The QR codes sculptures and QR codes bas-reliefs project developed by Vincent Du Bois extracts the graphics of computer-generated QR codes from the 2nd dimension and reproduces them in the 3rd dimension. Here, the digital is torn away to return to the analogical. While technology tends to reproduce everything virtually, it is here a process of inversion that takes place. We draw from the digital sphere to feed the material. The dialogue between matter and the digital revolution being a central theme of VDB, through this series of works the artist deals with abstraction on two levels; functional abstraction (typical of the brain) and structural abstraction (virtuality). The QR code, flat and strictly functional, is transformed in the material and becomes a work of art. From an image infinitely reproduced on our screens, frozen in marble, it becomes unique.

Also, as a bas-relief, it inspires touch, like a Braille script, giving back a little of its share to a sense bypassed by the digital sphere. The principle of the coded message (algorithms translating links, words or sentences) is preserved since standard or personalized messages are reproduced in these objects. The sculpted messages may or may not remain legible, depending on the materials and finishes chosen. Here it is the allusion to the secret or lost language that matters. As QR codes are based on algorithms that are inaccessible to the human brain, it is likely that they will sooner or later become a page in the archaeology of the future, joining the mysteries that tomorrow’s generations will have to decode.

Language is information. It is also the intangible base of our thinking, and social networks are an eloquent witness to this. Vincent Du Bois has developed a whole section of his work on ancestral and contemporary codes that structure idioms. Part of this work is devoted to the digital approach to language via QR codes. QR codes perfectly express the technological abstraction that overwhelms our daily lives. With the algorithms that compose them, humans have created a language that they cannot learn. Moreover, their aesthetic presence, although invasive, is little questioned. Vincent Du Bois turns them into works of art. From simple graphic lines they mutate into marble tables. From the ancient technique of stone sculpture, the artist offers contemporary works filled with poetry and mystery. A dialogue between past and present, between know-how and technology and between hand and virtuality takes place. Through the gesture, chance and accident invite themselves where digital planning does everything to erase them.

QR codes, these matrix jargons, are then sucked into human memory and become steeped in history, like the fossils of a future society. These black modules on a white background, which only digital devices can read, escape from the immateriality of the screen to become matter and deliver other messages. Vincent Du Bois thus transforms these mysterious paintings of signs into tangible objects by making bas-reliefs with hidden meanings. Thus these graphic grids are transformed into checkerboards or three-dimensional labyrinths, a little like the clay tablets which are at the origin of the first writings. Sight here is no longer the only sense solicited since the graphic play, typical of these codes, by taking shape in the material like a Braille language, inspire touch.

Each bas-relief takes up the original composition of the real QR code from which it is inspired and each contains a word or a sentence typical of computer language. Nprivate navigation, you no longer have enough memory, I accept, or Don’t be evil, taken out of context then take on a new meaning that underlines the discrepancy between the real sensitive world and the dematerialized virtual world. These QR codes thus rendered to the material offer a formal and aesthetic object charged with a new look, full of humor and poetry, offering a little perspective on a technology so dependent on the functional dimension. Are his strange bas-reliefs then the tables of the new digital religion? (Yasmine Lavizzari, art historian – excerpt presentation presentation “Glitch” – Air project 2016)