Author: Giovanna Qu (Page 2 of 2)

Futurism was an artistic and social movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti In Italy in the early 20^thcentury. His Futurist Manifesto celebrates speed, youth, danger, violence and war. Love is expressed for objects like cars, airplanes and the latest in industrial technology. He wants to eradicate libraries, museums, history, and anything considered antique to be freed from the obsolete past and fully embrace the notion of Futurism. Women and feminism are looked down upon as impediments to Futurism. Although Futurism is quite progressive in terms and celebrating technology and futuristic ideas, I find that violence and hate towards history and women are regressive ideas and should not be such. History and feminism do not obstruct the progress of technology because they are part of how technological achievements came to be. 

In Russia, Aleksandr Rodchenko, alongside with Varvara Stepanova and Aleksei Gan, was a founding member of the Constructivist Group. Their manifesto calls for artists and designers to abandon the traditional representational arts and embrace new technologies to create work for functionalism and mass production. Art making is professional labor like any other and artists should use everyday materials like metal and wood to create objects for the mass. Artists are at the center of a new world dominated by technology. 

El Lissitzky was an ambassador of Constructivism. He traveled across Europe and the U.S.A. in the early 1920s and spread the ideologies of Constructivism. In the essay “Our Book” he complains about how the technology of art books has not and can’t be developed any further than it already has. A book is a cover with a spine and pages and nothing else can be done about it. Artists are like books; they are limited to creating artwork to please the eyes with no real function. With the advancement and continuous development of digital technology, Lissitzky sees the internet as the solution to freeing artists to create for purposes other than a painting for someone’s viewing pleasure. 

Ferdinand De Saussure breaks down our perception of language and refers to words as “sign”. Signs are made up of a signified and a signifier. A signified is the representation of the concept, the meaning or emotions associated with an object or image. A signifier is the object or image itself, the sound associated with it. Language is a form of communication unique to human beings because it has a written and a spoken form. It is also unique to different parts of the world. From the moment we are born we are surrounded by the spoken language coming from our parents. As we grow up, we learn to recognize those sounds and associate them with different meaning, and we learn to write these sounds. 

Language is something that is transmitted from generation to generation and it can evolve during each generation. Different words gain new meanings and other words change meaning all together. This change is something that people do not have control over. Symbols and iconography evolve the same way and together with language. Different icons have different meanings because of the signified associated with the signifier. New signified are created to express signifiers that already exist or vice-versa.

Language is a form of communication, but it is different from communication itself. Communication is not unique to human beings. Animals, plants, organisms, all have their own system of communication. For people, communication is the way that language is transmitted from one person to another. It can be verbal, non-verbal, written, visual, and body language. Because communication and language go hand in hand, designers are able to create work that can be interpreted universally (except for cultural diversities) around the globe.

According to Helen Armstrong, in today’s world design should be socially responsible. Design should explore the issues pertaining authorship and universality. Design is like the new activism when it comes to social issues because it engages people to react and act to social issues. The evolution of new technologies has enabled designers with the tools and power of self-expression to engage their audience in politics and cultures.

According to Bruno Munari, the designer has always been an artist but far from the type that produces artworks for the richest. The designer is someone who solves aesthetic problems. It is someone who designs objects to be functional without sacrificing taste. The designer is responsible for solving the aesthetic problems of everyday objects because only then we can achieve a stable life.  

Designers speak a visual language. They are responsible for successfully delivering a message through the combination of colors, shapes, forms, symbols, images. Designers know how to correctly use different elements to convey the correct message.