Motivated by the typical beeps and tones of a POS barcode scanner, Košice-based artist Jakub Pišek decided to develop a way to make music with the same tools being employed in retail stores. With the help of some of his friends, Jakub started staging grocery store performance where they would scan anything in the store to create music. Each different barcode equates to a variety of sounds which can be composed in the moment by simply scanning. See the performances in action in the video below.

It’s always interesting to see how barcodes make their way into or influence various type of artworks but “Ultraviolet -The Blue Carpet” by French artist Jonathan Bréchignac might me one of the most impressive. He hand drew this  2.5 ft × 4 ft design on paper using just blue Bic pens and Ultraviolet ink! It took  and took eight months to complete and will be showing  as part of the “The Blue Route” exhibition  from September 27, 2013 to February 9, 2014 at  at Villa Empain in Brussels. The intricacy, detail, and scope of the work is quite amazing. Each of the four QR Codes in the work take you to mysterious pages like this one. Hopefully we’ll end up seeing more great works from Bréchignac in the future!

Most of the time when we use the term ‘barcode design’ there really isn’t much design work involved outside of making sure the right data gets encoded in the right symbology. Creativity and barcode design software don’t often make it into the same sentence but it’s one area where you can really improve and have some fun with your product packaging.

Artist Steve Simpson has been making the most of UPC barcodes with some very interesting and creative takes on how a product code can be better integrated into packaging design. He even provides some tips and rules to follow to make sure the code is still readable.

Barcodes are a common part of your everyday shopping experience or maybe even on your ID card to the gym, but they also can be found in public artworks.

SODO, created by California-based Merge Conceptual Design artists’ Claudia Reisenberger and Franka Diehnelt, is a visual narrative that catalogues more than 200 years of SoDo’s history. Created in partnership with the Seattle Department of Transportation, the artwork consists more than 500 painted columns as part of the Spokane Street Viaduct Widening Project.

Large stenciled and barcode designs adorn the concrete columns that hold up the existing and new portions of the Spokane Street Viaduct between Sixth Avenue South and East Marginal Way South. To distinguish and identify each theme within the artwork, the artists created their own unique barcodes encrypted with the name of each field for the project.

Contact us at BarcodesInc to find all the ways you can put barcodes to use.

Artist Scott Blake has a series of portraits completely made from scannable barcodes.  The images are of various cultural icons and are not just a simple print.
If you scan the codes in the portraits with a scanner or smartphone you can watch videos, listen to audio clips, and read up on the subjects in the image.

“I have made more than 30 large-scale digital portraits of cultural icons using actual barcodes connected to some aspect of their lives. My Barcode Elvis portrait is made with barcodes from his music CDs. Barcode Bruce Lee and Barcode Marilyn Monroe are comprised of barcodes from their movie DVDs. Barcode Oprah is made with the ISBN barcodes from her book club. Interact with my art. Move beyond form to function. Scan the barcodes with your smartphone. Hear, watch and read as my subjects tell their stories.” – Scott Blake