In the 1990s, as the new digital media and networks were emerging, it became obvious that graphic design was the core discipline through which the components of the new media could be integrated, designed and presented.

Graphic design is a twentieth-century discipline that drew upon the 500 year-old traditions of printing and publishing, the 19th century developments in advertising, poster design, and photography, and the early 20th century innovations of a swathe of influential designers.

These designers, from Peter Behrens and his ground-breaking identity for AEG (1906-1914), to the DADA artist-typographer Raoul Hausmann, and the De Stijl artists (1917-1920), to Lazlo Moholy Nagy at the Bauhaus, Alexander Rodchenko in civil-war Russia, Fortunada Despero in Italy, Karel Tiege, Piet Zwart, Jan Tschichold in other parts of Europe, plus the influence of DADA, De Stijl, Surrealism, Russian Agitprop, (etc) all contributed to the emergence of the new profession.

Other important ingredients in this emerging discipline  (not really to be called ‘graphic design’ until the 1950s) included late 19th century designers like William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Aubrey Beardsley, the Beggarstaffs, Alphonse Mucha, Henri Toulouse Lautrec, Arthur Macmurdo, (etc).

And of course, the emerging information sciences of the 1920s and 1930s played a core role in informing the graphic design of statistical information (Otto and Marie Neurath: Isotypes (1930s); and geographic information (Harry Beck: London Underground Map 1933, Phylis Pearsall: London A-Z, 1936), and information taxonomies (the work of Paul Otlet in the 1930s).

All these various ingredients, together with innovations in letterpress, hot-metal, photo-gravure, halftone, trichromatic colour printing, (etc) informed the new industrial-design of graphic artefacts.

Recently, in its digital iteration, graphic design has embraced the moving image, animated typography, even the use of sound and music. It has become the design discipline that above all others, integrates all these multimedia components, and information-design, as well as becoming the art underpinning the graphical user-interface and screen-based content design generally.

I’m planning more detailed posts on individual designers, as well as on the development of all the component media of the 21st century media-ecology.

 

 

 

This post-board or mood-board of stills from Deren’s work, assembled by her in 1944, includes stills from Meshes of the Afternoon, Choreography for Camera, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time. A prolific artist, dancer, choreographer, film-maker, Deren embraced the skill-set that came to represent avant garde American film-making in the post-war period, forming a kind of archetype for the counter culture.

John Brunner was one of the new generation of sci-fi writers who emerged in the late 1960s, and whose work was show-cased by Michael Moorcock in New Worlds Science Fiction. This new wave was characterised by innovations in form and in content. Brunner had spent his early career writing space-opera style sci-fi, whereas from 1967-68 onwards he focused on issues relating to the very sad state that the world had found itself in. By this time, the issues of over-population, pollution, the nuclear arms race and the power of the military industrial complex had become a major concern to the world’s youth. Brunner was to tackle these issues, incorporating them into his partially non-linear writing structure, in books that were later described as his ‘Club of Rome‘ Quartet.

The Club of Rome was a group of academics, providing research and investigation into global issues, and attempting to catalyse a change in our thinking, and by 1972 they had commissioned a detailed computer simulation of the world, its resources, its population, and run simulated projections to determine the impact of diminishing resources and increasing population. The projection was called ‘Limits to Growth‘. The simulator was based on Jay Forrester’s World Dynamics model evolved in the late 1960s from his earlier development of System Dynamics.

The Club of Rome stated its objectives as early as 1968: “The club states that its mission is “to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public.”

The Limits to Growth report, coming a decade after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) – the book that alerted us all to concerns about what we were doing to our environment -in a sense catalysed 10 years of mind-change. By the early 1970s Richard Buckminster Fuller had already begun his World Resources Inventory, and described his World Game idea (1964). Stewart Brand had piublished his Whole Earth Catalog (1968). All these were attempts to raise public awareness of these pressing environmental issues – as was the creation of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace over this period (1969-72). Brunner was incorporating these concerns in his zeitgeist books. The final book in this Quartet, The Shockwave Rider dealt more with the emerging trends in world communications networks, phone phreaking, computer virus’ (Brunner called them Worms), hacking and online identity-shifting. Shockwave Rider (inspired by Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock 1972) became the definitive British contribution to the Cyberpunk genre of science-fiction, a genre characterised by Venor Vinge’s True Names (1978), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1983), and Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988).

William Gibson describes Brunner’s work: “No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”^[1]

Shockwave Rider had a major impact on me and my generation.

Cynthea Brazeal is associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. She is a pioneer of social robotics – the investigation of how to make a robot capable of responding to social intercourse with humans  with some of  the signature facial expressions that mirror the ‘human qualities’ of social exchange, understanding, and empathy. Kismet was an early illustration of Brazeal’s doctoral thesis – on Affective Robotics – at MIT AI Lab from 1999.

“Kismet is an expressive robotic creature with perceptual and motor modalities tailored to natural human communication channels. To facilitate a natural infant-caretaker interaction, the robot is equipped with visual, auditory, and proprioceptive sensory inputs. The motor outputs include vocalizations, facial expressions, and motor capabilities to adjust the gaze direction of the eyes and the orientation of the head. Note that these motor systems serve to steer the visual and auditory sensors to the source of the stimulus and can also be used to display communicative cues.”

(http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/sociable/baby-bits.html)

 

Considerable effort in the research community has been put to the development of human-like robots, the smart (AI-based) software that drives them, and making the prosthetic ‘front-end’ – the eyes, face, mouth, voice etc – that is the effective and hopefully affective user-interface of the robot – what you see, how you gauge understanding, how you apply the Turing test etc. David Hanson (of Hanson Robotics) has produced some remarkable prototypes illustrating progress in this area since Kismet.

What exactly is the relevance of Kismet to the world of film?

We are heading rapidly towards the scenario in which sophisticated CGI and AI software – a development of what is happening right now in Pre-Viz and Games software – enables us to create feature-length movie-experiences in which several or even most of the protagonists are not just soft-machines (like us humans), but are really software-machines – a CGI developed ultra-realistic humanoid soft-robot or cyborg equipped with a sophisticated software-brain, with a built-in expert-system style memory retrieval mechanism, chatbot-style conversational capabilities, and other AI allowing it to keep in-character, and play its part in relevant plot development. Importantly these synthespians, virtual-actors (vactors) or digital dramaturges, will be equipped with the kind of algorithms developed by Cynthia Brazeal and David Hanson – they will be able to assume human characteristics, facials expressions and affective responses relevant to their fictional characters. Eventually of course, real actors will sell the software rights to their individual portfolio of personal motion-capture-data, expression-capture data, likeness-data, allowing movie-makers to cast (say) Richard Burton (in his prime) with Gloria Swanson (in her prime) with Peter Lorre (at his best) and Brad Pitt (at 20 years old) together in the same movie – the ultimate casting machine. Bit-parts and crowd scenes supplied by future generations of Massive Prime’s crowd-simulator, the whole locked together into movies using the catalog of virtual cinematography effects that we have already begun to develop.