person:christopher burke

TIME(LESS) SIGNS Otto Neurath and Reflections in Austrian Contemporary Art

Austrian Cultural Forum London

▻http://www.acflondon.org/exhibitions/timeless-signs-otto-neurath-and-reflections-austri

C’est bien sur l’expo à ne pas rater ! Moi, je prendrai l’avion rien que pour voir ça. Cette expo est une sorte d’expo-miroir de celle de Vienne en Janvier 2013 “a tribute to otto neurath”

–-> ▻http://www.zeitlose-zeichen.at/timeless-signs.html

This multi-media exhibition, curated by Maria Christine Holter and Christopher Burke, features over 30 contributions from renowned contemporary Austria based artists, whose work is either directly or indirectly inspired by Neurath.

TIME(LESS) SIGNS
Otto Neurath and Reflections in Austrian Contemporary Art
Tuesday 30 September 2014, 6.30pm | Austrian Cultural Forum London

The exhibition continues until Friday 9 January 2015

What is the state of art in today’s visual language? Signs, icons and ideograms determine our daily communication; pictographic guidance systems dominate public space. Much of what we understand as visual language originates in Otto Neurath’s Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, later known as ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

The exhibition presents various artistic strategies for using pictograms and pictorial statistics to visualise political, social, global or purely individual agendas. Original works by social economist and Vienna Circle philosopher Neurath (1882 Vienna – 1945 Oxford) will feature alongside contemporary pieces.

http://www.acflondon.org/media/images/events/OSTEN_commuting_090_jpg_573x380_crop_q85.jpg

Participating artists:

Bernhard Cella, Ilse Chlan, Hazem El Mestikawy, Nikolaus Gansterer, Wilfried Gerstel, Christoph Hinterhuber, Barbara Höller, Christian Hutzinger, Martin Kaltenbrunner et al., Karl-Heinz Klopf, Matthias Klos, Lena Knilli, Clemens Kogler/ Karo Szmit, Richard Kriesche, Gert Linke, open3.at, Bernd Oppl, Olaf Osten, Hermann Josef Painitz, Waltraud Palme, Andrea Ressi, Christian Rupp, Sito Schwarzenberger, Niko Wahl, Michael Wegerer, Peter Weibel, Jun Yang and Anthony Burrill (UK).

http://www.acflondon.org/media/images/events/YANG_revolutions_still03_jpg_573x380_crop_q85.jpg http://www.acflondon.org/media/images/events/Neurath-GW56-Cars_jpg_573x380_crop_q85.jpg http://www.acflondon.org/media/images/events/KNILLI_2010_Mitgift_jpg_573x380_crop_q85.jpg http://www.acflondon.org/media/images/events/CHLAN_patterns_of_economic_efficiency_2012_3_world_bank_jpg_573x380_crop_q85.jpg

#otto_neurath #visualisation #pictogrammes #isotype

The Mapmaker’s Conundrum - The New Yorker

▻http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mapmakers-conundrum#slide_ss_0=1

Images and text are drawn from “Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies,” edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, out July 15th from Thames & Hudson.

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/12_Louise-Bourgeois-690.jpg

Louise Bourgeois, “Paris Toujours Paris” (Set No. 7, detail), 2006. © Louise Bourgeois. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation.

A few years back, when Google’s various cartographic apps became ubiquitous, discussion groups were flooded with accounts of strange anomalies. Buildings, streets or, on occasion, entire cities disappeared; coastlines and mountain ranges warped; highways kinked and buckled; giant lacunae sprung up, sinkholes yawning from innocuous fields and deserts. The cause, of course, was glitch-ridden software and faulty collating techniques. But to dismiss this as a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon, a digital quirk, would be to overlook an essential feature of all maps: namely, that they don’t work, and never have. Pick up any textbook on cartography, and the very first paragraph will invariably remind you that the Earth is spherical but paper is flat; and, as J. A. Steers points out in his 1927 Introduction to the Study of Map Projections, just ‘as it is impossible to make a sheet of paper rest smoothly on a sphere, so it is impossible to make a correct map on a sheet of paper’. Maps are not copies; they are projections, ‘means’ (Steers again) ‘of representing the lines of latitude and longitude of the globe on a flat sheet of paper’.

#cartographie #art #projection

Isotype : design and contexts 1925–1971

Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, Sue Walker (editors)

Un tout nouveau livre sur les Isotypes, Otto Neurath et Gerd Arntz

▻https://hyphenpress.co.uk/products/books/978-0-907259-47-3

▻https://hyphenpress.co.uk/images/114/large_047_I.jpg

The work in graphic communication carried out by Otto Neurath and his associates – now commonly known simply as Isotype – has been the subject of much interest in recent years. Conceived and developed in the 1920s as ‘the Vienna method of pictorial statistics’, this approach to designing information had from its inception the power to grow and spread internationally. Political developments in Europe played their part in its development, and production moved to the Netherlands (1934) and to England (1940), where the Isotype Institute continued to produce work until 1971. Bringing together the latest research, this book is the first comprehensive, detailed account of its subject. The Austrian, Dutch, and English years of Isotype are described here freshly and extensively. There are chapters on the notable extensions of Isotype to Soviet Russia, the USA, and Africa. Isotype work in film and in designing for children is fully documented and discussed. Between these main chapters the book presents interludes documenting Isotype production visually. Three appendices reprint key documents. In its international coverage and its extensions into the wider terrain of history, this book opens a new vista in graphic design.

#otto_neurath #isotype #gerd_arntz #visualisation #cartographie