I felt inspired by Sam’s off the cuff stop frame animations, so I thought I’d make some some of my own to explore how people might use this RFID tag based offline communication system we’ve been working on.

The idea is for people to use devices that allow people to read and write text messages to RFID tags, see the prototype device above. People would take it in turns to leave messages for each other, by placing these tags on objects in spaces they share, with conversations sprawling out in different directions over time.  In this mechanic, 1 person leaves messages of text stored on round or square tags and the other person leaves prompts or questions, using the triangle shaped tags. The second person would point place the prompts close to the message they were responding to, using it like an arrow to point  towards where they want the next message to be placed.

I waned to play around with this turn taking mechanic, particularly to find out..

• How the placing of physical tags on objects might  render the paths that the communication takes visible, without revealing the content.
• How the use of these tags might support the use of metaphors of space and proximity, to describe relationships between messages.
• How the the circle and triangle tags could be used to prompt the (imagined) conversation to go in different directions.

I think for this to work best, it would be a slow, asyncronous channel of communication.  People would leave these messages when the other people using the system were not around.  I didn’t have time to test this with the other artists, so I decided to take role play both roles myself and use stop frame animation to document the process.

With more time, I would liked to have experimented with some lo fi test runs of this system with the other artists, to see how they might use it differently. But, short of time, these animations were a handy way for me to role play this myself quite quickly.