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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Reading quizz this Friday
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A Short History of Graphic Design (continued)
- Our topic this week: "media literacy":
- From Avant-Garde to Corporate Style (Bauhaus, Swiss Style,
International Style): The "Look and Feel" of Contemporary
Corporate Graphic Design (continued
from last lecture)
- Impact of International Style graphic design on the "look
and feel" not just of print-based media but of digital
"information":
The influence of International Style designers like
Paul Rand and Eliot Noyes (and, in Europe, Josef Müller-Brockman)
on corporations in the communications, electronics,
and office-technology fields (e.g., CBS, ABC, Westinghouse,
Olivetti, and, most influentially, IBM)
The Graphic Design of Paul Rand:
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 Paul
Rand |
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 Paul
Rand |
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From the Design Tradition to the Web:
Chasen, from Paul Rand, A Designer's Art,
p. 201 |
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Figure from Darrell Sano's Designing Large-Scale
Web Sites illustrating "Asymmetrical page
layout using tables with no border" (p. 191) |
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(link to page)
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Paul Schrank's Paul's a Computer Geek (home
page and design page) |
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Shauna Wright, Flaunt home page
(link to page,
since redesigned) |
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Anti-Design ("Post-Alphabetic" and
Network-Age Graphic Design)
- An analogy: the New Criticism
and Language Poetry
| "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E"
poets (Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman,
Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian,
etc.). A group of poets based in SF and some Eastern cities
(Boston, Washington) who began publishing after 1976;
over 150 books of poetry and criticism |
- The graphic design of David Carson, 1980s-1990s (Transworld
Skateboarding, Beach Culture, Ray Gun) (examples,
course login required)
- Some other "New Wave," "Deconstructive,"
and post-computer graphic designers (examples,
course login required)
- early Wired Magazine (examples,
course login required)
- Kirschenbaum on the "look and
feel" of information
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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "A
White Paper on Information" (1998) (excerpts)
Information’s presence in the Sprint commercial has been aestheticized,
and aestheticized in a radically visual manner. The computer-generated
imagery is compelling and it is cool—"eye candy," in the
contemporary vernacular. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon; aestheticized
representations of information are ubiquitous in the contemporary
media culture. From this I want to suggest that no full understanding
of information in the present moment is possible absent recourse
to the disciplinary methodologies that have given us our most
sophisticated analytical tools for understanding visual structures
of representation—art history, film studies, graphic design,
iconology, and visual semiotics, to name the most important.
From this I will contend that the consequence of much of the
computer science done in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
and more specifically of the so-called "Information Age"—an
appellation introduced in H. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding
Media, and which gained common currency in the early 1980s—is
not only that we have more information, and not only that we can
relay it more quickly and more efficiently and more economically
between geographical locales that are more spatially disparate,
but also that information itself has undergone a basic ontological
shift. If the pronoun "itself" seems odd or out of place when
subordinated to "information" in the preceding sentence, it is
only because we are not used to thinking of information as possessed
of any inherent qualities—a compelling but none the less
historically specific view that was first introduced by Shannon
at Bell Labs in 1949 when information was explicitly defined as
a function of accurately transmitting messages independently of
"meaning." That particular formulation is still relevant to the
extent that electrical engineers and computer scientists rely
on it as a basic tenet of systems architecture. But it seems to
me to do little to capture the rich information-based imagery
of the Sprint commercial, and still less to explain what a visualization
textbook might mean when its authors characterize information
as a unique way of seeing. Though it is true, as we know from
Edward Tufte’s expansive studies, that we have always possessed
heuristics for "envisioning information," in recent years this
phrase has been literalized by rapid technical advances in computer
science: both the widespread proliferation of graphical user interfaces,
and more specifically the tremendous growth in such fields as
computer modeling, simulation, and visualization.
"Hard data" of the sort I have been
describing—either models, renderings, and visualizations,
or the aestheticized constructions in the Sprint commercial—may
soon be the only forms in which "information" is meaningful or
even recognizable. [ . . . ] Yet, at precisely
the moment data becomes invested with visual form as information,
so too does it assume a cloak of representational artifice, thus
taking its place in the multifaceted media array that has defined
the popular contexts of the Information Age.
Here I want to argue that graphic design is actually possessed
of a deeper and much more specific import for critical observers
of the new media: that it is in fact the single most important
arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and feel
of information qua information.
As much or more than any of the scores of better-known prophets
and pundits of the Information Age, it seems to me that Hofstadter
has succeeded in putting his finger on one of the central dynamics
of our times: that "information," which was once explicitly defined
by computer scientists as a quality independent or indeed exempt
from meaning has now, as a direct consequence of advances in computing
technology, become meaningful in and of itself. By this I mean
not that data is useful or intelligible without context and structure,
but rather that the continuum involved in the creation of meaning
through the process of interpreting data now encompasses degrees
of abstraction and representational artifice which would have
heretofore been considered "meaningful" only after the prior imposition
of some second-order procedure or analysis.
[histograms
of .gif and .jpg files] ["accidents
of digital reproduction"]
An additional point of interest emerges from the visual glyph
that is the histogram itself. Its spikes and valleys can be usefully
understood not just as an abstract projection of the image, but
also as an alternative and equally authoritative rendering of
its underlying data structure. This is how the image "looks" to
the computational algorithm that produced the histogram, and though
the histogram might make make little sense to an untrained human
eye, it makes a great deal of sense to the machine. The histogram
suggests that we would be well advised to evaluate digital images
and objects in a number of different informational states, any
one of which can be said to be the image at a given moment and
only one of which is the normative view. I say this not to be
perverse, but because such an observation seems to me the unavoidable
conseuqeunce of following the logic of what Nicholas Negroponte
calls "being digital" to its inevitable conclusion. That is to
say, just as electronic artifacts are capable of endless permutations
by virtue of their underlying homogeneity as binary code—a
fact often celebrated by boosters of the medium like Negroponte—so
too are they capable of manifesting themselves in a variety of
different representational configurations, only some of which
may be said to corrrespond to those representational configurations
(say a facsimile reproduction) which we have found to be valuable—or
let us say "informative"—in our encounters with analog phenomena.
If, as Baudrillard states, "A possible definition of the real
is: that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation,"
we might also say that "a possible definition of the real is:
that for which it is possible to provide an equally real altnernative
presentation."
Computer-generated imagery will constitute an ever-expanding
field of our vision—as the data visualizations I have been
discussing above amply demonstrate, for they subordinate information
"itself" to the various conventions of representational artifice.
Because of this I am convinced that aesthetics and visual form
will be the most vital site for information and media studies
in the coming years; no media, by definition, can exist without
mediation, and the willful suppression of mediation cannot be
achieved without a simultaneous surrender of knowledge concerning
the relationships among various material technologies, their implementation,
and ourselves.
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References
- The Design Tradition
- Philip B. Meggs, A History of
Graphic Design, 2d ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1983)
- Paul Rand, A Designer's Art
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985)
- Design on the Web
- Darrell Sano, Designing Large-Scale
Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1996)
- Paul Schrank, Paul's
a Computer Geek, retrieved 3 Dec. 2000 <http://www.pgeek.com>
- Shauna Wright, Flaunt,
retrieved 22 Aug. 1999 <http://www.flaunt.net/>
- David Carson's graphic design
- David
Carson page (bio and images, including images from
Carson's early magazines: Transworld Skateboarding, Beach
Culture, Ray Gun) (Graphic Designers)
- David
Carson Links (Judy Litt /
About.com)
- Interview
with David Carson (Adobe.com)
- "Six
Degrees of David Carson"
(Lisa Marshall, zero9)
- Reviews
of Works on Graphic Design and Typography
(Mantex)
Tracy
Pickle, Review
of David Carson's 1997 2nd Sight
- David Bennahum, "How
Things Should Look" (1997) (on the clash between
the paradignmatic design philosophies of Edward Tufte and
David Carson; use graphical nav bar on each page to navigate
to next page) (Feed) | On
David Carson's Ray Gun Magazine
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum,
"The
Other End of Print: David Carson, Graphic Design, and the
Aesthetics of Media" (1999) (Media in Transition
conference, MIT)
- Language Poetry
- Douglas Messerli, "Language"
Poetries: An Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1987)
- Other Works
- Shoshana Zuboff,
In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and
Power (BasicBooks, 1988)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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