Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Barcodes - Assignment 2 Mas110




“Something people use but don’t necessarily look at”

Like the prints of fingers on humans, barcodes are the sense of unique identity to products in the consumer world. It’s one thing in the video to play the “identity game” (Murray, 2008) with the product in the picture however the main idea is in fact to examine the barcodes. Each is different, not just a group of monochromatic stripes with a corresponding numerical value, but a unique and individual pictorial sequence used for identification. Surprisingly, barcodes appear on nearly everything, which I only began noticing in selecting them as my object of focus for this assignment. The images depict an extensive range of goods from food items to concert tickets and even Government letters. In Murray’s article she talks about how photo sharing has become about “signifiers of identity” and “daily life” (Murray, 2008) and barcodes are a clear example of these. They are an everyday aesthetic, thousands scanned each hour most noticeably in supermarkets and retail stores, but also in less known areas, like distribution warehouses and mail handling facilities. Barcodes are a branding of identity and an extremely overlooked system of organization in the world.

Susan Murray. (2008). Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture. 7 (147), 134.
Susan Murray. (2008). Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture. 7 (147), 144.

C. Murphy 42878810

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