Recently, a good friend sent this book to me. Written by Harold Taylor and published in 1969, it’s an elaboration on a paper he wrote as a participant in a 2-year long ‘conference’ held here in the US. The conference was titled Consultation and was sponsored by the American Institute of Planners. It included professionals from a number of disciplines and its focus was the future of art, culture and society over the next 50 years. I couldn’t find much information on Taylor beyond what the book included in his bio (President of Sarah Lawrence College in 1945, academic, author and lecturer among other things). I also did a cursory search on the conference but found nothing on that at all.

A book like this is always entertaining in its reverse prophesying but what I found fascinating was his general view of the arts and some of the prescient predictions he made. It’s clear that television is the disruptive technology of the moment and a lot is made of TV’s hovering black cloud. But what comes out of Taylor are things like this passage:

“Certainly films with their link to television broadcasting and other electronic devices as yet unknown are going to be the mass form of art in the future. The combination of low-cost film cameras, the movie equivalent of the Brownie, and the mass love of taking pictures and showing them, plus the incredible possibilities in new uses in sounds, colors, lights and stories with multi-media effects centered in projection screens, will all combine to push the film arts deep into the daily cultural life of the masses, that is to say the middle class and the others. There it will be a participant art, a documentation of life carried out by those who are living it, showing their documents to all the others in a gigantic set of home movies with the world as home.”

 

I had to read this a couple of times. Although computers were definitely on the minds of many in 1965 what Taylor is describing here is our contemporary cultural norm based on technologies and implementations of technologies that very few people could have even imagine back then.

There is more of this in the book. What made it a good read was that it wasn’t dogmatic or finger wagging, doom and gloom. He makes some very interesting points throughout the book which are well thought-out and considered. It’s worth the read if you come across it.

 
 
 
And so it happens that, if someone has a liking for and an understanding of the phenomena of nature, he will find that anything, even if it be the accidental consequence of other events, has its own rhythm and grace.

~Marcus Aurelius

These are the front and back views of the rack card I designed for this year’s Annual Mt. Si Relay sponsored by Eastside Runners and Everyday Athlete. It was a fun job to revision the standard marathon card and give it a little more tranquil and subdued feel.

My level of insanity has not reached its peak yet so I won’t be running but I encourage anyone out there who’s got it in them to sign up.

This is a piece I recently designed for Melissa. It was printed by the impeccable Doug Keyes.

I don’t make it a habit of standing behind someone else’s predictions for the future of art; identifying exactly what it will look like tomorrow is impossible and a fool’s pursuit.

The approaches and explorations among the individuals interviewed in the Future of Art Project, however, resonate deeply with me right now.

Maybe something new is evolving.

The Future of Art from KS12 on Vimeo.

This is an immediated autodocumentary created at the Transmediale Festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany