B! Poetry

---

Shopping malls, the proliferating hybrid of modern Minotaur in a carnivalesque age

of globalization, are temptations we can hardly resist. With the melodic gospel of

commercial ads airing in the background, it is hard not to fall in love with this

prosperous, harmonious scene that bespeaks world peace. No maer which corner

of the globe you live, dont you worry, there are universal standards to check on

types of pasta and sizes of apples to cater to your needs. When you weep, you will

never weep alone: there happens to be just these ten brands of tissue paper, neither

more nor less for you to choose, waiting around to console your sorrow.

In our aempt to mark the so-called individuality through various consuming

practices, the act of consumption simultaneously erases all the dierences and

obscures our individual distinction. We trade other possibilities of living a dierent

life for what appears to be a bargain.

e loaded goods in his shopping cart / overlap with mine / which

implies some sort of possibility for living together doesnt it / Isnt

this swell / We eat the same brand of frozen food in dierent

apartments / Doesnt this indicate some shared personality traits /

Isnt this swell we use the same kind of soap and soap holder / Isnt

this swell we can join our ats together / we join each other as our

bodies come together / cause a rise in certain statistics / while make

a drop in some other numbers

---Hsia Y, Lining up to Pay

Barcode

barcode

In our aempt to mark the so-called individuality through various consuming

practices, the act of consumption simultaneously erases all the dierences and

obscures our individual distinction. We trade other possibilities of living a dierent

life for what appears to be a bargain.

Barcode, like our identity card number for citizenship, is not only a unique

identier for trade items but also speaks a universal language that enables

unimpeded circulation of commodities in the international market, transcending

limits of dierent linguistic contexts as well as constraints of national boundaries. In

our activity of translating the physical objects into digital barcodes, labeling goods

under neatly classied categories and puing a price on each and every item, the

world has integrated in unity when everybody lines up and forms continuity. Aer

the beep, we pay our bills. Whats the correspondence between the face value on the

notes and the barcode on the goods? ats a question not to be asked. Move on,

please! Clerks check and scan the goods in a wink, customers pay in cash or with

credit cardno mess, no fuss (as long as the barcode is in place)we perform the

ritual of consumption in perfect coordination, enacting the supreme order of

capitalism.

e world has then divided into two, and words belong to that invisible half, the

half that is on the screen and behind the counter.

128

(code 128)

When the words are not longer in presence, the objects they represent have lost their names. We

cannot see the vast logistics market operating behind the barcode mechanism, what remains right

before our eyes is numbers. In this eld of vision, all material objects we see are priced commodities,

and moreover, one by one, people all turn into pieces of goods, tagged with corresponding prices:

hourly pay, monthly salary and insurance premiumall summed up equals a persons social status.

To be or not to be is no longer the question in vogue; what denes somebody is whether s/he has

enough in the pocket to meet all the needs and desires for consumption: I beep, therefore I am.

All those jobs take great eorts, sinews and spirits, consume every bit of existence as Hsia Y aptly

put in her poem.

For this and many other reasons, we imagine the intervention of poetry.

By making use of code 128 that is currently prevailing in the consumption and logistics market, we

convert our poetic ventures into encrypted codes to generate short free verse in semblance of barcode

stickers and then put them on the merchandise on display in grand shopping malls in an aempt to

quietly disrupt consumer behavior that appears so ruly that nothing is out of order for people who are

lining up to pay. However, through this project of B-poetry, we envision someone waiting in line

would witness a verse line or two ashing on the screen when the barcode reader scans our

pseudo-barcode that unseles the original numerical database with poetic text, and hopefully, more

people would get involved and come to be aware of a momentary transgression as well as a rupture

within the system that not only challenges our logic of daily routine but leads us to reect upon our

being in the instant when our to-be-purchased items go beep! (Translator: Zona Yi-Ping Tsou)