Trent Lunsford invited me to create a short piece for one of their THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE performances, an imaginative take on the 1959 grammar book by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. I thought the project was such a cool idea! I also really resonated with the team’s approach in using accessibility technologies to communicate text without ever speaking. I was given the prompt, “Make sure the reader knows who’s speaking.” It just so happened that I started playing around with barcode technology when Trent reached out. So I decided to riff on the idea of translation and unclear speakers using a barcode scanner.
Using an online barcode generator, I created barcodes that register as a word or sentence. I then routed the scanner to translate the barcode into an online text-to-speech reader so that the text could get projected and read-aloud by the computer at the same time. But I could not find any software that would auto-play the inputted text — a separate play button needed to be pushed. With some experimenting I found that I could program commands inside a barcode, including tab and enter. Depending on the layout and placement of the play button, I could program a series of tab commands followed by enter to trigger play as soon as the text gets scanned.
I took sections of text from THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE and rendered them into barcodes affixed onto kitchen pantry items. The piece was presented as the most convoluted and needlessly complicated class lecture ever. Sentences were “spoken” and rearranged by scanning and moving items around — a physical interpretation of the construction of a sentence. But the sentences start to rebel, leading to me turning the barcode scanner to myself, revealing a hidden barcode imprinted on my leg. (Yes, you can make functional barcode temporary tattoos using tattoo paper!)
Myra Su 