QR Codes, Error, and Loopology

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to work electrically without working electronically.

This QR work started as an image problem — how far a QR code can be pushed before it stops being readable — but it’s become something closer to a way of looking. A way of inspecting systems that are supposed to behave, and watching what happens when they don’t quite.

That’s where Loopology comes in.

Loopology and inspection

Loopology, for me, is about systems that repeat, signal, encode, and return. Phone lines, tones, QR codes, warning systems — they’re all built to loop information reliably from one place to another. They’re also built with an assumption: that some amount of error will happen.

QR codes make that explicit. They don’t demand perfection. They budget for failure.

That margin — the allowed error — is where this work lives.

Painting a QR code

Instead of generating a clean digital QR, I started treating it as a physical object.

Tape. Paint. Lines. Bleed.

I masked the structure, then painted across it, knowing the paint would slip under tape, soften edges, and pool where it wasn’t supposed to. The rules were set first. Once the process started, I didn’t correct it.

The result looks painterly — watercolor, glitch, surface — but underneath, it’s still a functioning machine-readable code. Sometimes it scans instantly. Sometimes it takes effort. Sometimes it fails depending on the light, the camera, or the distance.

That variability isn’t a flaw. It’s the point.

Error that doesn’t end the system

In most painting, error resolves visually. The paint dries. The surface records what happened. There’s no recovery.

QR codes are different. They expect damage. They reconstruct missing information. They keep going until they can’t.

That difference fascinated me.

How much paint bleed is allowed?
How many lines can cross the grid?
How visible can error become before the system stops recognizing itself?

These aren’t symbolic questions — they’re testable.

Electric, not electronic

I keep coming back to the word electric.

Not because this work uses electricity — it doesn’t — but because it behaves like an electrical system: signal, resistance, noise, tolerance. The tools matter. The wear matters. The marks matter.

I think of old lineman tools, stamped metal, scarred surfaces — objects that once carried current, signals, loops. They weren’t decorative. They were functional. They show their history.

That’s what I want these QR pieces to do.

They aren’t illustrations of QR codes. They are QR codes, under stress.

Why Loopology

Loopology isn’t nostalgia. It’s not retro tech. It’s attention.

It’s inspecting the systems we rely on — scanning, dialing, decoding — and asking where they bend instead of break. It’s letting error show itself instead of hiding it.

These QR paintings are part of that practice. They sit at the edge where paint meets protocol, where human vision and machine vision overlap, and where a system either resolves… or doesn’t.

Both outcomes are meaningful.

That’s the work.