A few days into the quarantines that ushered in the Year of the Rat, printed QR codes began to appear everywhere in Shanghai This was the beginning of a QR code health registration scheme, which was used to manage population during the Coronavirus pandemic Register and you were given a coloured QR code A green code meant access to the city was open, with a red code the metropolis was locked Ubiquitous QR codes are not new to China’s urban landscape Starting around 2015 these simple black and white images, complex enough to encode characters, but cheap and easy to produce, created a virtual economy based on mobile-payments that has totally transformed city life More than texting or talking, watching, listening or wayfinding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell phone’s killer app This essay explores the machinic assemblage of cell phones + QR Codes which opens a portal into an emerging mediasphere that is fundamentally non-anthropomorphic in nature Scanning a QR code is an embodied practice or sensing system that activates an all-pervasive locative media, transforming the previously inert physical landscape into the urban scale, distributed intelligence of the sentient city © 2021 Society for Studia Neophilologica
QR codes and the sentient city