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Writer's picturejames girouard

Tricking the machine

Updated: Mar 22

We've all heard of 'the ghost in the machine'. Besides being an excellent album, it usualy refers to 'bugs' or problems in computer code resulting in behaviours that cannot be explained. How is it that computers, in all of their precision, specificity, and 0 and 1 coding can have fuzzy or non-specific behaviours? Can we capitalize on this and dupe them? How about pitting a human's diy craft skills against the computer? Could I create QR recognition software by hand, with a hook and some wool? I hoped that I could so I put together a QR code and hooked it.


This really cool red burlap found it's way to me and thought that the extra challenge to stray from the common black and white might be interesting. I already had a frame that fit most of the burlap, so I stretched it up and drew out the plan. The actual hooking was quick, with the grain all going in one direction, but I was on edge the whole time as I really had no idea if this would be wasted effort. No way to really know if it was going to work until it was all done. Once the hooking was complete, I whipped up a 20" square wooden frame and stapled it down for the final piece.


I think that the result is something that looks great and already tricks the eye in its use of swamp green against the rancid red. See the completed image of it on the main page.


By the way, the ubiquitous QR has it's own interesting history. Something that I really dig about it is the fact that this really cool piece of identification software was ultimately open source from it's incipience.


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