Illustration:
First Place, Most Creative

Scott Blake
Savannah College of Art & Design

Code 128/Jesus/Book of Revelation

Artist's Statement: My bar code portraits explore the process of making art with technology. As a computer artist, I am in the business of selling pixels. The bar code represents technology, efficiency, and commodities. It is the universal icon for the computer revolution.

Two artists that have influenced my work are Chuck Close and Roy Lichtenstein. Chuck Close's process of building a painting one block at a time encouraged me to work on my designer pixels. Roy Lichtenstein's examination of Benday dots opened my eyes to the science of half- tone printing.

Code 128/Jesus/Book of Revelation uses individual words from the book of Revelation that have been bar coded to paint a portrait of Jesus. It is an attack on the accepted image of Christ, as well as the sacred text of the Christian bible. It tests faith in religion and by doing so, questions the true meaning of any faith; be it in God, technology, or yourself.

I start work on my bar code portraits by building all of the bar codes using a Macros program I made inside Microsoft Excel. That program outputs a string of 0's and 1's that are formatted into white and black cells. I then take screen shots of the finished worksheets in Excel to be used in Photoshop. The screen shots are run through an Action that converts the binary blocks into bar codes complete with human readable numbers at the bottom. Going by the mean average in the histogram palate, I sort the bar codes into layers from lightest to darkest. I then begin working on the face image. I first reduce the image size to about an inch and then enlarge it to 5 feet using nearest neighbor interpolation. This gives me an image that visually is low resolution but is actually thousands of pixels wide. These oversized pixels match the dimensions of the bar codes I created earlier. Finally, I created an Action that fills the big pixels in the face image with corresponding bar codes according to their gray value.

The final resolution of my portraits are usually between 15,000 and 20,000 pixels square. Instead of working on the entire image at once, I process the image in smaller sections. It takes about four (4) days to render one portrait on my Mac G3 300 MHz with 196 RAM.