Assignment 3 Gabe Morales

This weeks’ readings were talking about technology and how it influences art and design. 

Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto spoke about technology through a story. The line “Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wins against the wall.” The imagery he shows in this line helped me understand the story the second time I read it. I envisioned the cars and boats and planes he speaks about and understood that there is immense pride in designing items that help revolutionize travel and society.

And further on “we today are founding futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.” the desire to create new technology to help citizens in their everyday lives. And the final paragraphs saying “The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.” we get the sense that a designer’s work is never done.

In El Lissitzky’s Our Book he discusses specific technology that has influenced our society and how humanity has also demanded solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had. He mentions Gutenbergs’ moveable type machine which was revolutionary. He mentions in the reading that as we have more people with access to writing and mailing letters, the more that the corresponding business grows and it will eventually need improvement or change so it can work better. So once the telephone was invented and more people gained access to it, people were now calling each other rather than writing letters so it relieved stress on the mail industry. The need was changed and then people gravitated to what was easier for them. Lissitzky also gives an example of a book. Starting out as a bound book with separate pages, then with color, and as times progressed we invented posters, then large scale advertisements meant to be seen on highways and on roads.

Rodchenko has a similar theme in his Manifesto of the Constructivist Group, People might see a wall or a plane but it is up to artists and designers to create things from nothing. We then see amazing inventions like the zeppelin, a helicopter…etc. He restates this thought with “We-are the beginning our work is today.”