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. * * *
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.
this is a brilliant post. thanks!
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