Tag: assignment
I will be honest: I did not understand much of the reading and I think McLuhan talks too much. Maybe it’s because I am, personally, a believer in the statement made by General David Sarnoff: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” I think McLuhan does make some valid points but I’m also left to wonder if I’m truly understanding them at all.
I do agree with McLuhan’s point on that technology has served as an extension of man. He uses good examples in the beginning of his piece with the railway and the lightbulb on how because of these inventions humanity was introduced to new ways of existing. The way we functioned and related to everything from social structures to time and space was changed because of the railroad. Electric light allowed us to completely push past the barriers of working in times and environments limited to light. In this case, I’m assuming the railroads and the electric light are “mediums”. McLuhan explains that because of these mediums we are able to extend ourselves. We can extend our minds, our understanding, our control on reality and our lives.
In Chapter 7, McLuhan speaks of the role of the artist in the adjustment to technology. He states that artists must “move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society”. There is a big sense of responsibility here and I do like the imagery of it. He states that we as artists are responsible for helping form an “analysis” of the technology around us and how it effects us. I can understand to some extent that it is often artists that help visualize and connect people to things happening in the world and how it’s affecting us. I think about how when social media started to become very very popular, it was artists that often helped communicate the feeling of being overwhelmed or the dangers of instant gratification and equating likes to self-worth.
I do not think I understand the concept of “the medium is the message”, however I do understand the concept of technology allowing us to reach a new scale of extension with ourselves and the people around us. Every time new technology is introduced we have a whole new “reach” on the world around us and everything starts to change. The further the jump in technology though the more of an adjustment period is required. I think that holds some truth. Technology in the last 20-30 years has moved so fast and evolved at such a rate that I think a lot of society just can’t adjust as quickly. Artists are often the one to pick up the message and translate it to the world around us. I think that’s a pretty powerful ability that we have. We are sensitive to tonal shifts in ourselves and in society and artists we know how to communicate those shifts into physical/visible mediums that others can understand. The more we do that, the easier it might be for everyone to be aware of the new ideas being shared. We ourselves might be able to introduce a few new ideas as well.
Jan Tschichold believed that design was meant to focus on clarity. He mentions how “old typography” aka the designs of the past such as the Renaissance focused more on elaborate beauty of the design itself as opposed to the focus being on what the text was trying to communicate. Tschichold believed that one should design with “form being created out of function”; the form of the design must come from what is needed for the content to be communicated as clearly as possible. Clarity triumphs ambiguity. Everything that is not absolutely essential to communicate the content is to be removed.
Karl Gerstner believed design could be approached from an entirely scientific/mathematical approach. He believed that just like science, possibilities could not be delimited absolutely and that there was always a group of solutions that worked best to solve the problem. In this case, it was design problems. Similar to Tschichold, Gerstner believes that design should be thought out. Using his grid, the elements of a design could be simplified and reduced to only the bare bones of the necessary design elements.
Josef Müller-Brockmann also believed in a very mathematical way of thinking like Gerstner (another who worked and focused on grids as guides) and emphasized a focus on the simple and objective like Tschichold. He also however believed that design had a level of social responsibility on the creators part. He believes that the use of directness and systematicness in design is “vital” for sociopolitical life. The focus of design, according to Müller, was to cultivate objectivity, rationalize the production process, and “penetrate to the essentials”.
I believe all 3 designers would agree on these points: Less is more. Design should be broken down to only the elements that are absolutely necessary to communicate the context. Design must remain objective as opposed to subjective, being created from a technical, almost mathematical process, though that should not completely eliminate the creativity that goes into the design. If anything, the limits of the process forces the designer to come up with more creative solutions that prioritizes the function to create the form.
According to Walter Gropius and his The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus, the thing that art lacked in the past was that it isolated itself from the world and environment around it. Different kinds of arts and practices were isolated from each other as if they had nothing to do with each other. According to Gropius, this form of teaching and development resulted in “useless social drones” that were ultimately fruitless in the productive life. Being removed from the rest of life does not make a good artist, according to Gropius.
In László Moholy-Nagy’s Typophoto, he makes a similar statement and says that typeface and typesetting “ignored the new dimensions of life” by which he meant the modern life of his time. He encourages the joining of methods and embracing techniques from other disciplines like photography, instead of pretending that the two mediums are two completely different things that must be kept separate. In doing this, typophoto would allow for new relationships between the content being read and visual experience. Both stances are simple: integration of mediums and mindsets of different mediums allow for a stronger, more wholistic artistic application.
I tend to consider many of the teachings of the Bauhaus movement boring. I find the “universal language” to be an interesting practice in the context of its time but ultimately a slightly outdated principle in art. However, I wholeheartedly agree with the statements made in Gropius’ text. The first one being that “academies” should allow an artist to discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie and and recognize that ones “elementary expression” can vary from person to person. It is said variation that makes the collaborative process that much more powerful. The second being that in pulling from various artistic mediums and being aware and in touch with the “life” around you makes you a stronger artist. Believing that one form of art solely exists in a vacuum on its own ultimately hinders the artist.
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One of the most interesting and scarily spot on points I saw in the readings was not only that the methods of communication would change drastically but specifically how the methods would change would be how we store knowledge. Herbert Bayer’s On Typography specifically states that the ability to store information in micro fashion will change the design of libraries and how we store knowledge, and that we will “have any and all desired information available and ready when needed… unburdening our brains from memory ballast… the book may be limited altogether…” How interesting it is that that is almost exactly what has happened. While the book might have not completely disappeared from existence, print is becoming less and less necessary as we rely more on the “micro-storage” available to us at a moments notice. I’ve grown up mostly in a generation where we can learn about anything and everything with a few simple keystrokes into our phones and not all of that information has to be memorized in order for me to use it.
Marinetti’s Manifesto Futurista has this anarchic energy and I want to talk about it for a bit simply because of how brash it was. From what I understand, he speaks of driving a car and crashing it in a ditch while the world looks on in horror at the scene. He speaks of speed and power, the rejection of the past, and this embracing of machinery, violence, and youth. My assumption is that he believe this was the future of art and intelligence. He believed technology wasn’t just going to shape the future, it was the future and with technology came the future of rashness and chaos. He says that “beauty exists only in struggle” as if the true art of the future can only be captured in wars, anarchy, and completely rejecting the knowledge that came before. There is this audacious aggression through out the entire manifesto.
Marinetti, Rodchenko, and Lissitzky all had a similar view point on 1) technology being the future of art and design and 2) the necessity to push way from the art knowledge of the past. I do believe however that Lissitzky’s push from the old into the new is the least violent of the 3. He speaks about the past in a tone that’s almost informative, as if to show the reader “this is where we came from and why”. Rodchenko speaks of the past in a way that draws the line a little more clearly, but he speaks less about the past being something inherently negative, and focuses more on the vision of constructivism. Marinetti, however, has a “burn it all” mentality to the past as if there’s nothing to learn or pull from.
I think all 3 artists knew that technology was going to change the world. I enjoyed Marinetti’s manifesto the most, but I didn’t agree with most of it. I do believe that about 100 years later we can clearly see how much technology has become not just the future, but our every day present. This whole world operates on speed because of the modern technology we have. The world has moved faster than ever before, and in a lot of ways the energy of Marinetti’s manifesto is the energy our world operates in today. However, I think the violence that is almost idolized in this passage is unnecessary and doesn’t necessarily benefit anyone. I also think it’s stupid to think that just because you don’t want to draw knowledge from the past you feel the need to destroy it all and hate it so much. Even Rodchenko recognizes that the tools of the line, the grid, and the point aren’t “new” concepts, they’ve just been rediscovered and used in a new way that embraces the mechanics of [at the time] modern technology. Lissitzky’s Our Book was the least interesting to me, even a little confusing, but I found it very interesting because in being able to talk about the patterns and development of art and technology in the past, we’re able to see how thing’s ended up playing out after. We have the answer for the next one to two question marks that he proposes on “Inventions in the Field of Thought-Communication” because we live in an age that has given us screens and audio books, and thus see “the new fundamental inventions in the field of book production”.
I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 short Lupton-Miller essays – Counting Sheep, Modern Hieroglyphs and Language of Dreams. Language, by Google’s definition, is “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way”. The research explored in these 3 essays, along with some of Saussure’s theory, implies that the development and use of language is dependent on man arbitrary factors as well as societal ones. I believe that communication is simply the transfer of information, or the transmission of a message, between 2 or more people. The how of communication can vary. Even animals communicate with one another in their own ways, but it is not the same as language.
Language, on the other hand, is a system of communication that relies on both verbal and non-verbal codes to relay information. Counting Sheep showed how archaic numbering systems have a relationship with design and symbols. The use of the abacus and its physical design directly resulted in the use of the symbol 0 to stand for the gap between number places. This already established language influenced a design.
Different languages have different systems of this dynamic between the verbal and the non-verbal. My favorite example of this dynamic is in Modern Hieroglyphs and Language of Dreams. It was interesting to see the symbols we’ve become so familiar with being used with such ease in conventional writing, however the history of its relationship with design was fascinating. Stylistic principles of reduction, consistency, and simplicity, are used in a system that is meant to be universal. It reminded me a lot of principles used in the making of Helvetica in which simplicity and uniformity were emphasized to construct a “universal’ type face. Language of Dreams breaks down this universal language and starts to point out its limitations in the use of specific language. We begin to explore the difference between pictographs, in which the picture is meant to have a literary translation, and ideographs, in which the symbols used are meant to communicate a secondary, or even tertiary idea. I hadn’t even thought about how the car rental symbol could be seen as “car dreams of key” but that is the relation that symbols have to language and how language differs from communication.
The role that language plays in design is its use of both verbal and non-verbal codes. Designers are always working with non-verbal codes. Color, shape, icons, lines, etc.; these all communicate specific ideas based on our understanding of non-verbal language. Our understanding even changes as we start to try and communicate in other languages that might have different non-verbal associations. To put it simply, it is a tool. Language is a tool that helps us communicate the ideas we have with others. It is fascinating however how the correlation we have with said ideas can be rather arbitrary in their formation. A lot of that depends on the histories of our respective languages. I guess that arbitrary origination allows us to ask ourselves how we can create non-verbal codes and associations in the future with our designs.
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