Elvis, Jesus and Warhol -- Rendered in Bar Code
Dec. 11, 2006 — -- To most, a bar code is little more than something that beeps at the checkout counter. To Scott Blake, a 29-year-old Omaha, Neb., artist, however, bar codes are the fingerprints of the products we consume -- and they are the raw materials for his art.
From Coke bottles and DVDs to books and flat screen TVs, bar codes get stamped on just about everything these days. But chances are most people have never taken the time to actually understand what all those lines and numbers mean.
Blake is a bar code artist. He started small, experimenting with pixels and Photoshop, creating squares, circles and lines out bar codes -- until one day when a "happy accident" occurred: Blake created a bar code out of bar codes and has never looked back.
Now, eight years later, his work includes portraits of cultural icons, videos, flipbooks, traditional paintings, and even tattoos that he creates out of complex combinations of bar codes.
"I'm drawn to the bar code because they're black and white," explained Blake in an interview with ABC News. "They break everything down into one identifiable symbol. It's universal. It can represent Coke or Pepsi, Jesus or Buddha, life or death. It represents itself, everything and nothing."
The use of bar codes in contemporary art is not uncommon. Since their invention in the 1960's, artists have used them as a symbol of commercialization and as a commentary on our consumer culture. But Blake's bar codes make art out of the ordinary and find beauty in the commonplace.
"Blake takes bar codes and turns them into art," said Art Papers Magazine critic Kent Wolgamott, "art that is simultaneously pop and op, intellectual and personal, minimal and ocular, appropriated and original."
By far, his most eye-catching pieces are the "Bar Code Portrait Prints," which combine Roy Lichtenstein's dots with Andy Warhol's iconographic subjects, featuring prominent celebrities, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Madonna, Jesus and, fittingly enough, Warhol himself.
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