The Poster Remediated
Extracts from a longer essay exploring the future of the poster which will be published in Warsaw in June 2016 In 1971 the Swiss graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann and the artist Shizuko Yoshikawa published a book surveying the history of the poster. Committed modernists, they concluded their catalogue of past designs with some reflections … Continue reading
Machines Should Work, People Should Think
IBM commissioned Jim Henson, later the hand behind the Muppets, to make a film promoting the MT/ST, an early word processor. Like other IBM promotional films including Charles and Ray Eames’ ‘The Information Machine’ ten years earlier, ‘The Paperwork Explosion’ promised that these labour-saving devices in the office would liberate their users to engage in … Continue reading
Personal Search
Here is a discussion of an undeservedly obscure Polish film, Rewizja Osobista / Personal Search, 1972. It was commissioned by the Bureau of Loose Associations / Piktogram.
Living books
Marx famously announced that commodities have the uncanny quality of seeming to be alive. He pointed this out in a famous passage in Capital (1867): A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological … Continue reading
