Spanish barcode marketing company Macanudos has developed a scannable QR-equipped dress to promote flamenco. Flamenco (which includes the older, more profound palos of deep song) has been declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. To promote it, the company has created QR lunares for women’s attire.
The lunares, or circles that customarily decorate dresses used in flamenco dance or worn by women singers, are embedded with a QR code that, when scanned, will trigger one of nine flamenco forms.
- Alegrias
- Bulerias
- Fandango
- Granaina
- Malagueña
- Seguiriya
- Soleares
- Tangos
- Taranta
This is a living art form encompassing song, guitar, percussion and dance and grown out of Andalucian, Jewish, Arabic and Gypsy voices and experience. Attendant cultural elements, like costume and even interior design, have grown up with it, and all of it creates a lifestyle, also called flamenco. Structurally, the art is based on musical modes that include distinct and complex rhythms and chord progressions.
This QR campaign is designed to promote an art form that is distinctly Spanish, muy gitano and all-too-often subjected to crass caricaturization. The truth is, it’s a folk form that offers enough variation and expressiveness that musicians both within the flamenco world and without have found it capable of expressing the complexities of what is often (and sometimes misleadingly) called “high art.”
A seamstress is currently building a QR dress, which she hopes to have walking-around-ready by January, in time for FITUR, the International Tourism Trade Fair in Madrid.
Scan the QR codes in the fabric form below and you can listen to the major palos.
Photo of the greatest bar in the world by Arkangel | thanks to Ian
