Reading Between the Lines


A barcode scanner is attached to two receipt printers.

The books in the exhibition Materials On Reserve can be scanned and two receipts are printed. Each receipt contains information on the book and a QR code links to the digital version of the book. One receipt is for the viewer, while the others pile up on the ground, documenting the act of book browsing, which is usually left un-noted. This piece is essentially an inversion of the normal book finding system where a library user looks for a book on a computer, then uses a printout to find the physical version in the stacks. In this work the physical book is the signifier for its digital counterpart.