The Moon is Down
Ten years ago the nation’s computers were full to bursting with typefaces, in complete contrast to an earlier period where you would have been fortunate to gain access to one of them. To have a typewriter was a luxury and the world of typesetting was as distant an option as a weekend in Prague. People discuss the ins-and-outs of the Microsoft operating system and the “Comic Sans” font and rarely speak about how our perception of words has been modified. The power of print is not what it was, and we blame journalists for that. What about design?… Taking care of text before it gets to be printed matter - have words become children? Typography mostly consists of deciding which flavour of crisps you fancy and thereby the flavour that other people get to eat.
PC and Macworld isn’t that bothered about new typefaces nowadays, though they keep coming. The new thing is to collect mp3 files and have 10.000 hits to hand. In today’s computer matrix it is music that is getting a hammering. A simple thing would be to call it the ‘Tesco treatment’, but the damage was done a long time ago - when, within a short period in the mid-1980s, the CD format was introduced, the independent distribution network self-combusted, and corporate sponsorship became loud. Lately, mobile phones came to be sold alongside music. Is there some strange relationship between the state of music and the advances in obesity and plastic surgery?
In Eastern Europe, covered by a lesser media force-field and whoever owns EMI, the flip-side is to put on a ‘Hard Disk Party’ and have everyone come with a coach-full of downloads. The party can last for a weekend, and you head home with 75 years’ worth of music. How many copies of the new Coldplay album might you end up with? If it wasn’t for the shuffle button, you’d need a 100 years to edit the file names…
Thank God the hard disks can take it. Think how they must feel. They’re grown up now, but looking on in suspension. Having to summon-up typefaces, JPEGs, music and movies on DVD all at the speed of [your] silence. The noise a DVD player makes when it is loading feels like a more definite scream than the fax machine made when it kicked in. Soon start up disks will be going to the moon… What is there left to imagine? How it came to be thus? To remember that for the Apollo 11 landing, the on-board computer had 36k worth of memory.
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Ten years ago it was possible to look at all the qualities and dilemmas of the design world - its connection to advertising, print production and commercial art - and see it as being pivoted between progressive action (the art and craft of the medium) and short-term gain (advertising/corporate patronage). The fact that the personal computer impacted first on graphic designers throws this into deep relief, because here was a major opportunity to take a progressive turn. It never happened.
Software, desktops and manuals all fall back on Graphic Design for their common language, almost always with lamentable results. Graphic Design interfacing with music is not a good idea either. The triumph of the i-Pod has been to upgrade graphic design minimalism, but it is matched with the worst effects of the digital upon music - compression codes, endless versions of the same tune, piss-poor headphone quality. “Use Hearing Protection”, an early Peter Saville poster for Factory recommended… this isn’t the half of it.
Readers might wonder where is the way forward in all this? It’s not where one normally would look, it is not there for you on the front page, nor spilling out of your headphones, it is the isn’t-yet-computerised experience. Google might summon up something, but first a non-digital reality check, a particular line of enquiry would be better than this race-chase for more ’stuff’.
Extreme conditions and an obvious overload should be a catalyst for refusal and regeneration. Imagine the possibilities, a world at once conscious of what it is hearing, rejecting the “deaf dumb and blind kid” direction. Stand around a Tube exit for any length of time and observe the % of passengers streaming out, giving the outside world a miss in favour of wearing headphones, whilst fingering mobile phones with nervous hands. It is all there, somewhere, on CCTV, an excellent end-point to the first Lumière film in 1896 where the train arrives at the station, and the public is astonished, whereas this time everyone is leaving the station, and they seem oblivious to what is going on around them.
Funny to consider how 20th century music was all about exhorting its audience to ‘wake up’.
Jon Wozencroft
author’s addendum
Jon, to leave aside the (il)legality of the hard disk parties you mention — which is another issue — isn’t the ease of acquiring music (new and old) a good thing? There seems to be a note of nostalgia in your post for days of dusty fingers in dustier record shops. Surely such parties and sharing iTunes libraries across networks broadens the market for previously more marginalised music. Chris Anderson has recently written a book called “The long tail” in which he notes that the vast catalogue of online retailers like Amazon has triggered a rise in the sales of obscure titles. These books and CDs have an extended shelf life – the long tail – and reveal that consumers are taking advantage of increased choice and are not simply buying the latest Coldpay albums. As he says, “Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.”(1) Moreover, websites like www.myspace.com let bands promote their music without the need for labels. The Arctic Monkeys, whether you like their music or not, are a good example of the potential of this medium.
So to compression, iPods, and crappy headphones. In my lifetime at least (I’m 24 for the record) really high fidelity sound equipment has never been particularly mainstream, least of all in the context of Walkmans, Diskmans and now iPods. It would be great to see this change. MP3 compression is mainly a response to (relatively) small hard disks, and long download times. As such the reduction in quality of sound that MP3 entails is simply the price we pay, for the moment, of the wider availability I mentioned above. Both the size of hard disks and the speed of internet connections are increasing and perhaps there will be an audiophile version of the iTunes music store selling uncompressed music. Perhaps.
And what about us all ‘giving the the outside world a miss in favour of wearing headphones’? What’s so wrong with that? Have you ever missed a train stop because you were engrossed in a book? That personal stereos expand the potential private space we have is no bad thing. I like being able to block out the shouting couple at the back of the bus with something I find more interesting. Does this make me anti-social? Only as much as reading the paper already did.
The way forward? More stuff please.
/Nick Evans 22/03/2006