Artist Meg Walker will be experimenting with the artistic possibilities of QR codes as part of the Artists in the Window series at Yukon Artists @ Work in Whitehorse from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday through Friday.

A QR code – abbreviated from “Quick Response” code – is like a bar code, but instead of a line, it’s based on a grid or matrix.

Walker’s window exhibit will be a car door-based sculpture with a QR code embedded in it.

During her demonstration hours, she will elicit the help of the public in creating a QR code with their handwriting.

Walker enjoys making art at the intersections of the senses to ask questions about the things we take for granted.

For example, to travel up to the Arctic Circle, or to anywhere “wild”, she finds she often spends at least as much time viewing the landscape through the lens of a vehicle window as directly with her own eyes.

Building a sculpture with a car door (salvaged from the Quigley Dump in Dawson City, where Walker lives) highlights the intervention of that machine in her journeys.

She asks similar questions of the computers that we spend so much of our time with.

You can generate a QR code online, but the computer composes it for you.

It’s made of dark squares and light squares. We have been using them more often as restaurants try to avoid using menus touched by many people, for example.

Touch interests Walker. Exploring the idea of “leafiness”, Walker will invite visitors to write their experiences of leafiness in the dark areas of the QR code that will take viewers to the final soundscape inspired by this idea.

If they’re willing, she will also record their voices saying things about leafiness, to possibly use in the soundscape.

Walker describes her soundscapes as being not music, but compilations of sounds, often quiet sounds, that she finds mesmerizing.

She finds that being immersed in sound a powerful thing, for good or for ill.

She wants to create visual objects with that kind of immersive quality. She strives for sounds that evoke a sense of spaciousness, whether they are sweeping, dense, noisy or minimalist.

As music leads to dancing, listening to sound can lead to gesture. That gesture can lead to painting or sculpture, and has been doing so in her practice over the past year.

Some of these pieces may also be on display.

The window sculpture’s QR code is a digital collage of her own and others’ photographs where the Arctic Circle crosses the Dempster Highway, and will take viewers to her soundscape created from recordings she took on journeys there.

You can find out more about Walker’s work at her website, http://www.megwalker.ca.

Her residency concludes the paid Artist in the Window residencies produced in conjunction Music Yukon’s Arts in the Park program.

Watch for Yukon Artists At Work member artists offering glimpses into their artistic practices at volunteer window residencies all year-round.

The Yukon Artists At Work Gallery is located in the blue building at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Wood Street, and is open Tuesdays to Sundays.