“Um… what language have we been speaking in?”

My sister often asks me this after a pause in a conversation. It may sound like a silly question, but it’s a fair one, since I am often unsure of the answer. It can be French or English. More often, it’s Franglish, the two of us weaving in and out of the languages unconsciously — yet strategically.

Linguists have a term for this strange bilingual behavior: “code-switching.” That’s also the name of a show by San Francisco art collective Quorum, currently on display at Downtown Oakland’s Swarm Gallery after a successful first run in Los Angeles.

Quorum, founded two years ago, is a hip, ragtag crew whose work encompasses everything from painting, sculpture and photography to video art, sound art and performance art, and the list goes on.

“We work in so many ways, but this theme of ‘code-switching’ seemed it could work for everyone,” said Michele Pred, Quorum’s founder. “I was thrilled, because we all developed really different ways of interpreting it.”

Pred’s own interpretation is a meditation on the language of technology and consumerism in the form of an embroidered barcode. Visitors can photograph it using an adjacent cell phone. Following a few simple instructions, they can then send the photograph to a service that converts the code into a Web address. Translation? “You are what you buy.”

Pred said she heard about this cell phone technology from a New York Times article explaining how popular it was in Japan. “You can use this physical hyperlink anywhere, to watch movie trailers, or to download schedules at a bus stop. So by embroidering this barcode, I wanted to show how technology is interwoven into our lives.”

Performance artist Praba Pilar decided to reflect on technology by reinterpreting Edward Munch’s “The Scream.” In her photograph print, she’s dressed futuristically, screaming angrily while holding a Hellenic mask representing the “humanist past.”

“There’s a lot of anxiety about technology right now,” she said. “I thought the ultimate switching today is between the human and the post-human.” Another interpretation is a gorgeous, delicate peacock skeleton, which upon closer inspection is made up entirely of beauty store items: cheap jewels, fake nails, hair clips. Artist Lauren Roth, a former park ranger, says the peacock symbolizes adapting to expectations of how we present ourselves in public.

“Like birds, we have mating plumage, only ours is more voluntarily chosen in regards to the situation,” said Roth. “We use code switching in our presentation, including dress and posture, to signal how much attention we want and what kind.”

Perhaps the most direct interpretation greets the visitor by the door, in the form of headphones. It’s a sound piece by Tania Ketenjian, a radio journalist who works internationally and speaks four languages. She recorded members of her multi-lingual family filling in the blanks of the sentence “I am __ when I speak __.”

“I wanted to see what parts of them came out in each language,” Ketenjian said. “My mom, for example, would become very womanly in Arabic, girly in English, and strong in French.”

The overlapping voices of several generations of men and women come out successively confident and hesitant: “I am what I am when I speak French” runs into “I am a foreigner when I speak English.” The piece ends with a chorus of voices repeating “I am” until they meld together.

“I wanted to show how regardless of our languages and the barriers they create, in the end, we’re all the same,” said Ketenjian.

“Code-Switching,” which features thirteen artists, runs through Nov. 18 at the Swarm Gallery in Downtown Oakland.