reinterpret what initially appeared to be a loss of objecthood and therefore a loss of me. I am used to locating myself, and my memories, in the singular and the finite.
The visual mixtape is a form of outsourced memory, in book and in place.