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QR CODE AS POTENTIATED IMAGE When we see a beetle walking by, we disinterestedly register its appearance or passively note its trajectory. Another beetle, on the other hand, empathetically sees an expressive compatriot replete with chemical indicators and relational possibilities. As such, someone who does not scan a QR code with their smartphone merely sees it as an apparently generic symbol. But someone who scans the code awakens its deeper potential by capitalizing its transcendental DNA to discover the code’s true (and often tritely pedestrian) meaning (namely, the website or photo it leads to). Unlike a foreign language, the QR code offers no outward aesthetic or otherwise symbolic clues to its translation – its linguistics are completely alien to human hearts and minds – so the nature of its understanding becomes absolutely binary: either you scan the code and receive the embedded communication in its entirety or you eschew scanning and maintain superficial observation and fully miss the encrypted essence. HARD-WIRING AS DOUBLED-EDGED SWORD - EDGE 1: the QR code contains all the information it needs to operate independent of any translational mediator. In other words, unlike a traditional barcode, which triggers the consultation of a local, external database in order to uncover its meaning, the QR code’s standalone graphic matrix contains all the information necessary amongst its internal pixels to universally direct all scanners to the intended destination. Also, while there can be multiple working barcodes of identical encryption that reference different concepts (such as two barcodes uniformly reading 0838753083 that represent a bible in Wal-Mart’s system and bulked hypodermic needles in Costco’s), a given QR code means exactly one thing and duplications always necessarily duplicate that meaning (it is read by the scanner like a language without synonyms or homonyms). - EDGE 2: the QR code’s operation depends on the persistence of its internet destination which, in turn, is entirely contingent on the server’s maintenance and/or the administrator’s respect for its continued integrity, The vulnerability of its transcendental meaning foreshadow each QR code’s tragic fate: eventually, the website or photo to which it originally and exclusively corresponded will be taken down or otherwise deleted and forgotten, rendering the QR image without a purpose like a stick without a popsicle. the sublime potential of the qr code
