MASS MoCA’s New Exhibition Treats QR Codes, Dial-Up Modems, and Coffee Readings as Living Technology
At MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, a new exhibition is asking visitors to reconsider what counts as “technology” — and what gets lost when speed becomes the default setting. “Technologies of Relation” brings together works that treat networks not only as digital systems, but as cultural, domestic, and ancestral structures: patterns, rituals, and ways of knowing that long predate the internet.
One of the show’s quietest provocations comes from Roopa Vasudevan’s “Slow Response I (Drawings)” (2021–22), a suite of 100 hand-drawn QR codes. Some are functional, linking to brief, poetic “reflections.” Others refuse utility altogether, reading instead as intricate graphic fields. In the gallery, the codes hover between machine language and ornament — a reminder that the QR code, now ubiquitous in museums and restaurants, is also a visual design with its own aesthetic logic.
Curator Cross, speaking about the work, emphasized the way Vasudevan reclaims the code from frictionless scanning and returns it to the pace of looking. The drawings, with their color and visible touch, insist on the artist’s hand where viewers expect automation.
Vasudevan extends that temporal shift in “Requiem for the Early Internet” (2022/2026), a tongue-in-cheek series of clear acrylic plaques dispersed throughout the exhibition. The texts memorialize the once-familiar infrastructure of online life: MySpace is remembered as “as place for friends that gave us a place to shine,” while another plaque reads “In Loving Memory of the Dial-Up Modem,” honoring the device that made connecting to the web feel like “a special occasion.” The work lands as both affectionate and pointed — nostalgia, yes, but also a critique of how quickly digital culture discards its own recent past.
Elsewhere, the exhibition turns toward the future by looking backward — not as retro style, but as a method for imagining what technology could be when it is shaped by disability justice, heritage, and non-Western epistemologies.
New Zealand-born Pelanakeke Brown’s installation “Reverb” (2025–26) is among the show’s most emotionally resonant works. Brown, an artist with a disability engaged with Crip Theory, draws on Samoan cultural forms, including tapa — bark cloth made through intensive processing — and overlays them with symbols that evoke keystrokes and mythic marks. The patterns are rendered in precise symmetry with the aid of A.I., creating a surface that feels at once ceremonial and computational.
Brown also references Mafuiʻe, the Samoan god of earthquakes who lives beneath the ground and, as Cross noted, is “also disabled,” having one arm. Brown’s research, Cross said, is rooted in locating disability narratives within precolonial Samoa — a reframing that challenges the assumption that disability history begins with modern medicine or contemporary activism.
A different kind of hybrid knowledge system animates “Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup: Querent)” (2024–26), a collaborative project by Mashinka Hakopian and Danny Snelson, with Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian. The work merges artificial intelligence with tasseography — coffee reading — described in the exhibition catalogue as an “ancestral form of knowing.”
Installed as an elaborately designed kitchen environment, the project foregrounds domestic space as a site where technology is always present, whether as appliance, ritual, or interface. Traditional Armenian textile designs nod to Hakopian’s heritage and to the ways pattern carries information across generations. Visitors sign up in advance for 10-minute sessions. They choose an overturned coffee cup on a saucer, place a thumb inside to smudge the grounds, then position the cup beneath a reader and press a button. A mechanical whir signals the start of the reading — a small theatrical cue that collapses the distance between divination and prediction, between the kitchen table and the algorithm.
Taken together, the works in “Technologies of Relation” propose a more expansive definition of the technological: one that includes looms and modems, disability mythologies and QR codes, the intimacy of a family ritual and the abstraction of A.I. In a moment when the art world is saturated with talk of acceleration, the exhibition’s most persuasive gesture may be its insistence on another tempo — one where attention becomes its own form of connection.
“Technologies of Relation” is on view at MASS MoCA.
