Live Open Call: Installation

Designing and building a QR-to-receipt-printer installation so visitors at an Oslo opening night could add to an open call from the room.

Brief

The brief was to compare a premeditated open call with a live one on the same night. The first had gone out across the UK, Canada and Norway, then been printed on one long receipt and made into a website (art-kive). What was missing was a way for somebody in the room to add to it.

01Structure

The call asked for anything in any format, so the archive needed a field for every kind of thing somebody might send.

I gave every object the same fields: title, medium, dimensions, date and place, edition, creator and contributors, with a choice of which to export.

The archive's metadata fields, and the folders submissions were filed into — Fig. 1The metadata fields every submission filled in, and the folders it was filed into.

02Promote

A countdown on the submission site meant the call could be promoted ahead of the night rather than announced on it.

Submissions came in from Canada and Australia while the night was in Oslo, a continuous stream for as long as the site was up.

Before the night: countdown

The archive on a phone

Fig. 2The call promoted ahead of the night, and the archive as it looked on a phone before it became a receipt.

03Build

Visitors scanned a QR code and their submission went straight from the browser to the printer.

I set up the backend and a simple input screen that opened the phone's camera and took a short text submission.

Fig. 3Opening night, in the only footage of it that exists.

04Print

A thermal receipt printer replaced a screen, so every submission was linked to the next on one continuous roll.

I designed the receipt output too, including the typeface and the image format.

Fig. 4The printer working through a submission. Greyscale only, which is worth knowing before you send a photograph.

05Archive

Both receipts were scanned and put back up on the site, so nothing that came in disappeared again.

Everything stayed browsable, drawings and comics included. It's a piece I'd want to run again as another way of getting visitors to co-create.

A long thermal receipt printed with submissions — Fig. 5The two receipts. They are long, which is rather the point.

A second receipt, printed with submitted photographs — Fig. 5The two receipts. They are long, which is rather the point.

Fig. 6The archive on desktop, where every submission stays browsable.

Results

85+ submissions across
both open calls

0 technical glitches
on the night

What I learned

The receipt printer was both a constraint and what unified the project. Once printed, nothing could be edited, so every submission became part of one record.