CODED emerges from interviews and image-based exchanges with Grindr users, examining how digital photography functions as language within queer online encounters. The work explores the habitual, almost unconscious nature of app engagement, where opening, scrolling, and sharing photographs occur on autopilot. Within this coded environment, photographs operate less as expressions of self than as performative gestures that sustain dialogue: “it’s just what you do, eh, send pics to get the chat going.” Through repetition and circulation, these images lose their aura, collapsing into signs of difference within an algorithmically governed visual economy. The project situates this banality as both symptom and structure, where looking replaces seeing, and the self becomes a loop of display and desire. CODED responds through collage and sequencing, translating conversational scripts into visual code. It reintroduces the possibility of aura by disrupting the automated language of the app, proposing a slower, affective mode of looking that resists algorithmic flattening. The series operates as critique and counterpoint, revealing how queer self-representation is simultaneously constrained and made possible by the networked aesthetics of everyday digital life.