Artist's Statement

“Barcode+Sound: Traces of Invisible Codes” is an installation and sound project to reflect the issues of globalization in relation to international trade and mass production. It also captures a trace of digitalization that interacts closely with human daily life.

Barcode + Sound, displays an enormous number of barcodes that I obsessively collected which were obtained from everyday consumer products from all over the world, for instance, China, Korea, Argentina, U.S.A., etc. This work incorporates sound that is edited particularly for this work. It mimics the sound produced when the barcode is being laser-scanned. The volume of the sound is faint and minimal, between a state of being able to be heard and not to be heard. Displaying enormous numbers of barcodes embedded with such faint digital sound, the work unfolds an unconsciousness and unawareness of the fact that boundless digitalization overwhelms the human world, spiritually and physically.

All the barcodes were obtained from the packages of consumer products I encounter every day, but I found only a few of them originated locally because most products are imported from overseas, especially from developing countries where a large amount of labor is used in the assembly line for mass producing goods. The sense of boredom, repetition, and monotony of the labor force resulting from globalization and mass production was examined during the process of creating this project: I repeatedly resized more than a thousand zip-log bags, and then packed each barcode into the bag. Subsequently, I repeatedly hung each packed barcode onto the meshes. This monotonous, labor-intensive process is industrious and emotionless, and that brings up a question of whether mass production, apart from its benefits, leads to depersonalization, dehumanization and alienation.

A barcode is a special and functional symbol of our time. It is so common that everyone would see this symbol everyday on almost every object. Just because it is so widely used, people tend not to be aware of seeing it. A barcode is different from other kinds of symbols due to a digital function that links it to a computerized database. The barcode is the center of interest in this work and is expanded as a reference of other issues in terms of the globalization and digitalization of our time.

-Mae Leong