QR Mosaics
Synthesis of art and technology
A brief history of the QR mosaic
The QR Mosaic is borne from the synthesis of two very different ideas from diverse cultures creating something that is modern and functional yet retaining the essence and beauty of ancient art.
The history of the mosaic
Dating back 5,000 years from the region of Mesopotamia, the mosaic started as an arrangement of colored pebbles or stones typically as decorative patterns or occasionally depicting animals or scenes. The mosaics of this period were typically set into the ground.
The Ancient Greeks later developed the artform into works that would be set into walls as well as on the ground. The development of colored glass and tools for cutting the tiles into desired shapes for assembling into more complex mosaics allowed for increased expression in the art form.
The Roman empire used mosaics extensively, expressing features of their own style and culture. Through the expansion of the Roman empire, mosaics became ubiquitous throughout Europe over the next 500 years, most notably influencing art in the Byzantium culture 700 - 1400 AD.
The history of the QR code
The QR code (Which is an acronym for Quick Response ) was a natural evolution of the bar code idea which has been in widespread use since the early 1950s. The QR code was developed in 1994 by Masahiro Hara, working in the Japanese car manufacturing business. The QR code was invented to increase informational content while allowing high-speed scanning capability.
While the QR code was starting to become increasingly commonplace in everyday society over the next 25 years, it was the advent of the Covid outbreak in 2020 that thrust the QR code to iconic levels of recognition, by the contact tracing programmes employed throughout the world.
The birth of the QR mosaic
The developer of the QR Mosaics idea, Michael Henderson, has a technical background and dabbled in the development of several iOS and Android games between 2015 and 2020. While developing a game based on the rolling balls into a QR-shaped maze to produce a hidden codeword, Michael read the specification for QR codes and was struck by the variety of colors and styles that are capable of being scanned. It is unfortunate that while QR codes are seen everywhere, they are typically printed in black and white on plain paper with no aesthetic style whatsoever.
Information presented in the right way can become as much as a piece of art as it is an item of function. The map of the London underground in graphical form is a great example of the synthesis of form and function.
The idea of the QR mosaic is to provide businesses and individuals with attractive mosaic art pieces that contain something useful to the owner: a link to their own website encoded within the mosaic. From this simple idea, the QR Mosaics business was born.
