Faces of Jesus

Bar Code Jesus

Based on the face of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin, this picture is made up of thousands of individual bar codes. The artist who created it did so not to inspire devotion but to ask questions about Jesus, faith and technology. Thanks to Scott Blake for permission to use these images.

Scott Blake, from Savannah, Georgia, makes portraits which combine art with technology. He says: “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.”

Scott has produced several images of the face of Jesus, and all of them are made up of thousands of individual bar codes. Starting with a scanned image taken from a Shroud of Turin hologram card, Scott matched the light areas of the face with light bar codes, and the shadowed areas with dark bar codes. It took his computer four days to produce the final image, which is almost 1.4 metres square.

The image above has an extra element. “I used individual words from the Bible’s book of Revelation that I bar coded to paint a portrait of Jesus,” Scott explains. If you click here, you can view a close-up of the image showing the individual bar codes. Each code is made from a word taken from the text of the book of Revelation: words such as king, sand, jasper, waters and healed.

Scott’s portrait of Christ, unlike the other faces of Jesus shown in this gallery, is not intended to encourage faith or devotion. Instead it is about asking questions. “This face has been completely engineered to make Jesus the ultimate poster boy for selling God’s word,” says Scott. “This piece 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 it questions the true meaning of any faith; be it in God, technology, or yourself.”

What do you think? Do you find this image, or the way it has been produced, interesting, thought-provoking or inspiring? Or what?

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