Plazemark

2006
urban intervention
stencil gaffiti
50 × 50 cm

Plazemarks are real life representations of digital places generated by users of the Location Based Web2.0 platform Plazes.com.

Plazes.com is a service wich tracks the location of users in the real world. Just by everyday technologies like routers, wifi or GSM without any GPS services user can locate themself in the city. With a small piece of software they can log on to hundreds of thousands of plazes created by other users. Each plaze shows a history: who has been there, what did they say? Pictures can be uploaded or connected location sensitive via Flickr to each plaze. Users can share selected information about them in their profiles.

To make the digital layer of plazes visible in the city a selected number of plazes in Berlin got marked by interactive tags on the sidewalk. Each of these Plazemarks are individual icons but they all share the same graphical language. Each Plazemark has the Webadress of the specific plaze of Plazes.com encrypted. The technology behind these icons is called „Shotcode“. By using a standard mobile phone it is possible to decode the encrypted ink and browse to the specific plaze. A small java application decodes the tag from a picture taken by the phone’s camera.