Kahn’s fascinating information graphics from the 1920s and 1930s have become motifs for the industrialism and mechanisation of the period – the result of Fordism and the idea of the man-machine, production-line, time-and-motion, rationalisation of work – essentially making man fit in with machine-age capitalism. Kahn’s beautifully intricate graphics echo the zeitgeist that is also illustrated (and summoned) in Raoul Hausmann’s Spirit of Our Times (1921), Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Karel Capek’s Rossums Universal Robots (1921), etc, etc.
Raoul Hausmann: Spirit of the Age 1921
The fact that Kahn’s work tended to solidify and ratify the mechanistic rationale of how our body and senses work, and that this was the model that determined how many of us (of my generation at least) were taught, makes you wonder at the cybernetic and computer-processing metaphor that is the current zeitgeist model of how we work. It’s inevitable, I guess, that we use these descriptors as metaphors – explaining the complex in terms of the simple. I was aware of this image long before I discovered that it was by Fritiz Kahn. It appeared uncredited in films and prints by Eduardo Paolozzi (History of Nothing, 1960) and Stan Vanderbeek (Science Friction, 1959).
If you’re interested in Fritz Kahn and his work, there’s a great monograph on him by Ute and Philo von Debschitz (Taschen, 2013).
This is a short film I made 2009-2010. It was a way of dramatising an archive database – a database film as Lev Manovitch called it. Its intent was to illustrate the changing zeitgeist of the previous 11 decades of new media innovation:
“ZeitEYE is a film about innovation in media and the arts since 1900. It is in the form of a rapid montage of stills featuring all the principle media and art innovations of the last eleven decades. It is punctuated and contextualised by the inclusion of keynote artists and celebrities of each decade, and is framed by closeups of the eyes of these zeitgeist figures. It is a kind of back-story of our contemporary broadband networked media, and it is a film about the evolving spirit of the age. It is eleven decades of media-arts innovation in eleven minutes.” http://zeiteye.wordpress.com
The avant garde music is Ballet Mecanique, composed by George Antheil between 1923-24 originally for the film Ballet Mecanique made by Fernand Leger, Dudley Murphy and Man Ray in 1924. Used with permission of the George Antheil estate. This recording is conducted by Daniel Spalding and played by the Philadelpia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra. CD available at http://www.amazon.com/Antheil-Ballet-Mecanique-George/dp/B00005NCYE
The Polish artist Brzeski , graphic designer, photographer and film-maker, produced a phenomenal range of photomontage – series of works exploring the zeitgeist motifs- the emergence of modernity – in the 1930s – visions of mechanisation (the Narodziny Robota – Birth of the Robot- series), visions of modern capitalism |(Idylls of the 20th Century), visions of War (Zwrotnice – Crossover series), and of emerging sexual equalities (the Sex cycle). Powerful image-making, pulling printed photographs, drawings, typography, news-clips etc together, Brzeski’s work parallels that of his contemporary Czech artists/architects Karel Tiege and Jiri Kroha – the second generation of photo-collagists.
What inspires me about these second generation photomontagists is that they shared in a more-or-less common vision of the zeitgeist of modernity – glamour, commerce, industrialism, mechanisation (the robot and the production-line), and the threat of fully mechanised, aerial warfare in a future world war.
Hughes’ Reverspectives are amazing. I first saw one at the Chelsea Arts Club in about 2004. I was blown away. I knew that Patrick had been deeply involved in the study of paradox and visual paradox in particular, and this (he called them Reverspectives) was a brilliant example of a great idea, beautiful crafting of the 3d painted-construction, and acute understanding of how perspective illusions are created in our brain. I must have walked up and down in front of this Reverspective for about half-an-hour, marvelling at the acutely visceral effect a mere illusion – a tromp l’oeil – was having on my perception.
Boeke was an amazing man – a Quaker and a pacifist, married to a Cadbury heiress, an educationalist, anti-capitalist, film-maker and artist. His Cosmic View illustrated an idea that was to meme its way through the following half-century, triggering filmic and bibliographic versions that illustrated or visualised the concept with varying but generally improving quality, from drawings and animation in Eva Szasz’ Cosmic Zoom (1968), to high-fidelity photography in the Charles and Ray Eames Powers of Ten and the Philip and Phylis Morrison Powers of Ten book.
Charles and Ray Eames: Powers of Ten 1977 Some 13 years or so before Photoshop and 16 years before After Effects, Charles and Ray Eames brilliant exposition and amplification of Kees Boeke’s idea, is to me, the best yet – it combines an aesthetic clarity and coherence with a ‘data-visualisation’ approach – you can see the numbers flicking faster upwards as God-like we accelerate out beyond the Milky Way into intergalactic space, and realise how small and delightfully insignificant we are in the great schema. In contrast, Boeke’s simple pen and ink visualisations are the bare maximum expression of the idea. Drawn with pedagogical intent, – to express and illustrate the amazing qualities of exponentials – Boeke’s book remains a brilliant masterpiece of information design.
This level of world-class information design embraces iconic examples of design such as Harry Beck’s London Underground map, Otto and Marie Neurath’s Isotypes, Florence Nightingale’s Mortality diagrams, and Alan Kay’s Alto graphical user-interface.
Florence Nightingale: Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East 1858 It was by means of diagrams like this that Nightingale was able to convince the British Military that profound changes in hospitalisation and care of wounded were essential. The clarification that a well-designed diagram brings to a mass of complex data explains why the art/science of information design and data-visualisation have become synch a central part of our intellectual world in the 21st century. These are some of the great pioneers.
Otto and Marie Neurath: Isotypes 1936. With the artist Gerd Arntz, the Neurath’s created a brilliant information-design system specially to humanise the illustration of complex statistics and other quantitive data. Their rationalisation of Isotypes into an information-design system has had a pround impact in this field, not least in the utilisation of simple icons and other symbols in the field of human-computer interface design (initially implemented by Alan Kay and the Xerox PARC team in the Xeroix Alto interface (1973).
Harry Beck: London Underground Map 1933 Becks brilliant innovation in schematic mapping uses colour-coding, simple symbols, a Gill Sans typeface, and a harmonic grid of horizontal-vertical-oblique to simplify the complex data of a geographical map, while at the same time preserving the logical relationships between stations and interchanges – all this with a stylised River Thames running across the capitol!
In 1982, Philip and Phylis Morrison, who assisted the Eames partnership in the making of the Powers of Ten film, produced a brilliant book of the subject, each page of the main sequence amplifying the image-field by a power of ten. In something like 80 pages the Powers sequence amplifies each step with contextual information, examples of artefacts at that scale – from DNA molecules to Galactic Clusters – informing at the same time as gratifying the senses.
And I started with Kees Boeke’s book not just because it was an original idea, nor because he was the first to visualise this idea, but because the book in its graphic simplicity has a kind of zen purity – a koan quality – that makes it sublime – it is Zen and the Art of Information Design.
Grimoin-Sanson’s Cineorama fuzes two media technologies to create a new experience: immersive cinema. The media-art-form of the early 19th century, invented by Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, the diorama – a circular building in which was hung a 360-degree painted canvas depicting views, great battles, etc – is combined with a very modern and recent 19th century invention, the cinematograph, in a bravado tour de force of new media experimentation worthy of the Paris World Exposition of 1900.
Grimoin-Sanson’s 10-camera panoroamic camera rig for shooting content for his Cineorama of 1900. Using synchronised cameras with slightly overlapping frame coverage of the entire 360-degree scene from an ascending balloon over Paris, Grimoin-Sanson then projects these linked films to create a simulated balloon ride for visitors to the Expo.
It is entirely appropriate that the new 20th century should be celebrated by a marriage of old and new media, and of course that the content of this new marriage should be the experience of flight. So three years before the first powered aeroplane flight, Raoul Grimoin-Sanson celebrates the experience of flying in this stimulation of a balloon-flight over Paris. Filmed using a set of synchronised 70 mm movie cameras, projected using a similarly synchronised set of 10 projectors, Cineorama provided the first taste of 20th century immersive entertainment.
Poster for the Cineorama – a foretaste of theme-park rides and subsequent world expo installations, Cineorama begins a long strand of innovation exploring immersive experience and simulation that culminates with the invention of virtual reality and augmented reality, iMax theatres and immersive-art installations towards the end of the century.
Chapman’s Oscar-winning entry for Expo67 was commissioned by the province of Ontario. It uses a ‘multi-dynamic image’ technique – a phrase invented by Chapman to describe the use of ‘dynamic frames’ – filmed sequences that varied dynamically in size as they were projected, and the multiple use of these ‘screens’ or ‘panes’ within the vast screen he was using at Expo67 – a screen that measured 66 feet by 30 feet – (i-Max size). Remember that in 1967 computers weren’t ready to process this kind of media-making, so that Chapman had to use auditor’s printed spreadsheets to work out how his multi-dynamic film should be shot, how it should be storyboarded, and finally how the multi-image effect that he wanted should be described accurately enough for the Todd-AO optical-printing specialists in Hollywood to actually assemble all Chapman’s clips (180,000 feet of film) together – as he wanted – into an 18-minute multi-dynamic film.
Chapman’s A Place to Stand was his first widely-promoted attempt to realise his multi-dynamic image approach. This is a fragment of the 70mmm film with sample images optically (photographically) printed as dynamic frames within the span of the 70mm frame.
A Place to Stand is a multi-image treatment – a motion-montage – about the province of Ontario. Chapman’s film content follows the ‘city symphony’ ideas of the 1920s (Ruttman: Berlin – Symphony of a Great City, and Vertov: Man With a Movie Camera, etc), and following the avant garde experimental approach of those early attempts to capture a physical space, Chapman’s film invents new techniques – a new form, in fact – presaging the digital compositing software that came into wide use in the last two decades.
BTW users of contemporary 21st century compositing software like Adobe AfterFX, Nuke, Maya Composite, Apple Motion etc, will find it hard to understand the level of difficulty facing Chapman in his quest for the multi-dynamic image form. It is relatively so easy today to assemble and view test composites in realtime, or after only a few minutes rendering time, and see the results on large flatscreen display monitors – as you are working. Try to imagine this kind of compositing being planned using a standard Movieola. This is how Chapman describes part of the process:
“180,000 feet of film were shot. Some additional footage of material I had not time to shoot myself was shot by David Mackay, using TDF cameramen. After completely familiarising myself with the footage, I worked out a storyboard of the entire film. Although it was theoretical, it did give me an impression of how the subject matter could be structured. I then had to devise my own charts as did Barry Gordon who translated my charts into his own lab charts in a language that the lab could comprehend. The lab was most impressed with the clarity of Barry Gordon’s technical instructions.
To edit the film I had a 2 picture head moviola which was the closest one could get to visualising the results. One could only use it to compare actions of any 2 shots at one time and designate the length of shots. In normal film editing, one works with the actual footage and soon discovers that frame or two on any shot can make a difference in rhythm. With the Ontario film I could never “see” the film develop. The charts indicated the movement of the shots. Because of the shortage in time their could be no changes in structure in any of the sequences once they returned from the lab. It was a tremendous discipline for me, for once I had made a creative decision, I could not change my mind. The entire concept of development therefore, was on paper in chart form.”from http://www.in70mm.com/news/2011/canadian_short/place/index.htm There’s a short clip of Chapman’s film here:
So like graphic designers of the time, Chapman had to provide the optical printing lab at ToddAO with a set of written instructions and multi-image storyboards, then wait for several days or weeks while the Lab constructed his multi-dynamic film. Nowadays we can visualise this more or less in realtime. What lucky bastards we are!
Vordemberge-Gildewart was a late member of the De Stijl group that had been formed by Theo van Doesberg and Piet Mondrian in 1917. One of the first painters to focus on abstraction from the very beginning of his career, he produces these balanced, beautiful and harmonious works throughout his life (died in 1962). In Art and Photography (1968), the art-historian Aaron Scharf describes the kind of harmonious aesthetic-technical innovation process evangelised by De Stijl:
“The idea of art as play, discussed by Kant and then by Schiller late in the 18th century, and elaborated upon by Konrad Lange at the turn of the nineteenth, became an important consideration in the aesthetics of twentieth century theoreticians. The spiritual pleasure inherent in the freedom of experimentation was believed by the De Stijl artist, Theo van Doesburg, to be an essential pre-requisite of the truly creative process – the gestalting or forming process as he called it. ‘Play he wrote, is the first step of creation.’ In Film as Pure Form in 1929, characteristically structuring its evolution, he noted that, like other media, photography, having first gone through a phase of imitation, then a second stage of experimentation and manipulation in the mastering of its technical means, must now (as with film), give way to purely creative expression.”
Du Hauron’s experimental photography in the second half of the 19th century produced several world-class innovations. Du Hauron was amongst the first to explore colour photography, producing a carbon-colour print using cyan, magenta and yellow filters (equivalent to the 20th century cibachrome print) as early as 1868. He wrote a book on colour photography the following year (Les Couleurs en Photographie 1869), and produced what is widely thought of as the first colour photograph Angouleme Region View of Agen in 1872, and this still-life of flowers around the same time:
Ducos du Hauron: Colour photograph using his carbon-colour 3-colour process (around 1869-1872).
Du Hauron went on to invent the analglyptic (red-green) stereo process, and also the lovely colour pictograms (direct prints from objects) pictured above.
What I love about this kind of innovation is that it emerges from a synthesis of art and science – by an artist who has the modernist or neo-scientific approach that characterises much of 20th century art and design. The creative exploration of phenomena, based on a neo-scientific but predominantly aesthetic investigation, is a strand of innovation that has given us Photoshop, Postscript and much of the core media-processing and media-authoring software that underpins digital media.
Following the fabulous Montreal Expo67 with its rich feast of multi-image films and a/v shows by the likes of Roman Kroitor (the inventor of the iMax format) and Christopher Chapman whose film A Place to Stand introduced his Multi-Dynamic image technique, it seemed only natural that Norman Jewison and cinematographer Haskell Wexler should use these multi-screen (multi-image) techniques in this stylish feature, showcasing the charisma of Steve McQueen and the sophisticated beauty of Faye Dunaway. Expo67 had been an inspiring world expo for those of us interested in a/v shows, ‘light-shows’ and the potential of non-linear pictorial narratives. No small number of artists and photographers were engaged in these speculations (Marc Boyle, Joan Hills, Malcolm Lewis and others in the UK, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and multi-screen films like Chelsea Girls (1965). The originator in the world of the movies was of course Abel Gance with his phenomenal 3-screen panoramic Napolean in 1927.
Haskell Wexler went on to make his masterpiece Medium Cool a year or so later. It is rumoured that Roman Kroitor whose multi-screen exhibit Labyrinth was one of the high-spots of Expo67, was called in as advisor on The Thomas Crown Affair, for the multi-image/multi-screen sequences, apparently used in the film to compress several long sequences of footage into one shorter multi-screen sequence.
Chris Chapman: A Place to Stand 1967
I was a post-grad at Clive Latimer’s Light/Sound Workshop at Hornsey College of Art the following year, and we produced a big show in conjunction with the Archigram group at Oxford MOMA, showcasing a number of multi-screen, immersive a/v work by the likes of John Bowstead, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Peter Cook, Gary Crossley, Tony Rickaby and myself.
In 1970, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema traced the range of ways in which movie-making was stretching out beyond the confines of the single screen.
The use of multiple parallel strands of images and film-sequences strangely disappeared from the movies until the last decade or so, when Mike Figgis introduced the idea in his Time Code (2000). Then the use of multi-screen cascaded through TV shows like Spooks (2002) and 24 (2001). It is more in new media multi-window works like Chris Milk’s The Wilderness Downtown (2009) that the potential of this kind of pictorial narrative really becomes apparent.
media+art+innovation 