Past Student Work

Barcode Cinema and Urban Chameleon

Posted by Sabrina on
Photo credit: Kristin Lucas

Barcode Cinema is a collaboration between Kristin Lucas and Lee Montgomery that appeared at Conflux Festival New York in 2010. It involved stickers featuring QR codes within a movie screen that were placed throughout the festival locations. By scanning the codes with smartphones, viewers gained access to video of geotagged images from that location. (see videos)

I think this piece is a great example of creating art using emerging technologies to create art. Lucas called the project “research of the communal landscape constructed by Google, Flicker and Picasa”. Lucas and Montgomery were able to tie appropriated images back to their original location by exploiting then-recent geotagging technology. The stickers act both as street art and as the keys to unlocking more content. Because the viewer needs to be in the space itself to scan the codes, they are interacting both with the physical location and the art piece.


Urban Chameleon is a 2003 piece by Katherine Moriwaki and Fionnuala Conway. It’s a collection of three skirts that each react to the surrounding environment in different ways. According to Moriwaki’s website, “’Touch’ changes visual properties upon contact. ‘Speak’ reacts to urban
noise, and ‘Breathe’ visualizes pollution and urban exhaust as it
travels through the garment.”
I really wish I could see video of this project, but the description alone is compelling. I find the idea of reactive fabrics really exciting, and since I have absolutely no idea how someone would go about engineering something so space age, I definitely want to do some research into it.
*I believe this image is the project in question since it’s all that I could find online, but there were no images provided on the websites of either artist, so I can’t be 100% sure.