HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE Catalog

HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE

NICOLO GENTILE

ROOPA VASUDEVAN

EDITED BY TESSA HAAS

AUTOMAT

HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE

This catalog documents HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE, an exhibition of new works by Roopa Vasudevan and Nicolo Gentile, on view from May 7–28, 2022, curated by Tessa Haas and organized at AUTOMAT, a cooperatively-run gallery collective located in the Crane Arts Building at 1400 N. American Street, Phila, PA. Contributors Tessa Haas Nicolo Gentile Roopa Vasudevan Tannon Reckling Designer Nicky Rhodes Editor Tessa Haas © 2022 All rights reserved

<automatcollective.com>

FOREWORD

By Tessa Haas

Featuring works by Philadelphiabased artists Nicolo Gentile and Roopa Vasudevan, HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE explores materiality of digital mediation and materializations of labor through formal sites of physical and digital space.

Gleaning the ruins of the recently-demolished 12th Street Gym, a former site of ritualized communion, bodybuilding, and cruising for queer Philadelphians, Gentile reconciles an absent site within the walls of AUTOMAT. Based on archival architectural floor plans of the gym, we’re invited through the doorway of the locker room. Filled with double meanings, the ball chain curtain feels heavy and inaccessible, yet is light and evokes movement.

Making everyday, ubiquitous symbols precious, Vasudevan handdraws a series Quick Response (QR) codes, testing boundaries between human and machine through the laborious practice of inserting her own eyes and hands into a traditionally digital generation process. Some patterns lead to web pages, creating a narrative that explores human4

machine identification. Vasudevan questions when scanning a QR code, as one identificatory act, became second nature.

Engaging analog and digital media alike, HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE invites new ways of encountering seemingly-quotidian sites and their meanings.

I’d like to offer my deepest appreciation to Nicolo and Roopa for their input, flexibility, and for many generative, ongoing conversations during the planning of this show. Many thanks goes to Tannon Reckling for their insightful contribution to the catalog. Additional thanks to my fellow AUTOMAT members, whom I am so lucky to call friends and colleagues. Lastly, my deepest appreciation goes to my partner in all things, Nicky Rhodes, who designed this catalog and provided invaluable, innumerable support throughout each stage of the exhibition process.

This catalog is made possible by the Judson-Morrisey Excellence in New Media Award and Grant from the New Media Caucus, an affiliate society of the College Art Association.

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INSTALLATION VIEWS

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Photographs courtesy of Danielle Degon (p. 7–17) & Shelley Reed (p. 18)

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VISIBILITY, IDENTITY, REFUSAL A Conversation Between Nicolo Gentile, Roopa Vasudevan, and Tessa Haas April 7, 2022, via Zoom Edited for clarity & length

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Tessa Haas: Huge thanks to you both for being here. Could you tell me a little bit about the works that each of you is creating for Hard Medium Software?

Roopa Vasudevan: I am going to show a selection from a series that I’ve been doing since late November last year, 2021.

The project is entitled Slow Response. In its current form it is a series of 100 manually drawn QR codes that I have been working through pretty much on a daily basis. It took me about three or four months to get through all 100 of them.

I’m generating them online and drawing them by hand. And I’m trying to experiment with things like form, color, texture of the materials that I’m using to find that boundary between how much I can mess with the computer generated code and have it still scan.

When is the camera not going to recognize it as a QR code?

And the functioning codes, only about 70 of them will actually scan with a mobile device.

When you hold your mobile device up to them, it might not scan immediately. It might take a little bit, it might be finicky. It might only scan from a distance very far away.

It sometimes takes a little bit of work to get the camera to recognize the code. But for about 70 of them, they scan and link to these really small, singleserving mobile websites that I’m designing to be read on a mobile device in the gallery.

They’re going to be poetic explorations of questions relating to quickness and 21

speed, our demands for instant gratification and the ways that we engage with these artifacts out in the real world, questions of instinct and assumption, how we learned to scan a QR code so that it happens by default and we know exactly what to do when we encounter one out in the wild.

These websites are going to construct a narrative around them where many of them are readable on their own, but knit together, they lead to something larger. So that’s kind of the broad overview of the piece. I’m going to be showing a selection of them in the exhibition.

Nicolo Gentile: Can I ask a question? So when you approach self-curation, only picking a section of these, how does that narrative change and what is the selection process of these kinds of smaller subsections of the larger series?

RV: I’ve been really thinking about this and working with Tessa. Once I finished the drawings, I created a large inventory that I have on a spreadsheet with all of the drawings together. I think the nice thing about exhibiting this project as I’m at the tail end of finishing this up is that I can treat the sub-selection as kind of anchors, essential pieces, then build the rest around that.

I was also thinking, okay, well, what if I show the 30 that don’t scan. And, you know, have that be a subset that I show in an exhibition at some point, right? Like what if that is the demarcation point?

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach it.

And the nice thing about working 22

on this in-process is that I have a lot of freedom to kind of determine with Tessa what parts I show and how I want the audience to engage with the piece.

TH: It’s really fun to scroll through the Excel sheet really fast, it looks like a gif or animation.

NG: It’s also really apparent to see the growth of these drawings… is really evident when scrolling through them. What was a very simple translation of a QR code to grid or graph paper has become like, like textural. And almost like weaving, a formal lexicon.

RV: Totally. It feels very crafty. What I’ve really liked about doing this is the amount that I’m working with my hands.

As somebody who’s working with the Internet and with technology in the majority of their practice, it’s nice to have a project where I can really focus on making something materially and have that connect to my larger practice, but then also have objects that you can look at and appreciate for their aesthetic qualities on their own, too.

TH: There’s something subversive about the idea that they read as craft instructions. My first thought when seeing these works is that they look like quilt instructions, particularly the triangle motif QR codes.

It’s funny because that’s an instruction and narrative that our eyes understand. But when we look at QR codes, we can’t see what a computer-machine sees and we have to rely on our phones to do that translation.

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RV: And it’s funny that you say that because for two of these codes, code 31 and 99, I actually try to follow the machine logic.

So basically you draw the two timing patterns first, then the corners, and then the alignment, which lets the camera know that what it’s looking at is a QR code. It then encodes all the data in binary, in a really counter-intuitive zigzag pattern going up and down from right to left, which is also really confusing because we typically, in English, read left to right.

I made code 31 pretty early into the process and code 99 was my second-to-last, to see if my working with this form over an extended period of time might’ve made it easier for me to think computationally about this.

And it was so striking to me how counterintuitive that machine logic is. QR stands for “quick response”, right? So obviously the code is built to be read very quickly by a machine, but when you’re actually going through it and approaching it the way that a computer would, it’s just really striking to me how humans created these machines, yet the logic can be so counterintuitive to the way that we actually approach things. It is ironic to me that it becomes so jumbled.

TH: There’s a very Warholian, you know, wanting to be a machine dynamic going on here that is super interesting. And I definitely want to hear more about ironic tension, but I also want to hear about Nicolo’s work, because the connections are just so apparent. As we’ve continued doing studio visits, the connections, to me, seem to grow stronger between your work.

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Structure of a QR code (version 7), highlighting functional elements.

Via wikipedia.org.

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Nicolo Gentile, Tough Love, 2021.

Nickel-plated steel ball chain, automotive enamel, plywood, latex paint, appropriated image by REX. 144 x 124 x 112 in. Installation view of Queer and Now at Temple Contemporary. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yet, this [interview] is the first time that you’re meeting.

It’s kind of incredible.

NG: I love that the connections are secondary. They’re not necessarily in the content and there’s a current that runs between them. You’ve been creating these particular [web] sites. So my approach to the virtual is a former site in Philadelphia, the site of the 12th Street Gym. My body of work, as of late, has been focusing on truncated or lost narratives of social community and the intersections of histories, places and people with a focus on queer sites and communities of sex and sexual expression.

I’ve been wanting to work with the 12th Street Gym now for some time since moving [to Philadelphia] in 2019. I was told about it, but never experienced it because the building had been closed since I arrived, and within the last few weeks it was finally demolished. So the site of engagement for me lies twofold. There’s the material reality of this place that is on the corner of Camac and 12th.

But there’s also this virtual or projected site that it operates on through the stories and narratives. When approaching this new project, one aspect is reformatting a material that I’ve been invested in, which is the ball chain curtain. I’m reinterpreting the curtain in this work.

I was able to work with the William Way Foundation and within their archives found the original architectural drawings from before the 12th Street Gym was the 12th Street Gym, when it was still [the Camac] baths in 1973 27

[and later became the 12th street gym in 1983]. What started off as this residential block peppered with hotels and restaurants slowly unfolded itself into a complex where buildings would bleed into buildings with intertwined history. It was the [Henry] Minton house prior, so a robust 19th-century abolitionist space.

So that’s one work: reinterpreting the curtain and re-articulating the architecture based on these drawings. It’s an engagement with archival information, and for other elements of the installation, I’ve been stealing[/reclaiming] items from the construction site.

I’ve been taking aluminum fittings from the site itself and recasting those as grips. For the installation I’m replacing the grips on gym equipment with the grips that I’ve made. So [Roopa] you’ve been talking about the place of the hand in your work as drawing QR codes, the place of the hand in the work that I’m making are casts of my hand’s grip. The ‘Hold on Me’ series was created with individuals with firsthand experience of 12th Street Gym solicited from Grindr. Following interviews conducted over the phone, these men were tasked with instructing me to grip, hold, or tug the bar.

My body was a temporary vessel for their demands, my hands responding to their explicit instruction.

TH: Have you used a casting process in your practice before?

NG: It’s definitely a material learning curve. This is my first metal casting that I’ve done.

I’ve worked with casting other 28

materials before, like polymerbased materials, but aluminum has its own mind.

I always come back to that question of, well, is the space itself a representation of the community that it possesses or that it holds? And ultimately, no, this building was just a building, but without that space of congregation, where does community happen? Where is an exchange of knowledge happening?

Ultimately as a member of the LGBTQ community in his thirties, I’m also asking questions about community belonging. There’s a generational gap that can’t be denied, and there are voices and stories that can’t be accessed.

RV: I love what you said about, you know, ultimately the site was just a building and it gets imbued with all of the immaterial, ephemeral stories and narratives that people experience there.

That also kind of works in reverse to what I’m pointing at, which is that we often think of the internet and the virtual as an immaterial thing, but the internet has a physical infrastructure. Tung-Hui Hu puts it really beautifully in his book A Prehistory of the Cloud, where he goes back to this metaphor of the cloud and questions, what is the cloud? Where is it located?

Where is all of our data going?

And tracing the material physical infrastructure as a lead-in to the Internet being built from the idea of disaster, and how disaster informs everything that we’re doing online. So we want this place to store all of our information and keep our knowledge that is not tied to this material world.

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In my work I’m really pointing to this idea of the Internet, this thing that we think of generally as not existing in a physical space, as an actual physical artifact, and the physical infrastructure that makes up the way that we engage with technology as we know it.

And I think it’s an interesting conversation that’s happening. I think that our work really points to that tension between the material and the immaterial.

TH: Yes! And exchange being the highlighted role of these infrastructures. You just touched on such a poignant connection, which is this theme of remediative and restorative histories across both of your work. Another connection that struck me during our studio and site visits is the role of labor in your practices. You both go through particularly slow, painstaking, and meditative processes. Roopa, you’re hardcoding and coloring individual units, and Nicolo, although ultimately this isn’t included in your installation, you’ve hand-painted individual balls to create visual motifs on your curtains. These are things that could be made more easily and quickly through digital fabrication. Could you tell me a bit about using your hands and the process of slow labor that you’re both engaging with.

RV: This is my first time handdrawing, and, Nicolo, I really resonated with the materials learning curve you mentioned, because drawing seems so simple, like something that everybody should be able to do. But this is actually my first time trying to work in this way.

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Nicolo Gentile, wax grip study for Hold On Me series, 2022.

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Nicolo Gentile, wax grip study for Hold On Me series, 2022.

Nicolo Gentile, Hold On Me II, 2022. Cast aluminum sourced from demolition site, knurled and chromed steel, steel mount.

12 x 8 x 4 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

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But at the same time, it’s a natural extension of other work in which I’ve collected large amounts of data over time. I also did a project ten years ago [All-American Girls, 2012] where I cross-stitched election data into needlepoint samplers, also reflecting craft and labor and long processes of doing something.

This is just the latest iteration of my thinking through what it means to be a human in a world that is moving quickly... We’re becoming engulfed by these fast moving digital spaces, so I’m reckoning with that. I don’t want to move as quickly as the world might be demanding that I do now.

Emphasizing labor, emphasizing time, and making projects that don’t do what they’re supposed to do immediately, and that reward you for spending a long time with them. You have to spend time scanning each individual QR code in order to see whether or not it works. Part of the artistic process is forcing the audience to have the slow, complex, layered experience with the piece in a way that, in my personal experience with tech-based art, doesn’t happen anymore.

NG: Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s this kind of desire for you to wedge yourself between this kind of accelerant futurity.

I think that I’m also trying to really pump a brake and hold. I think holding is probably the most political. I think any engagement with an archive, there’s this idea of going back.

I’m looking, and I want to hold and just take off.

If that’s the space that we can create for a viewer experience for 10 minutes in the actual 33

gallery, I think that that’s a huge triumph and a huge success.

I’m resonating with the idea of not fitting within the expected temporal pace. The body holds that tension… it’s also a vehicle of desire and pleasure, but also like pain and it holds memory and itself as pain.

TH: The archive also sort of holds that tension as an erotic space with promises of intellectual and material connection, but is inaccessibly tied to specifically other temporal moments, as well as in the traditional sense that one can’t access materials, or perhaps doesn’t know where to begin engaging. And, as someone often in archival spaces, I wonder how one can take these materials and ideas and move forward? I think your work [Nicolo] really attempts to engage a process of answering this.

RV: I think about our current moment, and particularly the Trump era, where it felt like things were happening so quickly that you didn’t have time to stop and process. And I think that things are happening to you, to your psyche, and to your body because of the speed of technology and the speed of social media… that you don’t realize are happening to you until much later.

I keep coming back to a project [#Bellwether] I did in 2016 around the presidential election that was happening at the time. When Trump was running, everything that he said was a giant news item. He would post something on Twitter, it would flare up in the news for 24 hours, and it would disappear.

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I was doing a project where I was collecting social media data over a year, over the course of the primaries, capturing all of the discourse around those moments, then building a slow, laborious installation. That was when I first started to really understand the long-term implications of this frantic moment that we’re in, mediated by technology and constant shifting and changing.

We’re carrying all of this with us in ways that we don’t understand right now, and we are not given a moment to stop, hold, and comprehend. I think that is really resonant. And what you’re talking about [Nicolo] is something impacting the way that you operate in the world and not realizing it until you really stop and take time to understand how this long history has affected you directly, in your existence as a human being in the world today.

NG: Right. I’m also excited by this. Labor can be ritualistic.

In some ways it’s about recognizing what it means to lay your body on the line. And as a maker, to introduce the hand back, and the labor of the hand back into the practice, carries with it all of the surrounding political gestures that it holds.

On one hand it’s commemoration and it’s about a celebration.

It’s an homage to time gone by, of people lost. But it’s also about slowing that pace of production that’s being demanded. And then also I think that, again, similar to the way I spoke about how the body holds the past, both traumas and celebrations, that there is also use of the body as activism.

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I forget that my engagement in the studio and with the hand engages that history of putting the body—and putting my body— on the line. Am I actually comfortable doing that? Is it protest or am I hiding in the studio? It’s hard to say.

TH: There’s also this idea of making yourself legible through the work, through that instantiation of your own hands. So I think that there’s this double-legibility that’s happening, and tied to legibility is this concept of visibility, themes looming over both of your broader practices and previous work. Can you speak a bit more to how visibility relates to your practice, scholarship, and research?

NG: I’m really invested in ideas of queer abstraction and the ways in which the body is purposefully self-coded, as a means of navigation, of survival, of other worlds and other spaces.

That’s also personal work, like me coming to terms with the way that my body is perceived. How do I control that perception? How do I navigate that perception? How do I then abstract those methods of evasion, or the opposite, completely commit to a false sense of legibility, perception, and knowing.

Strategic essentialism to like a tooth of sculptural work. My body is already a vehicle of all of these types of coding. So, can the object also stand for some of that abstraction? How do these methods of abstraction make their way into these objects?

I’m really drawn to materials that are double-coded already.

A cool bead, like the beads in 36

Install view, #Bellwether. SPACES, Cleveland, OH, May–July 2016. Photo by Jerry Mann.

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Screenshot of dataDouble browser extension as of January 2022.

Four resultant dataDouble portraits generated between 2019 and 2020.

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the curtains here, flicker in the light and seem ephemeral and soft, but they’re hard, plated steel at about 300 pounds. So if there’s like this visual softness opposite a material fortitude, like some of the casting that I’m doing. As an artist I’m always looking for ways to interject myself within the mutable, within material translations. And in this new body of work, allowing others to be supplanted within that transformation.

TH: I’m also thinking about the leather candle piece, and how a leather jacket should last forever. Yet, it’s made of this paraffin wax material that evaporates as it burns. So it literally disappears during use.

NG: That’s also drawing the symbolism of the jacket, not only as a material reality, but also as a symbolic hold. It’s a symbol of masculinity and of queer radicalism. It’s a symbol of punk and post-alt subcultures.

But it’s also one of communal exclusion and it’s a signifier of a lot of different things. And in my previous curtain piece, I’m destroying the image by pixelating it and allowing it to be subjected to the movement of the curtain TH: Pixelating and breaking things down is perhaps a good tie back into Roopa’s work. I know a lot of your previous work has engaged digital identity online, questioning what it means to be a person on the Internet. Can you tell me a bit more about visibility in your work?

RV: Absolutely. Nicolo, I really appreciated when you pointed to the ways that your body is already encoded in the world.

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What is already happening, maybe without your direct consent or conscious knowledge, or based on the way that you exist as a human being? I think that speaks to what I’m interested in exploring related to this idea of visibility. How can we point to the practices that enable technological and social phenomena to be forgotten?

When I first started practicing, my work was really about using technology to engage larger social and political structures. I’ve done projects on reproductive rights. I’ve done projects on political and electoral processes. I’ve done work on the use of hate speech on the Internet. And so, that is all thinking about identity in a very traditional way within the field of contemporary art.

But lately I have been thinking about technology itself as a cultural object, and how it shapes the way we see and are seen. I have a recent project called dataDouble (2018–present) where a web extension constructs a clone of yourself based on the data that has been collected from you by corporations and your daily use of the Internet and daily browsing. That project really reflects an evolution into considering what identity means in conversation with the digital systems and structures we engage with every day, often without thinking about it. What happens to how you are perceived when you are constantly being abstracted and broken down into, essentially, dollar values? How is your humanness perceived when you can’t necessarily control what parts are being seen, and how? How does that start shaping how you perceive yourself?

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Nicolo Gentile, Drop my Body, 2021.

Paraffin wax, leather dye, cotton wicks.

4 x 36 x 24 in. Installation view from Everything Must Go at Atelier Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Nicolo Gentile, Drop my Body (Panty Dropper), 2022. Paraffin wax, pigment, cotton wicks on Muscle and Fitness (1985). 24 x 15 x 3 in. Installation view from HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE. 42

Part of that work involved talking with people directly after they use the extension, about technology, data surveillance, and identity. I use interviews a lot, in both my artwork and in my academic research. I actually ask a variation of the control question at the end of all of my research interviews with fellow new media artists – I’m like, what do you hope future audiences take away from your work when you’re not there to explain it anymore.

NG: I’m taking away a lot of explanatory elements. It’s a completely new framing of engagement with the virtual, the engagement with the digital, whether it’s in fabrication or in projection into space and histories engagement with digital archives. It’s nice that, Roopa, your work is questioning that very notion of these tools. I would never consider myself a new media artist, but I do think when you were speaking about making these networks legible... gosh we’re speaking about capital now...

RV: [Laughs.] Always, all the way through.

NG: Yeah. And I’m just thinking back to Felix Gonzales-Torres, he spoke about artists not doing what they’re supposed to do. And I’m wondering – how do we create an environment that allows us to not do that? I lean into the particularly big capital-Q Queer capital-G Gay thing, in order to allow for that expectation of what it means to show and make work, whether as a new media artist, as a gay artist, or all of these things, right.

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These are the things that’s expected of us. It’s the same engagement with them. It’s like these types of networks of expectations.

RV: Tessa and I have had conversations about both being South Asian women who are working and existing in this art world, and the tensions of managing expectations to make or curate work about being South Asian.

And to me, that is always very uncomfortable because yes, I am a South Asian woman, but that is just a small part of my identity and the things that I’m interested in.

I was just at a gallery visit this past week in New York where the curator was talking about making space for artists of color and from marginalized identities to make work that is not necessarily about that experience. I think that is also something that I’m struggling with is, you know, that process of refusal. Just because I present myself in the world in a certain way, you’re expecting me to make work about what it means to be living as a South Asian woman and drawing from all of these Indian influences and whatever. And I’m not going to do that. I’m going to make work about the things that are perhaps more pressing to me at the current moment.

I think that idea of refusal ties into the way that I work with technology, it’s like a weird roundabout thing. But particularly with this QR code project, you see the QR code, your default instinct is to scan it. But the QR codes, in certain instances, are refusing to be scanned. They aren’t doing the 44

thing that you expect them to do. And I think that’s a really interesting approach I wouldn’t have gotten to without being in this show.

TH: I hope a takeaway for visitors reading this or seeing the show is an understanding that we ought to push against pigeonholing artists, and ourselves, into these identity boxes. I think Jayson Musson said something like, “If a white man paints a flower, it’s a flower… if a black man paints a flower, it’s a slave flower.” Right?

We can’t project expectations onto anyone – artists, curators, people – because of their identities. As a South Asian woman, I can’t be expected to only curate or study South Asian artists. And at the same time, one shouldn’t gloss over someone’s culture and ways of identifying within the world and their own subjectivities. There’s a balance to be struck, and I love that there’s an underlying sense of refusal implicit in the work.

RV: The refusal is not actively exiting the system. The refusal is acknowledging that you are embedded in these systems and trying to find those pathways within them. Once you acknowledge and view that relationship holistically, you can see how it connects to the way that you operate and practice.

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MEDITATIONS ON MEDIATION

By Roopa Vasudevan

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The quick response (QR) code was invented in 1994 by the Japanese automotive company Denso Wave.1 It was designed to scan and return information faster than a traditional barcode could, as well as hold more types and a greater quantity of content.2 Whereas most standard barcodes read in a single direction, QR codes use both vertical and horizontal encodings to dramatically increase their capacity for storing and returning data.3 Initially deployed to track car parts as they were produced, the codes eventually found their way into broader usage, largely due to Denso Wave’s decision to make the specifications for the codes openly available.4 The codes have since been ubiquitously adopted in commercial and institutional settings, with a noticeable uptick in the Western world during the COVID-19 pandemic. We see them all over the place now: in Super Bowl ads,in restaurants in lieu of physical menus, in wheat-pasted posters as we walk down the street.5 As contactless transactions have become more desirable—and as we have become further and further dependent on our devices in daily life— the QR code has found a place as a sort of mediator, a way to quickly and easily obtain information in spaces where more traditional forms of access might feel cumbersome, take too long, or, in the extreme, even require us to put our own health and safety at risk. It promotes speed, seamlessness, and instant gratification; it reinforces the prominence of digital technology in our lives. When, just a few years ago, we might have relied on our memories in order to go home and look up something 47

interesting we saw out in the world, we can now get access to it immediately, take it in fast, and move on to the next thing just as quickly.

True to their name, QR codes are quick to make and to use. Plug “QR code generator” into a search engine and hundreds of websites are returned, all of which can make a code, for anything you want, within milliseconds.

Cameras on most mobile devices now scan them by default, and they are often deployed in situations where the act of typing a URL into a browser would be too time-consuming and cumbersome. Almost unconsciously, the perpetually accelerating speed of technology and the sudden social changes of the pandemic coalesced to give us a new digital default. Now, when we see a QR code in the wild, we’re programmed to know exactly what to do. It happened fast, within only a few years—and yet many of us probably cannot point to the specific instance that taught us how to do it.

Ten years ago, in the United States, QR codes were ridiculed and treated as a joke. I was in grad school when I first heard of them in 2011, doing a master’s degree in an art and technology program in New York City. I vividly remember seeing a Tumblr account passed around among the student body, entitled “Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes,” that intentionally didn’t have any content on it—the joke being that evidence of their use simply didn’t exist. QR codes were thought of as a technology that only people extremely out of touch would use, and the 48

more tech-savvy of us laughed at those who earnestly tried to incorporate them into design and user interaction.

It has been fascinating to see their wide adoption in the United States over the years, particularly after I spent close to 3 years in China, where they were used on a daily basis for every kind of interaction imaginable. Scanning QR codes was part of one’s daily digital life there; QR codes were used for everything from adding contacts to WeChat, to paying for coffee or food, to checking in for flights and train rides.6 I would eventually come to leave the house routinely equipped with nothing but my phone, because I knew that anywhere I went would enable access with a QR code.

Seeing the uptake of QR codes at home in the United States has felt a bit like comeuppance, in a way. I am often facetiously reminded of this aphorism when I think of them: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”7 After years of insider ridicule, QR codes are finally having their heyday in the Western world. The only question that remains is what “winning” actually means here; whether, in another ten years, they will remain as dominant; or if, like many technological protocols that came before, they will become an outdated relic, with only odd little geometric patterns to remind us of their existence.

And even when QR codes are used widely, they never look like they “fit”; even when they are color-coordinated, include logos, 49

or otherwise are finessed into design schemes, they stand out as clunky, artificial, not quite belonging.8 Their inclusion is utilitarian, not because it was the most logical design choice.

It often seems like a marriage of convenience to include them.

I have come to think that this is because QR codes are simply not meant for human vision. They are artifacts generated for machines, by machines. Their only utility to humans, in fact, comes from their obviousness—the mere hint of a QR code prompts us to whip out our devices and scan. As such, it benefits the codes to stick out, to not fit in with human aesthetics. It makes it more obvious to the camera what is meant to be read, and what is not. These codes are not for us; on the contrary, they are arguably designed to be able to bypass us entirely.

The Slow Response series technically began in the summer of 2021, when I manually screen printed several QR codes for my project Provocations For/On Technology. The time it took to produce each set of prints—and the time it sometimes took for the scan to register on a device— seemed, to me, antithetical to what the QR code was designed for: quick deployment and quick delivery. I also became obsessed with finding the limitations of the form; when my registration was off in the printing process, or if I forgot to flood the screen before printing (causing the ink to poorly mark the surface), most of the time the code was still readable by a camera even with these mistakes.

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Screenshot of picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr. com, January 2022.

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Code #9, as posted to Instagram on December 17, 2021.

Code #53, as posted to Instagram on January 30, 2022.

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Code #68, as posted to Instagram on February 16, 2022.

Code #95, as posted to Instagram on March 25, 2022.

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Provocations For/On Technology, May 2021, screenprints on paper. Process documentation.

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It is true that QR codes are designed for error correction;in fact, Denso Wave advertises their ability to read correctly “if the code is dirty or damaged,” touting this as a key feature of the technology.9 10 But where are the boundaries? When does human error become too much for the machine to handle? What happens to objects that are meant solely for machine “eyes” when they are filtered through human ones instead?

The iteration of Slow Response in HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE is a selection from a series of 100 hand-drawn codes, completed between November 2021 and March 2022. Each drawing took anywhere from 45 minutes to three and a half hours to complete. The process was simultaneously meditative and fraught with anxiety; while the manual, mostly screenless work was a refreshing change of pace from my typical, computationally intensive practice, the drawings also required significant and constant attention to counting and pattern recognition. In most of the drawings, I made mistakes—and, more often than not, they were unintentional.

Throughout my process, I posted on Instagram when I finished each code, along with brief reflections on making it. Sharing my practice, and being open about roadblocks and surprises, has always been an integral part of this project; this essay, in fact, found its beginnings in snippets of thoughts posted to social media as I was starting to think through the larger motivations behind this work.

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But the diaristic act of posting also helped me uncover tensions between my creative aspirations for the project, and what my instinctual perfectionist tendencies—motivated, perhaps, by an understanding of the “correct” way to use the technology— wanted instead. Even though my stated goal, outright, was to bend and break the boundaries of what seemed to be a very rigid encoding structure and visual form, in practice, somehow, it wasn’t always easy for me to accept this as an outcome. I usually felt a deep sense of disappointment when I finished a drawing and it didn’t scan, especially in instances when I sunk over three hours into completing it. I still don’t know whether that’s because of a desire to “trick” the machine—something created by an “imperfect” human still fooled it!—or because not being able to complete the cycle of scan and response is inherently unfulfilling. The code’s only job, after all, is to mediate information; when that can’t be accomplished, what purpose does it actually serve?

According to Denso Wave, “QR Codes not following the standards and indistinct ones may not be read with particular kinds of scanners and mobiles phones… A code that looks like a QR Code but does not follow the standards cannot be called a QR Code.”11 Semantically, it makes sense; there is no “response,” after all, so the code cannot fulfill its promise of delivering a quick one. But a human looking at a functioning code and a nonfunctioning one probably wouldn’t 56

be able to tell the difference.

If it looks like a QR code and feels like a QR code, we probably see it as a QR code even though it technically isn’t one; you can’t really see it as anything else.

And even if you don’t scan it, the form now carries an innate expectation which doesn’t go away simply by not functioning.

Over the course of this project, a great deal of people sent messages to me with images of things they think look like QR codes—many of which do not fit the specifications outlined by Denso Wave, but which look just similar enough to be mistaken for them. Anything shaped this way is now seen as a conduit for something else, lying just beyond; it becomes simply a mediator, not to be considered or appreciated in and of itself, but only for its active promise of more on the other side.

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1 Denso Wave. 2014. “History of QR Code.” QRCode.com. 2014. <https://www. qrcode.com/en/history/>; Sugiyama, Yuhi.

2021. “From Japanese Auto Parts to Ubiquity: A Look at the History of QR Codes.” Mainichi Daily News, November 9, 2021.

2 Denso Wave, “History of QR Code”; Tiwari, Sumit. 2016. “An Introduction to QR Code Technology.” 2016 International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT), December 22-24. <https://doi. org/10.1109/icit.2016.021>. 39.

3 Denso Wave, “History of QR Code”; Denso Wave. 2019. “What Is a QR Code?”

QRCode.com. 2019. <https://www.qrcode. com/en/about/>; Sugiyama, “From Japanese Auto Parts to Ubiquity.”

4 Denso Wave, “History of QR Code”; Tiwari, “QR Code Technology”, 39.

5 Gartenberg, Chaim. 2022. “Coinbase’s bouncing QR code Super Bowl ad was so popular it crashed the app.” The Verge. February 13, 2022. <https:// www.theverge.com/2022/2/13/22932397/ coinbases-qr-code-super-bowl-ad-appcrash>.

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6 WeChat is the dominant Chinese social media and communications application, which, while I lived there, was the primary way I would text with people, pay for everything from groceries to rent, and keep up with the news.

7 Wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.

8 Lin, Yi-Shan, Sheng-Jie Luo, and Bing-Yu Chen. 2013. “Artistic QR Code Embellishment.” Computer Graphics Forum 32 (7): 137–46. <https://doi. org/10.1111/cgf.12221>.

9 Lin, Luo, and Chen, “Artistic QR Code Embellishment,” 138.

10 Denso Wave. n.d. “Error Correction Feature.” QRCode.com. Accessed April 27, 2022. <https://www.qrcode.com/en/about/ error_correction.html>.

11 Denso Wave. n.d. “Examples of Problems Encountered in Reading a Code.” QRCode.com. Accessed April 27, 2022. <https://www.qrcode.com/en/howto/ trouble.html>.

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HOLD ON ME

By Nicolo Gentile

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Through a steel chain link fence wrapped in concept renderings of Midwood Investment & Development construction plans, I make out demolition equipment and dumpsters in the crater below. A hit of petrichor and diesel from the idling excavator draws me nearer and seduces me to slink through a break in the barriers down into the worksite as the construction team breaks for lunch.

I want a piece; a little harmless something by which to commemorate 12th Street Gym. Working frantically and without hesitation, I scale the dumpster and shield myself from surveilling eyes behind its cladded wall. My knuckles knock through muddy brick and rubble until a glint of sunlight catches my eye. It was a small length of metal, an aluminum railing.

It floated there in the sun, unearthed from the rubble, a witness to the demolition, its burnished surface glittered in the sun interrupted only by a scar scraped from the backhoe. I take hold of the railing, yet it has a hold on me.

With surrounding highrises reflected in the iridescent slick leaking from the excavator, the sunshine fades and rain begins to fall onto my bloodied hands and sweaty brow. I hasten from the dumpster back onto street level with a token carved from Chancellor and Camac. Behind me, the backhoe fires up. I hear metal grate stone and the only remaining wall comes crashing down.

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YOUR DIGITS ON MY DIGITALS!

By Tannon Reckling

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Nicolo’s work in HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE with AUTOMAT engages the history of the recently shuttered and demolished 12th Street Gym in Philadelphia. Nestled within the city’s Gayborhood, this space operated as a multi-use haven that housed activist meetings, a functional gym, local businesses, a restaurant, and of course proved a site for gay cruising concealed away on 12th Street between Chancellor and St. James.

The site, like many shuttered by governing bodies but indeed essential to locals and integral in day-to-day life, will be both mourned and judged.

As many other metropolitan areas continue to gentrify and displace disenfranchised local communities, Philly’s brunchstyle Gayborhood included, queer spaces become more public and more surveilled, and thus, further influenced by larger neoliberal control mechanisms.

Gentile’s work in HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE deals with this speculation of a past, present, and future of queer spaces, and questions how architectural assets and tools guide seeking community, forming resistance, engaging rest, developing kinship, and seeking pleasure.

Nicolo’s work in AUTOMAT acts as an access point, not only into specific LGBTQIA+ histories of the 12th Street Gym, but also how we might develop our own present and future communal spaces. With no affirmation or declaration or reprimanding, Gentile’s work lives in HARD MEDIUM SOFTWARE as formal art objects, also symbolic of how any minority catharsis might be found in footnotes or hidden within larger oppressive systems. Handprints as evidence of a friend or foe; 63

lost or thrown away coats or underwear from a lover, family, or community member; familiar or unfamiliar hallways to explore or hide within.

Within the installation we encounter workout equipment, sculptural objects with molded grips where one would engage the machine. These grips made from cast material are remnants from an earnest encounter Gentile had with an enlisted gay mentor, who we’ll call Arthur, via the queer crusing/dating app Grindr.

Gentile uses the help of Grindr to discover other queer folks, in this case, an older gentleman who had personal encounters with the 12th Street Gym when it was in operation. Encoding forms of intergenerational dialogue and BDSM-influenced gestures of consent and ritualistic communication, Gentile followed Arthur’s directions as he instructed Gentile how to handle the clay and equipment, softly or hardly. The resulting forms are now finalized and placed on the equipment in the space.

This encounter evokes the type of queer cruising interaction that might have happened at the 12th Street Gym, while also echoing Gentile’s practice of looking at LGBTQIA+ histories through a contemporary lens. This ‘soft’ body form on a ‘hard’ surface references the gym’s functional past while also engaging bodily alignments regarding tools and technology (from a rock to a computer) one might use today with queer intentions (going to the gym to work out, for sex, etc.) The actual material of these soft molded objects on workout equipment grips are melted down from found metal within the 12th Street Gym 64

demolition site.

Double-meanings and entendres are important to Gentile’s practice. Within this show these might include: pumping iron, getting buns of steel, and hard as balls. Additionally, there is an exploration of interactions increasingly mediated by screens, like internet-based searches for sex or community or kinship or guidance.

Another work in the show is a hanging bead curtain that instantiates the 12th Street Gym’s architecture directly into AUTOMAT’s gallery. The beaded curtain’s layout in the space mimics the measurements taken from a portion of the 12th Street Gym’s locker room doorway.

Gentile met with John Anderies, Director of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia to research floor plans for the installation, mapping and inserting a “ghost” of the 12th Street Gym in AUTOMAT. Working with Anderies, Gentile was also able to access old advertisements and documentation of the space to embolden his research. The process of this installation involves CAD (Computer-Aided Design) processes in order to get precise measurements and assist in the choreography that the curtain creates for viewers.

This installation from Gentile creates a path leading the viewer within an intent to echo similar steps taken by those who frequented the nook and crannies of the Gym’s architecture during its operating time, whether the viewer knows this or not at the time. The steel beads are 65

measured and installed from the ceiling of the gallery space housed in the Crane Arts Building which references its past history of industrial use especially in its current location in Fishtown, a rapidly changing neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Within this cadence of curtains and gym equipment installations, the viewer will find a piece of what appears to be discarded clothing around the floor.

However, it is a paraffin wax candle, molded from white underwear owned by the artist.

The solid material and clean lines of these molded objects appear as if they could also be 3D printed or machine-made; however, they are traditionallycast, which introduces nodes to contemporary tools and their histories.

Placed within the curtain space on the ground, atop a 1985 issue of Men’s Health, the underwear candle is discarded in gesture, small yet monumental as multiple candle wicks stick out: codeswitching into a formal, somber object. Who might this object belong to? A lost lover? A hookup? Lustily stolen underwear from the gym? Who might these wicks be lit for? The candle and smoke bring us back to the embodied, tactile experience, with all the tools and material identities they carry.

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CHECKLIST OF WORKS

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Roopa Vasudevan Selections from Slow Response I (Drawings) 2021 – 2022 Ink and colored pencil on graph paper; mobile websites 7 x 7 in. (each) Nicolo Gentile Tough Love (Threshold II) 2022 Nickel-plated steel ball chain, plywood, threaded steel, aluminum channel Dimensions variable Nicolo Gentile Drop My Body (Panty Dropper) 2022 Cast wax of found briefs, cotton wicks 10 x 7 x 4 in.

Nicolo Gentile Hold on Me I, 2022 Cast aluminum sourced from demolition site, knurled and chromed steel, steel mount 48 x 8 x 4 in.

Nicolo Gentile Hold on Me II, 2022 Cast aluminum sourced from demolition site, knurled and chromed steel, steel mount 12 x 8 x 4 in.

Nicolo Gentile Hold on Me II, 2022 Cast aluminum sourced from demolition site, knurled and chromed steel, steel mount 86 x 4 x 4 in.

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ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Nicolo Gentile is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. His sculptures and installations — composed of leather, latex, iron and steel — slip between recognizable materials of kink, industry and sport to address the commodification of queer aesthetics and the oscillating power dynamics of gender, whiteness and masculinities.

He received his Master of Fine Art in Sculpture at The Tyler School of Art and Architecture of Temple University and his undergraduate degree from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Philadelphia, New York, Portland, Los Angeles, Paris, and Melbourne. He currently teaches at the Tyler School of Art and has guest lectured at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland State University. His works have been collected by the Leather Archives and Museum, the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, and the Jordan Brand Collection. <nicologentile.com>

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Roopa Vasudevan is a South AsianAmerican media artist, computer programmer and researcher, currently based in Philadelphia.

Roopa’s work examines social and technological defaults and autopilots, and explores labor, duration, intentionality and critical self-reflection within our relationships with technology. Through a varied creative toolkit that includes data collection practices, systems design, web development, and remix, she seeks to emphasize personal and human experiences, often on an individual or local level, in a time of Big Data and surveillance capitalism.

Her work has been exhibited and featured by media outlets internationally, and supported

by Eyebeam (Brooklyn, NY); the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy (Philadelphia, PA); the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation (Philadelphia, PA); the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives (Haverford, PA); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard); China Residencies; SPACES (Cleveland, OH); and Flux Factory (Queens, NY).

Roopa is currently a member artist at Vox Populi, a 30+ year old collectively run arts space in Philadelphia; and a member of the year 8 Art & Code track at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator at the New Museum (New York, NY). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is researching the complex and involved relationships between new media artists and the tech industry. <roopavasudevan.com>

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tessa Haas is a curator and art historian. Her academic research and curatorial work focus on screen-based media, net art, and digital identity, particularly through queer studies and material culture methodologies.

She is a Ph.D Candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she earned her MA in 2019. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), the Center for Creative Works, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, and AUTOMAT. She has contributed to exhibition planning and publications at PAFA, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University, the American Philosophical Society, Fleisher Art Memorial, Telfair Museums, the Phillips Collection, Arcadia Exhibitions, the University of the Arts, and more. <tessahaas.com>

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Tannon Reckling (they/he) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and organizer living and working between Portland, OR and Philadelphia, PA. They attended University of Oregon (2021) and University of California- Los Angeles (2017).

They are interested in: tremulous digital materialisms, shadow labor, queer semiotics, and collaborating with queer artists.

They have previously published in artandaboutpdx, Title Magazine, and multiple artist-run publications and museum catalogs.

Nicky Rhodes is an architectural and digital designer currently working in Philadelphia, and an incoming student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

His work explores connections between craft, technology, and collaborative practice. <nicky-rhodes.com>

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