This past Saturday’s opening at Scott Projects featured work by Arend deGruyter-Helfer, Aylor Brown, Bailey Salisbury and Carson Fisk-Vittori, a team of four recent undergraduates who collectively assembled while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and who share a tendency towards conceptualism and a subtle sense of aesthetics. Their respective concerns appear dissonant, except where their processes touch upon the transit of information from the physical to the digital, and back again. Accordingly, Carson Fisk-Vittori begins the exhibition with two QR code images laser-printed on clear vinyl and adhered to the wall near the gallery entrance. The two-dimensional QR code, like its more familiar one-dimensional counterpart, the UPC barcode, is an optical representation of digital data, capable of being read, with the assistance of special software, by a cell-phone camera. Once read, the code immediately redirects a user’s web-enabled phone to a particular URL; a process, called hardlinking, bridges physical and digital space. Unfortunately, no one present endeavored to scan the two works (and my outmoded cell-phone lacked the proper technological capability to attempt a reading), leaving a vital component of the work unacknowledged, though the impact, of a possibly fruitful expansion of physical space, may still be felt. (Nate Lee)
Through June 2 at Scott Projects, 1542 N. Milwaukee. Open by appointment.
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