Stephanie Chan (b. 1987)
SELECTED POEMS
Quick Response
1.
The first QR code was created in 1994 by a Japanese car manufacturer
to make it easier to keep track of vehicles on the factory line.2.
The design of the QR code inspired by the black and the white mottle
of a goban board, the board used in the game of Go.
To this day we still think of code as grid: QR synonymous with monotone
a pattern in search of meaning.
3.
Go is the oldest board game in the world . The name It comes from the Japanese word ‘Igo’ which was derived from the Chinese word ‘weiqi’ which means a board game of surrounding, of encirclement.4.
First time players may start by placing stones anywhere on the board, as if it playing a game of chance. This is before they understand how stones connect for greater power.
Every arrangement of black and white dots in the middle of a game of Go: both arbitrary and filled with meaning all at once. Both smattering and pattern.
5.
The point of the game, being, to completely surround your opponent. It’s only human to constantly looking for patterns. The way we are never not surrounded by patterns.
6.
Every ritual: a series of seemingly random actions, movements, arranged in an order to form something, to mean something exponentially greater than the sum of their parts.
7.
The word comes from the Old English code as in, “system of law”, from the Latin codex"
as in, systematic classification of statutory law," which comes from caudex meaning "book," meaning, "tree trunk”.
8.
Code as rule. As means to track the movement
of warm bodies, of virus, vectors through space:
we create new rituals to protect ourselves
hang QR codes from walls like talismans against death
9.
The players of two millennia ago watching us, surrounding ourselves with Go boards
to keep track of movements of people, to control and ward off disease. As ritual. As strategy.10.
Somewhere on an internet message board a stranger calculates that there can be 2 to the power of 23624 possible QR codes that can be made.11.
The number of legal board positions in Go is estimated to be about 10 to the power of 80.
This is also vastly greater than the number of atoms in the universe.12.
Ritual as order as a means of making sense of arbitrary patterns.
Ritual forcing scatter into logic. Ritual as trying to create order to chaos.
13.
If every atom on earth had its own QR code, there would still be more leftover.
They would have to create new atoms to take them on.14.
Imagine: every atom with its own hyperlink to its own website, every atom begging you to tap your phone to see more.15.
Somewhere a hundred years from now, a child asks his father why he taps his hand against every patch of black and white square he sees before entering a room.
Maybe he will call it protection.
Maybe he will call it coercion.
Maybe he will call it ritual.
