Numbers Racquet
This photographic diptych forms a composite object—a racquet—using outdated numeric interfaces to explore systems of access and control. The work reflects on how analog devices once shaped movement, connection, and hierarchy, revealing enduring cultural codes embedded in obsolete forms.
In Numbers Racquet, a photographic diptych presents two obsolete interfaces: a telephone keypad on top, and a vintage elevator button panel beneath. Each segment functions as a relic of a now-outmoded technology, yet their union forms a coherent, almost sculptural shape—the head and handle of a racquet. This subtle formal integration transforms archival observation into conceptual play, bridging technological material culture with visual metaphor.
The top half depicts a standard twelve-key telephone pad, including alphabetical pairings and secondary functions such as “TONE,” “MUTE,” and “REDIAL.” Its once-bright plastic keys have dulled to shades of institutional green and yellowed white, suggesting prolonged use and age. Framed directly and evenly lit, the keypad reads as a grid—a rationalized structure of communication in which letters and numbers are neatly encoded into a system of access.
The lower panel sharply contrasts in tone and texture. Here, three circular elevator buttons—marked 6, 5, and 7—descend diagonally along a blackened metal shaft. The surfaces are worn, with the red “5” illuminated like a signal light. These buttons are not crisp artifacts; they are lived surfaces, rich with the traces of touch. The uneven wear, the soft glow, and the oblique camera angle lend this segment a bodily immediacy. It suggests transit not only through space but through memory, invoking the slow friction of ascent, descent, and repetition.
Together, these components form a hybrid object: a racquet constructed from codes. The keypad is the string bed—gridded, logical, digital. The elevator buttons compose the handle—linear, directional, analog. The viewer’s mind resolves the shape subconsciously before registering the symbolic weight of its construction. This composite form literalizes the work’s title while emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnection between systems of movement and speech, of interface and intent.
Numbers Racquet invites reflection on the architecture of control. Phones and elevators are both interfaces designed to move people—one through space, the other through networks. Yet both are deeply embedded with hierarchies. The keypad grants access by permission of the system—each number dialed passes through an unseen infrastructure. The elevator panel offers limited choices, predetermined paths of vertical mobility. Their pairing suggests that the very tools meant to enable movement may, in fact, constrain it within the logic of design.
The image also gestures toward obsolescence, capturing a moment in technological history where the tactile, mechanical, and physical mediated our connection to systems of information and architecture. In an age of voice commands, touchscreen glass, and seamless automation, these buttons now appear intimate, even nostalgic. But the work resists sentimentality. Instead, it calls attention to the embedded ideologies in even the simplest numeric codes—how choice is shaped, options are constrained, and agency is always situated within structure.
From a formal perspective, the diptych employs symmetry and contrast to highlight the duality of its themes. The top image is frontal, rational, and abstracted; the bottom, oblique, emotional, and atmospheric. This dual framing serves as a subtle commentary on the tension between abstraction and embodiment, between systems and the people who navigate them.
Numbers Racquet stands as a meditation on the cultural residue of systems once invisible in their ubiquity. By reassembling utilitarian objects into a symbolic tool, the image reconfigures our relationship with machines—not as neutral conduits, but as players in a game of access, mobility, and control. Its brilliance lies not only in the cleverness of its form, but in the depth of its critique: beneath the buttons and digits lies a portrait of how we once moved through the world—and how we still do.
Essay written: May 2025