Project Report by Simon Evans

The One Pound Shop continues my excavation of philosophy from within complex systems and the discovery of aesthetics in technological processes that are not usually associated with art. It is also the result of my determination to inject some much needed humour into media art.

An archive of the project's first test is online here but is optimised for Firefox only. Opera also works, but less well. Internet Explorer will not display the archive. However, there is a walkthrough demo of the One Pound Shop process here , that is viewable in all browsers.

The Shop is based upon the infrastructure developed during Where Are We Now? The piece deploys commercial mapping, mobile phone location and SMS services to create a live action, interactive performance. In a gallery, a member of the public puts a one pound piece into a coin slot on a touch screen kiosk and is shown the position of the artists somewhere in Britain. The member of the public then instructs the artist to purchase something for a pound and the artist has to respond, spending a pound as soon as possible.

The One Pound Shop creates an online landscape of contemporary Britain, a place in which the transaction model pervades cultural forms. In the piece, the pathetic combination of the endless repetition of trivial consumption and the absurd demands on the artist open up other, less rational, geographies and suggest experiences lying beyond consumption.

We tested The One Pound Shop prototype during the Diffraction conference on 4th and 5th April 2006. The complete system was in place, apart from coin receptor interface and I invited the artist Richard Dedomenici to perform the artist's role. During the performance Dedomenici took the opportunity to continue his own ongoing project of mapping of the border between London's 0207 and 0208 telephone numbers and testing, in the process, his thesis that there is a higher incidence of nail salons along this boundary; that a nail salon belt exists. For the purposes of The One Pound Shop, this meant Dedomenici would be making the purchases in South London.

The objective of the installation at Diffraction was to test the system prototype and to explore the relationship between members of the public in a gallery setting and an artist out in the 'real world'. The installation threw up some interesting insights into how an artist used mobile technology as an expressive tool and into the nature of a performance mediated by a machine and expressed through a commercial mapping service. This short report is a review of some of these insights, both practical and theoretical.

First let’s summarise the process. In the gallery, a visitor pressed the ‘spend a pound button’ on the project website. This took them through to a registration screen where they were asked to leave their name and address and mobile telephone number. Once this was submitted, the visitor - the ‘customer’ - was shown Dedomenici’s position plotted on a Google map. The customer could choose purchase categories and having chosen one, the visitor then requested Dedomenici to purchase.

The request was sent to Dedomenici’s mobile telephone via text message. The message contained the name of the customer, the category they chose and, importantly, the URL of the unique web page to which the purchase documentation should be uploaded. This URL contained a reference to an index number associating the purchase with relevant data such as customer, artist location and so forth. This meant that any media assets Dedomenici uploaded to the web page from his mobile telephone would automatically be plotted to the map and tagged with all relevant information. This automation proved to be an important point which I’ll discuss below.

Dedomenici then set about finding something to spend a pound on; sometimes he was successful, sometimes not and the story of his attempts often became the subject of his uploaded documentation. Whatever success he had, Dedomenici used his phone to create media - images, video, text - on the purchase that he then uploaded to the web page as described above. Once this had taken place, the customer was automatically sent a notification via SMS that the purchase had taken place and a URL provided for them to view their purchase plotted to a filtered version of the map.

The artist’s involvement in the process was now at end; however, the purchased items were returned by Dedomenici to the One Pound Shop headquarters (Simon Evans’ studio), where they were packaged and dispatched to the customers (sent rather late – the fulfilment part of the ‘business process’ left a lot to desired.)