This response to Seán Cubitt’s presentation as part of our Summer Speaker Series was written by Dr. Alberto Lusoli, post-doctoral fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute.
Invented in 1994 by the Japanese automotive components company Denso Wave, Quick Response (QR) codes are ubiquitous elements punctuating our everyday lives. The essentialist aesthetic of these two-dimensional barcodes is now familiar to many. According to ex-post recollections of their history, it was inspired by the famous Japanese board game Go. QR codes have become even more familiar in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which they found widespread applications: linking digital menus in restaurants, codifying health passports, regulating mobility across borders, etc.
In his talk at the Digital Democracies Institute, screen studies professor Seán Cubitt defined QR codes as “the outer edge of computing,” a form of “abstractions of information capital” that can reveal how our subjectivity has changed since Freud, Klein, and Lacan. Using QR codes as an example, Cubitt discussed how the subjectivity created by information capital abstraction compares to previous forms of abstraction, particularly compared to the de Stijl movement of the early 1900s.
De Stijl (The Style, also called Neoplasticism) was an interwar artistic current initiated by the Dutch painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in the same period that Walter Gropius, in Weimar, Germany, was developing the Staatliches Bauhaus (Bauhaus state school) manifesto and program.
In the Introduction to the Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, released in 1925 but initiated in 1915, van Doesburg advanced seven principles that the nascent De Stijl group of artists presented at the Düsseldorf International Artists’ Congress of 1922:
- I speak here for the De Stijl group in Holland which has arisen out of the necessity of accepting the consequences of modern art; this means finding practical solutions to universal problems.
- Building, which means organizing one’s means into a unity (Gestaltung) is all-important to us.
- This unity can be achieved only by suppressing arbitrary subjective elements in the expressional means.
- We reject all subjective choice of forms and are preparing to use objective, universal, formative means.
- Those who do not fear the consequences of the new theories of art we call progressive artists.
- The progressive artists of Holland have from the first adopted an international standpoint. Even during the war …
- The international standpoint resulted from the development of our work itself. That is, it grew out of practice. Similar necessities have arisen out of the development of … progressive artists in other countries. (Van Doesburg, 1968, p. 6)
From its origin, van Doesburg stressed the anti-subjective stance undergirding the De Stijl movement, expressed vehemently in the third and fourth principles. De Stijl’s aspiration to universality and commitment to suppressing subjective elements translated into an aesthetic dominated by horizontal or vertical straight lines and elemental forms. Inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s color theory, De Stijl’s artists relied exclusively on primary colors: black (void), white (plenum), red (body), yellow (spirit), and blue (mind). De Stijl’s quest for universality “resembled that of the universe itself: it was boundless, going beyond the limits of the canvas and seeking to abolish the wall as the boundary between interior and exterior space.” (Padovan, 2013)
Composition décentralisée. Author: Theo van Doesburg . Credits: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Bequest, Richard S. Zeisler, 2007. Source: Wikimedia
In abstracting reality through a codified and universal visual language, De Stijl’s art attempted to free the subject from the discipline created by industrialization (i.e., factory discipline and consumerism). In Cubitt’s words, De Stijl’s art “wanted to elevate by making the cosmic Subject of the universal language present, and to draw the artwork’s audience into becoming the subjects of that universal Subject and its language, speaking and spoken by it.” While capturing and abstracting the world into primary colors and essential forms, De Stijl attempted to liberate the subject through a universal language.
This brings us to 21st-Century Abstraction. QR codes constitute the “sensory apparatus” of digital capitalism. Their diffusion reflects the need to subsume every aspect of our lives to the logic of capital. QR codes abstract reality into a binary code of black and white that feeds algorithms surveilling and predicting our interactions with them. Our interactions with QR codes are necessarily mediated (by technical devices) and fully scripted. By using alignment patterns, specific regions of the image encoding meta-information, QR codes allow the scanning device to determine and correct possible perspective distortions.
QR code structure. Author: Richard Wheeler (Zephyris). Source: Wikimedia
In doing so, QR codes erase the subject and its gaze instead of allowing it to become the subject of their binary language. The erasure is operated not only by the essential grammar of QR codes (black and white) designed to be produced and consumed by computational systems but also by the depthlessness of QR codes created by their immutable proportionality. By erasing the subject, QR codes become “receptors that take without giving back.” They include everything that can be computed, translated into data, and fed into algorithms. Unlike the De Stijl abstraction, the abstraction of information capital leaves the subject at the door of its symbolic universe.
The result is alienation, incomprehension, and the creation of alienated data subjects left at the computational periphery.
Works cited:
Padovan, R. (2013). Towards Universality. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315013077
Van Doesburg, T. (1968). Principles of Neo-Plastic Art. Percy Lund, Humphries & Co.
A response to Alberto Lusoli, by Seán Cubitt
In his generous response to a talk I gave earlier in 2022, Alberto Lusoli has made a couple of important moves. One is the wonderful quote for Padovan about de Stijl: ‘it was boundless … seeking to abolish the wall as the boundary between interior and exterior space’.
In my home base in screen and media studies, screens tend to be things that show: that have things projected on them, and generate or reflect light carrying images and other mediations. Nowadays, with the aid of media archaeology, we think of screens as media in themselves. But this leads to a second thought, and a third: that screens are also barriers, like the screens they used to use to shade people from hot fireplaces or today from the sun; and that they can also be filters. Let’s say: Doesburg saw the wall as a screen hiding the world and protecting the viewer, and wanted to turn it into a projection, where the world and the viewer could project themselves onto a mutual space or surface.
QR might be considered as a membrane: filtering the possibly overwhelming rush of sensations for what it wants: data. This appears to be a one-way process.
It strikes me now that what is so demeaning about being reduced to a QR reading is precisely reduction: there is an act not just of filtering but miniaturisation. We shrivel into a clutch of info-points, but we are also crammed into a dataspace with no room for the aesthetic sensations that we otherwise feel are the essence of what it is to be alive. This is a complex move: it also involves the transformation of the living present into an inscription, and like the struggle between writing and speech that has occupied philosophy from Plato to Derrida, there may not be any simple side-taking available. But without doubt, data capture is also a deferral. [As Father Ted explained: https://youtu.be/vh5kZ4uIUC0]
The second insight concerns the inspiration of the Go board in the design of QR. The connection to Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI which triumphed over Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016 [https://medium.com/codex/lee-sedol-vs-alphago-how-googles-a-i-machine-beat-the-18-times-world-go-champion-214ffae72fbd]. Unlike IBM’s Deep Blue that beat chess master Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, AlphaGo is not a single-task device but a general AI. It uses a combination of deep learning and network reinforcement, where the combination is the crucial factor. Unlike its chess predecessor, AlphaGo doesn’t use brute force processing. It evolves in real time.
The implication is that there is one present on my side of the QR and another present on the further, system side. We know that computation arose from the logical-mathematics problems of completeness and halting explored by Gödel and Turing: that the closed world of the Ais processing QR-derived data is structured around its own incoherence, which now drive sits evolutionary mode of processing. Its speeds and scales exceed my comprehension as much as my aesthetics exceeds its. These incommensurable worlds confront each other at a wall which has again become impermeable. We are both smaller and futher away than we thought.
Only totalitarian politics seeks total knowledge: that may be the goal of the cyborg corporations deploying QR codes but it isn’t necessarily the game plan of those Go-like interfaces. The new concerns of our time are very probably not to produce the cognitive maps of the totality of capital that Fredric Jameson dreamed of in the 1980s, but to figure out a gameplan where we can meet our technologies as equals – and introduce them to our fragile planet.
Seán Cubitt, 5 November 2022