Shrinking very large barcodes

Question

My apologies is this is not the right place for this question, please advise if it needs to be moved or deleted.

So my city has an art installation of some very tall Dr.Suess style flowers.

These flowers have barcodes that runs down the length of the stalk and I am looking for ideas on how to capture or identify the pattern to then begin working in decoding them.

I have attached a picture showing the flowers and the barcodes. It has been confirmed by the creators that the patterns are indeed barcodes.

Answer 1

Not sure if this is really on topic, since it's more about image manipulation than the puzzle itself, but I'll answer anyway (and keep it on topic by solving the puzzle at the same time).

You can convert them with photo manipulation software as follows:

1) Isolate a barcode:

2) Warp to stretch the stripes:

3) Convert to black & white (and rotate):

Using an online scanner, you can then decode those images. From left to right in your photo (one word per flower), you get:

Corson
sonic
energy
science
bloom

After having got the above list, I see that those words seem to fit neatly with the art installation itself (found via reverse image search):

Which is titled Sonic Bloom, by Dan Corson, and is thematically tied to energy and science.