Discover the Magic of Bar Code Art

Scott Blake is a bar code artist. As if that wasn’t unique enough, each piece of bar code in his art is scannable. That’s right, you can take your iPhone right up to his art and scan a piece of code to see the product it is associated with.

He has created over 30 celebrity and cultural icon portraits including Madonna, Elvis and Ozzy Osbourne and in each one of these 8-foot tall portraits, each piece of bar code comes from the UPC numbers on the product that relates to that person (i.e. one of their own CDs or movies).

In the first video below, you will see Scott creating a self-portrait painting entitled, “I am what I eat” which is a compilation of bar codes from the foods he eats. He even has a place on his website where you can “bar code yourself.” This is so cool because it takes the very basic information about each person and reduces it down to “one black and white identifiable symbol,” as Scott describes. You can bar code yourself here.