All / Live Open Call: Installation

Live Open Call @ Torpedo Books

An open call was sent out in the form of posters, posts, and invitations across UK, Canada, and Norway, ahead of an opening night. The submissions were printed in one long receipt and made into a website (art-kive).


To compare the difference between a premeditated open call and a live one, I designed and built an interface which enabled visitors to scan a QR code and send text and images to a receipt printer, bridging digital and physical interactions. These digital submissions left an immediate tangible trace in the physical exhibition space, rather than disappearing into a screen or database.

The open call: the archive's folder taxonomy, and the submission window that went out with it

Ask

To compare a premeditated open call against a live one, side by side and on the same night. The first had already gone out as posters, posts and invitations across the UK, Canada and Norway, with the submissions printed on one long receipt and made into a website. What was missing was a way for somebody standing in the room to add to it.

Highlight/s

A countdown was added to the submission site allowing promotion ahead of the opening night. Submissions were sent in remotely from Canada and Australia, when the opening night was in Oslo, Norway. This meant that there was a continuous stream of submissions coming in while the site was up.

A live thermal receipt printer was selected as the output instead of a screen display or regular printer, meaning the continuous nature of the output linked each submission in some form. There were also custom design elements in the receipt output, like typeface selection and image format.

Contribution

  • Established a backend to allow a QR-based submission flow for text and images, integrating the browser-based submission to the printer
  • Made a simple interface design for visitor input which connected to their camera and allowed a (limited character) text submission
  • Scanned both receipts and uploaded them to the site, allowing people's submissions to be permanently archived

Outcome

Had some great feedback from the opening night and managed to gather over 100 submissions between the open calls. The installation went ahead with no technical glitches and it became a piece that I would want to run again as it was another way of getting visitors to co-create.

Project media

Here are some key artefacts from the project, with captions explaining each of them.

The archive's metadata fields, and the folders submissions were filed into
The call went out asking people to send 'anything that might fit in an online archive, in any state of completion, language or format', which is a generous brief and a hard one to build for. So before anything else the archive needed a field for every kind of thing somebody might send: title of work, medium, dimensions, date and place created, edition size, source of file, creator, contributors. It also needed a way to pick which of those to export for each object.
The countdown on the submission site, so the call could be promoted ahead of the night rather than announced on it.
The submissions as the archive, on a phone: the same entries, before they became a receipt.
The archive on desktop. Everything that came in stayed browsable, including the things that arrived as drawings, comics and photographs of notebooks.
The live open call in action on the opening night. Unfortunately this is the only footage of it that exists.
The printer working through a submission. Greyscale only, which is worth knowing before you send a photograph.
A long thermal receipt printed with submissions
A second receipt, printed with submitted photographs
Two of the receipts, scanned and put back up on the site so that nothing that came in disappeared again. They are long. That is rather the point of printing submissions on one continuous roll, and it is why the archive needed all those fields in the first place.