McLuhan, Fuller, Agel and Fiore: An Inventory of Electric Information

During the mid-1960's, journalist and PR man Jerome Agel, and designer and typographer Quentin Fiore produced several highly influential mass market paperbacks based on the heady, radical, yet prescient ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, Herman Kahn, Jerry Rubin, Stanley Kubrick, and others.

This brief talk focuses on how Fiore and Agel radically changed the landscape of publishing through the use of expressive, kinetic typography, increasingly complex layouts and structures, paired with photography reflecting the culture of the time, the past, and the future.

What these unique books help reveal is that artists and designers are keys to a future not entirely focused on the rearview mirror, where past artifacts become art.

Transcript

2. McLuhan Fuller Agel Fiore An Inventory of Electric Information
3. The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.” “ — Wyndham Lewis, “Understanding Media” p 65
5. Marshall McLuhan
9. Quentin Fiore
11. Jerome Agel
14. 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1966 – 1975
15. 1960 1970 1980 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy The Making of Typographic Man Marshall McLuhan Published by U of T Press 1964 Understanding Media The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan Published by McGraw-Hill
16. 1960 1970 1980 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy The Making of Typographic Man Marshall McLuhan Published by U of T Press 1964 Understanding Media The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan Published by McGraw-Hill 1967 The Medium is the Massage An Inventory of Effects Marshall McLuhan Published by Bantam Books 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village Marshall McLuhan Published by Bantam Books 1970 I Seem to be a Verb R. Buckminster Fuller Published by Bantam Books
17. 1960 1970 1980 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy The Making of Typographic Man Marshall McLuhan Published by U of T Press 1964 Understanding Media The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan Published by McGraw-Hill 1967 The Medium is the Massage An Inventory of Effects Marshall McLuhan Published by Bantam Books 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village Marshall McLuhan Published by Bantam Books 1970 I Seem to be a Verb R. Buckminster Fuller Published by Bantam Books 1973 Herman Kahnsciousness Herman Kahn Published by Bantam Books 1975 Other Worlds Carl Sagan Published by Bantam Books 1970 Do It! Jerry Rubin Published by Bantam Books
18. McLuhan
19. 1960 1970 1980 1972 Take Today The Executive as Dropout Marshall McLuhan & Barrington Nevitt Published by Hartcourt-Brace 1968 Through the Vanishing Point Space in Poetry and Painting Marshall McLuhan & Harley Parker Published by Harper-Collins 1969 Counterblast Marshall McLuhan & Harley Parker Published by Hartcourt-Brace 1970 From Cliché to Archetype Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson Published by Viking, NY
23. Our obsession with the book as the archetype of culture has not even encouraged us to consider the book itself as a peculiar and arty way of packaging experience.” “ — “Counterblast” p 93
24. The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word.” “ — “Understanding Media” p 54
27. The Medium is the Massage An Inventory of Effects
28. a e M ssage
29. a e M ssage
30. a e M ss age
31. a e M ss age
52. war and peace in the global village
83. TODAY
84. Microserfs Douglas Coupland (1995)
88. The Brand Gap Marty Neumeier (2005)
93. WHATEVER YOU THINK THINK THE OPPOSITE. PAUL ARDEN, author of the world’s bestselling book Whatever You Think… Paul Arden (2006)
95. BACK TO THE FUTURE. 7' 41⁄4 " THE OLYMPIC RECORD 1968 7' 6' 5' 4' 3' 2' 1' 0' 5' 8" THE OLYMPIC RECORD PRE-1968 NTIL the Mexico Olympics of 1968 the customary way for a high jumper to cross the bar was with his body parallel to it, in a technique known as the Western Roll. But that was about to change. A little-known athlete approached the bar, which was set at a world record height of 7ft 4¼ inches. He took off, but instead of turning his body towards the bar, he turned his back on it. He brought his legs up and ipped over the bar backwards. His name was Dick Fosbury, and his method of jumping became known as the Fosbury Flop. It is still used today. He jumped higher than any man before, by thinking the opposite from everyone else. This example is just a technique for thinking, but here the technique for thinking became a technique for jumping, turning a op into a success. U 7
96. WHAT’S YOUR POINT OF VIEW?
102. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” “ — “The Medium is the Massage” pages 74–75
103. The Electric Information Age Book By Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels Introduction by Steven Heller