City Skin is a collective of artists devoted to the transformation of public space. They are based, mainly, in Cape Town. ArtHeat Project presents CUE Tags, a part of a long term street art project by the collective. CUE Tags (Conspired Urban Encounters) are a secret language of images.

The series is meant to offer an alternate form of public messaging, an inverse of the invasiveness of the ubiquitous billboard advertising aesthetic. These tags appear in the city’s ‘backend’ visual spaces, the places where your eyes rest when you’re specifically NOT giving your attention to the clamour of all the visual forms that want you to want them; these tags don’t try to maximise the number of people they reach…so they kind of play with the possibility that there are coextensive private spaces embedded within the public, and that we occupy them simultaneously as we move through the city.

The tags have already been slowly spread through the city. The tags here are accompanied by words explaining their meaning, encoded in a QR code. QR codes are a 2-d barcode readable by a cellphone camera with the correct software installed. Google QR code to find software suitable for your phone.

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