| Tjebbe van Tijen on Thu, 12 Jun 1997 11:11:15 +0200 (MET DST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Speaking Signs. Otto Neurath's Viennese Method ofVisual Education (0) |
"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction." (Otto Neurath) It was nice to see one of my favourite subjects, pictorial language, for the last decades appearing in the context of a text focussed forum like 'nettime'. If there is any interest in this gorup for the subject of pictorial language than there are many links to both printed and digital materials available. The minimum I want to do at this point is to mention the standard work on Otto Neurath's picture education work: Otto Neurath Gesammelte bildpaedagogische Schriften -Herausgegeben von Rudolf Haller und Robin Kinross Verlagh Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, Wien 1991 p.674, ilustrated, isbn3209008639 some other books are mentioned at http://physserv1.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/notebooks/neurath.html The Institut Wiener Kreis/Vienna Circle from Vienna is engaged in promoting the study of the group of philosophers at the beginning of this century in which Neurath participated http://hhobel.phl.univie.ac.at/wk/ivc-e.html Interpretations of the meaning of the pictogram/isotype system of Neurath keep appearing like this one comparing the modernity of Piet Mondriaan and Otto Neurath http://www.modcult.brown.edu/students/DN/matthew/ Frank Hartmann forgot to mention his own German text"Otto Neuraths revolution�re Methode der Bildp�dagogik" on the subject that can be found at http://www.netsphere.co.at/neurath My own reserach in this area focusses on the relevance of historical phenomena like heraldics, emblematics, the charateristica universalis (17th century), the ars combinatoria (13th century), the tableau system (17th century Comenius), the isotype system of Neurath(20th century) and the semantographic system of Bliss (20th century), for nowadays information and communication systems. What becomes clear that a lot of concepts, at this day promoted as being the product of the new digital area, existed long before. Seen in a historical perspective the relativity of 'universal comminication systems' become clear, like the creative misconceptions about the Egyptian hieroglyphs at the end of the 16th century in Europe that led to a wave of emblematic art during almost two centuries, very similar to the multi-media hype of our times. I have attached 3 pictures to this message to illustrate this, because of traffic problems with attached images (size) there are 3 seperate messages belonging to this answer tj. Tjebbe van Tijen Imaginary Museum Projects, Amsterdam [email protected] --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: [email protected]