The red line goes corner to corner. I have been told this is too much and that in life the beam is a modest thing you barely notice, confined to a slot in the counter.
I know what it looks like in life. I painted what it is doing.
It is reading. A beam of light is crossing an object I am holding in both hands, and it is converting that object into a number, and it is doing this at a speed that makes the conversion feel like it was always true. The can was never a can. It was always $2.49. The scanner is only revealing what was underneath.
Look at where the light lands. The red is on my hands and on the underside of my face and on nothing else in the room. Caravaggio understood that a single hard source makes a courtroom out of any space it enters. He used a high window. I used a barcode reader, because I do not get to choose the lamps in the places I work.
The can is dented on the shoulder. I chose it for that. A dented can is a slightly cheaper can, sometimes, if someone has bothered to mark it down, and if nobody has bothered then it scans at full price and the dent is simply damage that the system has no field for. Either way the machine will not look at the dent. It will look through the dent, at the code, which is undamaged.
I am not against being read. I would only like it recorded that on this evening the reading took about a fifth of a second and I had been holding the can for some time before that, and I had noticed the dent, and I had wondered what had happened to it in transit, and none of that was scanned.