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.

Not surprisingly, Blake is a whiz on the computer. Bar codes allow him to combine his two passions -- technology and art. Using Photoshop, Blake arranges the bar codes into intricate, swirling patterns that come together to form not only a recognizable image, but a concentrated collection of data.

Blake's fascination with bar codes goes beyond their aesthetic black and white stripes.

"Just thinking about how all the information was getting broken down into zeros and ones, binary data, and being transmitted through the Internet tubes on to my screen, that was a very spiritual awakening," he said.

Sticking bar codes on paper sounds simple enough, but it's not as easy as one might think. As it turns out, each bar code has a different girth and shade from the next, as exhibited on his Web site www.barcodeart.com, which means that Blake must determine the right gradation of code to match the image he is recreating.

"I've created a large database of bar codes over the years," he said. "I arrange them. They all have the same width but some have thick lines, some have thin lines, and that gives my first gradation. I've done portraits like that with just the gradation of the density lines. Some are big and some are small."

Although these discrepancies make his work considerably more difficult, it is the grades of lines that produce the contrast and "optical illusion quality," according to Blake.

Like Monet's "Waterlilies" or Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," Blake's work transforms as his viewer's perspective changes. Up close, viewers can analyze the elaborate array of bar codes. From a distance, the total image is revealed.

Conceptually, Blake's ideas differ from those of Warhol and Lichtenstein, both fascinated by the popular image. His prints argue that the public's perception of these celebrities through television, film or print are nothing more than a combination of data, some concrete and some simulated, fed to them by the media.

To that end, Blake's bar codes, all of which he contends are scannable, are clipped from products associated with his subject. For example, Oprah's face is formed from bar codes of books selected for her book club, Bill Gates' image is made from bar codes from his Microsoft products, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's portrait is from bar codes off every one of his movies.

Although his art is different, many in the art world do not consider him a true artist because his work is done solely on the computer.

"People kind of portray me as a bar code lunatic; people think it's kind of a gimmick," said Blake.

But is Blake's computer-generated, data-ridden, consumer-driven work the future of contemporary art? As more and more information and images become instantly accessible via the Internet, will the art world expand to make use of this new creative resource?

In the meantime, Blake continues to snip, synthesize and scan these everyday objects into works of art.