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Picked this up because I liked the cover a short while back, and hadn’t even checked to see who did it yet when I saw a few others flash by on the excellent 80 magazine, so I figured I’d post this one up as well.

Published in 1995 by Intercultural Publications of New York, as it’s over 50 years old the original texts may be out of copyright & available in full somewhere online, but I haven’t seen them around yet.

As per usual here’s the index:
Apparently perspectives was a periodical that was spread in a number of languages around Europe to promote ‘the American way’ (fuck yeah) of thinking about issues of art & culture at large, and i have to say it does contain some pretty interesting articles. (If you don’t mind reading stuff over 50 years removed from our current reality..)

I enjoyed “Technics and the future of Western Civilization” (I guess the author hadn’t got the ‘technology’ memo yet), which sends up a bunch of red flags regarding the issues society would be about run into what with the proliferation of all this radiotrontastic equipment everywhere.
The feel-good takeaway then comes from the fact that where we are now with our technology has well surpassed the articles predictions, and in spite of the authors worst fears and dire warnings, we don’t seem to be doing too badly.

“Ultimate terms in Contemporary Rhetoric” was also pretty interesting, though mostly for the fact that in this case the situation the author warns for has very much come to pass and reached levels beyond retarded, where political jingoism has stripped several very powerful words almost completely of their actual meanings. (Still got ‘hope’ anyone?)

Anyway, pictures dammit. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot to post out of this little mag, but I did like this page from “The Film Sense and the Painting Sense”, featuring a direct comparison between Wassily Kandinsky’s “Multicolor Circle” and a scene from Sergei Eigenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible”.

And by today we of course mean 1972, which makes this book interesting as it provides a discussion of electronic & computational art that entirely predates the age of the personal computer.

We’ll be spreading this book out over a couple of posts, as there’s quite a bit of stuff to cover, in this post will be a number of scans from chapters 1-4. The copy we’re working with has had a pretty hard life, so you’ll have to excuse the stains and wrinkles.

First up, photography students can roll your eyes and scroll on, but for the rest here’s our first item of interest, a tiny yellowed paperback reproduction of the first photograph:

Shown here is the cutting edge image compression technology of 1971. Pretty glad we got better at this with time. They say you can recognise the subject by holding the book at arms length, I call Cornelius from Planet of the Apes.

It’s interesting that a lot of the stuff that was being done in the late 60’s is still being ripped on and passed off as ‘modern’ or somehow cutting edge by many artists & designers today..

Here are two pieces by Lloyd Sumner, at the time “one of the few ‘Computer Artists’ that actually makes a living off their work”. Haha, awesome. He kind of gets ragged on in the book which suggests most of his designs may as well have been executed with a ruler and compass, but gets some credit for also animating his designs, which I guess makes him one of the first Motion Graphics guys ever.  That Christmas card is still horrible though, sorry Lloyd.

Frieder Nake created this next piece, working in computer graphics from 1963 on, he believed that the computer could simulate ‘intuition’ by the automatic generation of pseudo-random numbers. Then in 1971 he denounced the whole concept of works of ‘computer art’ as a decadent fad. I think that’s pretty funny coming from a guy whose work now looks like many of the half-baked AI processing projects produced by art students across the planet.

You see pieces like the next one around every now and then, so remember who was first. Apparently the 32×32 matrix of lights could be set to flash patterns that wouldn’t repeat themselves for 32 years.

The final image for this post looks at first glance like some basic ASCII art, in fact each image is a derivation through which ‘the contour characteristics of the image are enhanced’, making this a grand ancestor of now painfully overused filters like ‘Glowing Edges’.

That’s it for this post, check back soon for part II as we show off more amazing rubbish from Science and Technology in Art Today.

When our wireless is broken we just go and reset the router, but back in the bad old days when people had to walk miles barefoot through the snow carrying wood to steam up their terminals things apparently weren’t that easy, and you actually had to fix shit for yourself. Fortunately the Practical Wireless Datacard System was around to make that part dead simple.

Coming at you from October 1968, its Volume II, number 4 of The Journal of Typographic Research. Later renamed to ‘Visible Language’ and now unduly stuck with this horrible site as its legacy. :/
I’ve only got the one issue under the original name, but am keeping an eye out for others around the way as the content is pretty high quality. We’ll show some scans, first here’s the Table of Contents:

You know El Lissitzky, shown here are some classics and a bit of process which is interesting as you usually don’t get to see it:

From ‘The Changes in Letterforms Due to Technical Developments’, showing first a historical precedent of a typeface ordered in a system of geometrical design, and second a later constructed alphabet that ‘points towards electronic solutions for a digitally stored alphabet’, ‘in which the the single elements of letters are built up from dots of light’. Sounds pretty high tech to me.

From ‘Research in Progress’, a couple of students trying to figure out uses of an object language. I’m not sure how far they got, it sounds like a McLuhan type version of what Bruce Sterling is on about nowadays, but here are the last 2 sentences from their write-up:
“My concept of a three dimensional language is the energizing of objects, relative to everything, and within a spatial sequence or configuration.
Energy: the g a m e.”
Well played Temple University Junior Student of 1968, I just lost the game.

Lastly some cool pics from ‘Musical Scores as Graphic Works’:

The blog must have content, so every now and then among other news we’ll post bad reviews along with some scans of old reference material we have lying around in the studio.

To kick the series off, we start with the classic ‘Typing One’, chosen primarily because of the big number 1 on the cover.

Published in 1976, Typing One is a course in basic typing skills, the mechanics and style rules of the machine shown below, which nowadays in my opinion finds its best use in being scrapped to build robot sculptures.

While the book provides an interesting look at the style rules that owned the age of the typewriter and could still be used to learn to type, the cool part unfortunately stops at the cover. The rest of the book consists of incredibly dry repetition exercises such as the following, taken from near the end.

‘Typing Two’ must have been absolutely exhilarating, too bad we’ll be reviewing something else for the next post in this series.