Universal Product

For business, the UPC barcode represents an advancement in product identification, inventory control, and cost saving automation. Since it’s introduction, marketers have been able to easily track the movement of products from production, to warehouse, to market shelf, to cash register. Near instantaneous information has improved manufacturing planning, transportation, and merchandising. The data collected have improved processes in pricing, targeted marketing, and cross promotions.

As a symbol for artists the ubiquitous barcode has come to represent the culture of consumer packaged goods, imprisoning automation, and dystopia. Its simple ever present black and white lines are easily observed and recreated by anyone, yet the meanings and values are out of reach of citizens, held only by businesses, read and interpreted with lasers, scanners, and microprocessors.


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The first UPC barcode ever scanned was in a supermarket in the heartland of the USA, a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was in 1974. A celebration of our collective future and technology, it is fitting that the first product was Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum. What could be more disposable than a product that acts like food, but is meant to be thrown away before it gives any real value? More telling perhaps was that it was not a single package, but a bulk 10-pack of gum, hinting at the coming explosion of consumption and obesity to follow. The package now hangs as an artifact of American culture in the Smithsonian.


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Today the UPC barcode is often used by artists as a convention to react to or celebrate overt consumerism.


Artist Scott Blake has been creating portraits of famous people and celebrities using barcodes from products related to their persona. For example, his portrait of Oprah Winfrey is made up of barcodes from books on her Oprah Book Club list. Elvis Presley uses barcodes from music CDs and Andy Wharhol, of course, uses barcodes from cans of Campbell’s Soup.





You can see more of Scott Blake’s work at http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/index.html


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Many other artists have incorporated bar codes into their work. Designer Artemy Lebedev playfully hides barcodes in altered photographs of natural settings and everyday objects. Lebedev invited others to create similar hidden barcode posters and he offers a wide range of work at his website WWW.Art.Lebedev.com






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Economist and sociologist Max Weber once described modern economic society the concern for material goods as having turned from a saint’s cloak to an iron cage. The vertical lines of barcodes lend themselves to images of cages and prisons, and this theme of imprisonment and escape from modern society, technology and commerce is fairly common in barcode art.




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Other artists use barcodes to highlight the often jarring interface between the human experience and the dehumanizing aspects of mechanized culture. So we see many images using barcodes adorning human forms, and even as tattoos.



For an outstanding display of barcodes as tattoos and street art in their many forms head over to Jet City Orange: http://www.jetcityorange.com/barcodes/tattoos/ and http://www.jetcityorange.com/barcodes/art/


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More recently, businesses have begun to see the barcode as an opportunity for expression to differentiate or at least draw attention to their packaging. A number of companies have sprung up that will create customized designs that function as working bar codes for existing optical scanners. Below are a few examples from Design Barcode Inc ( www.barcoderevolution.com ).




So what has become a convention of commerce has come full circle, owned by business, claimed by artists, retaken by business again.

Electric Performance

Thomas Edison is best known for being an inventor and innovator. Yet he was also a clever showman, and in an attempt to win over consumers, he electrocuted an elephant, and a horse, and many dogs, and even people.

At the dawn of the adoption of electricity Edison saw an opportunity to profit by being an energy supplier. His systems offered direct current power (DC), which is electricity that flows through circuits in one direction. A drawback of DC power is that it loses energy as it travels so many small power plants have to be located near customers for this system to work. Westinghouse, a competing company, soon developed an alternating current (AC) system which has the ability to maintain its power over great distances, a clear advantage.

Facing this competition, Edison sought to dissuade the public from adopting AC by trying to convince them it was unsafe. One way he did this was by involvement in the development of the Electric Chair as a means to execute prisoners. In particular he made sure that when first used, it would be powered by Westinghouse AC generators. Leading up to the use of AC power for killing people, Edison displayed the use of AC power to electrocute numerous animals. Perhaps the most famous of these displays was the 1903 electrocution of Topsy, the Coney Island Luna Park Zoo Elephant. Fifteen hundred people were on hand to watch.

The $10000 Sculpture

Artist Caleb Larsen says that the dollar bill acceptor is "a symbol of self-serve retail transactions." In the piece called The $10000 Sculpture (In Progress) the dollar bill acceptor shows up dismembered, not attached to any vending machine, but installed in an otherwise blank wall, with no indication of what it is for, nor what will be provided in exchange. In presenting the acceptor this way, Larsen exploits expectations about mechanisms used for transactions and the work makes a comment on our relationships with them. Despite offering nothing in return, one is tempted to (and many do) put a dollar in just to see what happens, or for the pleasure of having the dollar mechanically eaten by the mouth of the machine. In this way, the art may show there is some compulsion, or some pleasure, associated with interacting with the device, beyond the exchange that is usually made.

A second facet of the work is that it involves a contract between the owner/curator and the artist that stipulates donation of any money collected. In this way, Larsen further challenges the meaning of ownership, as it comes to mean an acceptance of responsibility, and a decision to enter into an ongoing relationship with the artist.

See this and more of Caleb Larsen's work at
http://www.caleblarsen.com/projects/10000-sculpture-in-progress/#1

Human Milk Cheese

Chef Daniel Angerers took his art to a new level when he saw the stored milk meant for his infant daughter going down the drain. As a chef, he could see the potential for this human product to be used in much the same way milk from other animals is made. He hasn't just made cheese, however. He has placed the cheese as a centerpiece in lavish presentations one would expect from a high end restaurant; "mommy's milk cheese with beets and romaine", or "rolled in dehydrated porcini mushroom powder with burned onion chutney."

Of course, many people find this disgusting. Research on what people find disgusting and why goes back as far as Charles Darwin (yep, Darwin). Recent researchers tend to think that while disgust may be an emotional reaction to things, such as foods, that may harm us, much of it comes from learned reactions to objects. Certain categories of things tend to be particularly likely to cause disgust. These include food, animals, body products, sexual deviance, body envelope violations, and death. In addition there are moral forms of disgust that come from certain violations of what are considered acceptable behaviors, such as incest, and unfair treatment.

This case of mother's milk cheese is a like a triple whammy. It comes out of a body hole, from a human animal, may have a sexual connotation, may be unacceptable because it is like taking milk from a specific baby. Moreover, the sacred relationship between a mother and a baby is sullied by this processing the pure milk into mundane cheese. Finally, its presentation is jarring. We don't expect this ingredient in a quality restaurant meal. So it contaminates the entire category by its very existence.

See more at http://chefdanielangerer.typepad.com/chef_daniel_angerers_blog/2010/02/mommys-milk.html

Above the Fold

By now it's either under the dog in the corner, or put out with the recycling, but Disney recently paid the L.A. Times about $700,000 to put a false front page with an advertisement for the film Alice in Wonderland over the actual front page of the newspaper. An advertisement in a newspaper is not abnormal, but putting it on the front page, and allowing it to look like an actual front page, seems to have crossed a line. The critical outcry is telling. It suggests that consumers and citizens feel a sense of ownership over a newspaper's front page, or at least a sense of expectatoins about its proper use. Some would argue that a manufacturer can configure their product in any way they choose. Then consumers can either buy it or reject it. Not true, it appears. Now a trust has been violated. What's more, by making the advertisement appear to be an actual front page with the Mad Hatter character superimposed, readers were at least momentarily duped. So readers are disrepected. Art (and marketing) prevail.