Artist in residence at BRASS: QR ribbon prints with Artstation

In April 2012 the artist Glenn Davidson of Artstation, Cardiff, began a residency at BRASS, the ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society at Cardiff University. Over the following months he worked with the centre's staff and researchers on a set of pieces about the place they worked in and the people who worked there.

The best known are the QR ribbon prints, made for the arrival of the September 2012 intake. Each researcher was given a QR code designed for them. The code was engraved into a block of Corian and printed by hand, with the researcher, onto raffia ribbon paper. Scanning a ribbon, or following its web link, opened an online page built from that researcher's motivations, and some researchers took on a persona for theirs. Gavin was one of the researchers who took part; his ribbon led to his profile page on the BRASS website.

Other strands of the residency looked at the centre's buildings. A group of five pictographic images drew on the University Estates map and on the terrace of Victorian houses in Park Place that housed BRASS, joined by a corridor cut through the first floor. A series of framed prints rearranged the footprint of the University's buildings across the city. In a mapping workshop, staff and researchers marked the routes and connections of their time at the University, with colleagues from architecture and linguistics invited to join.

The work is documented on Artstation's website (see Links).