QR Code Alphabets

The essence of communication and the definition of Words

• Visual Arts

This work begins with a fundamental question: what is language? What makes something a word?

When readers of different languages encounter the same literary work, do they truly experience the same thing? Is translation a transfer, or a transformation? We assume we understand — but are we understanding the same thing?

By deconstructing the structure of QR codes, I created a new alphabet system — 26 letters, each corresponding to a visual unit extracted from a QR code. These symbols have distinct forms, carry assignable meaning, and are differentiable from one another. Yet no one can read them at a glance. The system satisfies the first condition of a writing system: each symbol maps to a specific meaning. It deliberately withholds the second: legibility.

When familiar words are converted into this alphabet — rendered into something completely unrecognisable — do we still have the same psychological response in the moment of seeing? Has the meaning disappeared, or has it simply taken a form we cannot yet enter?

What this work ultimately asks is the nature of communication itself: do we truly understand one another? Or are we each operating within our own familiar systems, convinced that we do?