Scott Blake - Barcode Art

Note: This is a re-post from my old blog (pseudopop). Blake continued to push the envelope of art and has updated his site with a lot of new great work. Be sure to check it out. barcodeart.com

Barcodes are everywhere. They saturate virtually every facet of American consumerism. They are inescapable and inevitably here to stay. When a barcode is used as art, at first it comes across as one of those blank canvases hanging in a modern art museum that nobody understands or a tired cliché, making an astute observation on our automaton-esque lives. Scott Blake is trying to make us all reconsider.

Blake explains his work as follows:

I choose the barcode symbol because it reduces everything to white and black marks. It equalizes the world with an objective scan. Coke or Pepsi, Jesus or Buddha, American or Russian, Dead or Alive is all the same to the barcode. The system of bars appears random, but the computer easily understands this chaos. I try to look at the world from a computer’s point of view. – Interview with inbox magazine

One of my favorite pieces by Scott Blake is titled “Bar Code Oprah“. This piece is a portrait of Oprah composed of hundreds of barcodes, each acquired from books featured in Oprah’s Book Club.