Shaping Time
Graphic Design Museum Breda, NL
May 11 [?] – June 2010
Curator: Lev Manovich
Statement: «Lev Manovich is one of the most influential thinkers in the field of new media and digital culture. He is professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego and director of the Lab for Cultural Analysis at the Californian Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. In addition to being an academic, he is also an artist, designer and programmer.
Manovich’s research is for everybody to see in the glass corridor of the Graphic Design Museum or from outside in the Pasbaan.
Manovich researches the effects digital media have on the image culture.
In his theories he postulates that designers may very well prove superfluous in the future as software becomes increasingly advanced.
The Graphic Design Museum is exhibiting his research into the use of colour for the covers of TIME MAGAZINE from 1923 to today. Trends in design are revealed as you look at the images. The images which he shows in this way seem like works of art in themselves.
“The visualisation of the Time covers exposes the gradual changes in the design and content of the magazine”, says Manovich. “It shows, for example, how colour was introduced at a given moment and is used in combination with black and white elements.” The colour contrast of the covers gradually increases in the 20th century, but surprisingly this trend disappears at the end of the previous century. In the last decade, designers have made increasingly sparing use of colour. Content changes in the magazine are also exposed by this cultural analysis. The moment when sport and culture made their appearance alongside politics can be clearly seen. Because this visualisation shows the actual covers instead of standard statistics, far more trends can be revealed at a glance and it is more broadly accessible to a large public than statistics.»
