Cluster Blog

I found what turned out to be a poem called “Why We Lose Our Hands” on the bottom row of a shelf in the back of a Brooklyn comic shop.  The poem came in the form of a small, handmade book; several sheets of thick white paper folded in half and sewn together with red thread that ran along the bound edge.  “Why We Lose Our Hands” was composed entirely of QR codes.  Gabe, the owner, didn’t remember who dropped it off or what it was, but he was selling it for $5.

QR (Quick Response) codes are a type of matrix (two-dimensional) barcode that was originally developed by a Toyota subsidiary in 1994 to track vehicles in the manufacturing process. QR’s, which are composed of square black modules arranged in different, seemingly randomized patterns over a white background, were designed to allow complex files to be decoded at higher speeds than the QR’s two-dimensional barcode cousins.  Today, they have become major notes in the visual noise of advertisements, appearing everywhere from advertisements to, well, books of poetry.

The only text on the book of QR codes I found on the back, which read:

I flipped through the book of hand-letterpressed QR codes before scanning them, ran my fingers over the boxy grooves pressed on the pages like Braille and looked at each code as something other than innovation in advertising.  I started to see Chris Fritton’s “Why We Lose Our Hands” as a well thought-out piece that plays with obscuring the boundaries between textual and visual expression, as well as physical and digital space.

“I love writing about, and in, codes and ciphers as well as diagrams and schematics,” Fritton tells me in an email. Fritton, who sells this book and others like it on Etsy, is the Studio Director of the Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC) in Buffalo, NY, and also runs the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, which will be taking place on March 24^th this year.  One of Fritton’s more recent works, called I Hid Art, was an interactive project that allowed anyone to follow a list of clues and directions to find a piece of original artwork hidden in public spaces.  Seekers were encouraged to take a photograph of their find along with a short story about how they came across it.  “Why We Lose Our Hands” appears to be an intersection of Fritton’s self-proclaimed obsession with hiding things in plains sight as he did in I Hid Art, and also an experiment with codes and schematics that invade our visual senses in an age of advertisements and anxiety, to create something beautiful under what Fritton referred to as “visual blight.” 

 After I contacted Fritton in early December, he responded that he was hoping to create a novella-length work created entirely out of hand-letterpressed QR codes, which to date is still in process.  His aim with “Why We Lose Our Hands” was to reshape the way we interact with literature now that new information technology and consumer products have entered into the picture.  At first, this much is clear: the book’s form challenges us to consider the relationship between literature (poetry) and digital art (QR codes).  The object does this by collapsing the boundaries between the two: the QR is the stanza represented in code, and the stanza is only accessible on a mobile phone by scanning it.  To read the poem, the reader must consciously perform the same action each time they turn the page, which forces the reader to reflect on each page separately before viewing them all together.

With the novella, Fritton hopes that “its length will call attention to technology as prostheses” and asks us to imagine the experience of reading something in this particular form:  

You’re ‘reading’ the book, which really means you’re holding the book and flipping the pages, using your phone to decipher each page, but then you’re reading the literal content off your phone.  Your phone is reliant on the book for information, you are reliant on your phone for information, and in the end, after 100 pages, it will be impossible not to notice the complexity of the reading experience.  At some point, the reading will become a technological performance, which is a uniquely human activity. 

Each page of  “Why We Lose Our Hands” is its own stanza, and each stanza its own visual piece, a 2-D code á la Chuck Close, at least I’m seeing them this way for the first time. Rather than translate into a number or a label, QR codes can—when scanned—jump a phone’s Internet browser to a website, lines of text, a photograph, etc.  If QR codes can be looked at as purely visual, the random shapes beocome like clouds as I tried to place labels on them: this grouping of pixels looks like a squid, that one a crazy-eyed dog baring its teeth, and on the cover a bat is throwing up.

            We, the readers of this QR quasi-poem, are forced to perform over and over the action of viewing, translating, and reading “Why We Lose Our Hands” to a point where, through technology both current and obsolete, it becomes what Fritton called a uniquely “human” activity.  Of course we can set up programs and automations to decode page after page of QR onto a screen, but we don’t yet have artificial intelligence that can contemplate art, or see things as others.