About the Barcodes




THE LIGHT PEN TOOL ITSELF IS CLUMSY, hard to hold for long without getting a severe pain in your wrist. You are to drag it over the barcode in the proper time intervals and speed, in the rhythm of the tango or the carrioca. At each "beep" you have succeeded … . If you don't hear the beep, you can repeat the action going backwards or forwards. Keep on, please, don't get embarrassed.

THERE ARE THREE KINDS of laserdiscs which are accessible from the catalog:

THE FIRST GROUP is found in laserstations labelled INFOSTATION, probably up to five of them located throughout this exhibit. These contain about two hundred Still images and up to twenty short Moving image segments, all related to the history and the performance of the Instruments described in the catalog. You will find the barcodes correlated to them in two sections of the catalog: The Instruments and in Video: The State of the Art article. Watch for a small label under the barcode itself, a tiny text shows INFO for orientation.

THE SECOND GROUP of laserdisc stations is visibly labeled MUSIC and they are located in quiet museum spaces. There will be at least two of them and they win hold SIM images and Moving sections with actual samples of sounds, assembled by David Dunn to accompany his article in the catalog. All of the barcodes in the article entitled A History of Electronic Music Pioneers, are correlated to the MUSIC laserdisc.

THE THIRD GROUP of laserdisc stations are labeled NANO (THEATERS) A, B, and C. They all have an identical Still image section as the Infostation, which means that you can access these stills from all stations except MUSIC. However, the Moving images on all discs are different. Even though you can also program the discs independently from the catalog by using the summary of all barcode information available at the stations, most of the disc information is available from within the catalog. For example, in the case of the Light Music in the Soviet Union article, the catalog will show a barcode labeled NANO informing of a stack of still pictures sitting there.

NOW, IF YOU ARE BORED by all of this, there is a keypad at each laserdisc station with a generic command set of instructions on their face. Just feel free to browse.

BY THE WAY, there is a space named ENDO-THEATER in this exhibit. It is programmed to play tapes selected by Steina: no keypads, no barcodes.
W.V.