Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 13. The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924 |
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USER.INFOTECHNODEMO |
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Author: Jan Baetens Peter Lunenfeld, USER.INFOTECHNODEMO |
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"WOW!" That's the only word that can express the baffling amazement one feels when looking at and flipping through this marvel of graphic design put in the service of highly original critical thinking. Certainly, we all remember the collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, which produced two land-mark publications, The Medium is the Message and War and Peace In the Global Village , but what Lunenfeld and his partner in crime, the Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen, are offering us in this pocket-format book goes far beyond the McLuhan/Fiore works, which were already, in their times, boundary-breaking visual essays (Baetens 2003: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/janbaetens3.htm )
Before discussing more in detail the visual display of the texts, one should stress that the audacious design is not a kind of window-dressing, aimed at hiding the poor quality of the content. Lunenfeld's essays (I don't think the word 'columns' adequately fits their depth and scope) are a stimulating example of no nonsense reflection on what is going around in our postmodern digital culture. Here too, the shadow of McLuhan is not far off: Lunenfeld is not just a thinker or a cultural critic; above all, he is a very gifted and committed writer, with a real sense of rhythm, metaphor, and style, whose almost aphoristic way of writing catches wonderfully the spirit, both bad and good, of the times. Moreover, the style is so refreshingly simple and straightforward, without ever being banal or formulaic, that one is constantly tempted to show the book to colleagues and friends without being afraid of bothering them. The type of topics discussed gives a good survey of what digital culture means for all of us: new objects, new practices, new interpretations, and also the clash between all that newness and the stubborn resistance of the old, which healthily remembers us that things are not always like they seem to be, or like some people want them to appear: the form of the computer graphic interface, the aesthetics of science fiction movies, the necessity of living twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, the gendered masturbatory use of new media, the boring repetition of always the same list of people and works in the globalized art world, the spearhead function of real pulp and real crap, the star system, and so on. Each of the essays addresses things that may seem so simple that we are no longer paying any attention to it, and each time Lunenfeld manages to give us a fresh look on the blurring of popular and digital culture (since this is the heart of the matter).
As an 'ars poetica' (and in this respect too, Lunenfeld is continuing the McLuhan tradition: both are doing what they are telling and vice versa), the book not only adopts a particular style, as energetic and tight and edgy as its very objects, it also embraces a philosophy of book-design that owes a great deal to the material it is analyzing. Thus the book plays with the design principles of advertising (colored letters and backgrounds that permanently shift; heavy use of sans serif, bold, capitals, and very large type size; absolute refusal of blank spaces; equality of text and background, etc.), each essay has its own style (but not a style that is a rhetorical reduplication of its content: the style sheet used for essays A, B, or C, are perfectly interchangeable), and a desire to surprise the reader at every page (and even at every sentence, the sentence remaining the basic unit of composition). What is utterly astonishing, and one really has to read the book to realize what an achievement this is, how perfectly legible everything remains. The book seems at first sight a total chaos of colors, splashes, letters, and figures, yet the reading of the texts is always very smooth, and the typographical decisions are not working against the text, but on behalf of its understanding. However wild her work may appear, Gerritzen's typography deserves to be called classic: it makes the text not only easier to read, but also to understand (and this is the final aim of classic typography's transparency principle). So neat and sharp are the apparently overcrowded and 'howling' pages that one does not immediately notice that the book has no 'images', or that it does not need them. One could, indeed, say every page of the book is an image, but it is a strictly typographical one.
An unfashionably fashionable as well as fashionable unfashionable book on fashion hypes, reflecting both the absolute fascination exerted by the semiotic, physical, and psychological whirlpool we are living in, and a survivor's guide that will help avoiding many traps of hasty generalizations and second-hand thought. The initial "WOW!" lasts long after the closing of the book. |
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