I Can Read You was an artwork, experiment and game created in summer 2005 by artist Simon Poulter. The work, commissioned by HP Labs in Bristol in collaboration with Watershed, was part of a wider research project called Active Posters.

Active Posters explored how everyday printed posters could become links to online content, generate text based overlays to the poster in the reader software and trigger SMS messages using camera phones. This was achieved through the use of QR or Quick Read codes, a two-dimensional bar code created in Japan in the 1990s but re-vitalised ten years later through the proliferation of cameras appearing in mobile phones.

Simon Poulter was commissioned to explore this technology as a research and development project in order to bring new conceptual thinking from an artists’ perspective to what was essentially a technical research project. As a result he created I Can Read You, a game based around these QR codes.

In the game, players searched for missing pieces located within the real world to solve a code, exploring the relationship that we have to portable technologies and the ways that physical and virtual technologies enhance our everyday experience.

Related Links:
HP Labs, Bristol
Simon Poulter

Ended in August 2005

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