1925 Malerei Fotografie Film
Moholy-Nagy for example splits Malerei Fotografie Film into two clear sections, the first to “identify the ambiguities of present-day optical creation,” (1925:1) and the second to“[place] the illustrative material separately following the text because continuity in the illustrations will make the problems raised in the text VISUALLY clear” (1925:47). Because Moholy-Nagy’s work is responding to the age of mechanical modernism and experiments to liberate the image from representational practice, Malerei Fotografie Film uses photography, type and photograms in a graphically rhythmic and elastic new communication language he calls ‘typophotography.’
1967 Fiore x McLuhan
Quentin Fiore similarly animates McLuhan’s media theory on the effects of the cool connected electric information age, as compared to the hot media of Gutenberg’s linear printing press, in a completely new graphical language of kinetic compositions, high-contrast full-bleed images and a cinematic interplay of text, image and graphics. Unlike Moholoy-Nagy’s undulating but linear modernism, Fiore’s experimental paperback is like a spoonful of visual rockcandy: fizzy, ecstatic and consumed instantaneously in a series of television-like blinks.
Fiore designed Medium Is the Massage following the creation of educational films for Bell Laboratories exploring the relationship between the computer and the book at a time of explosions in new printing and imaging technologies, alongside the Vietnam War, Civil Rights and Free Speech Movements. He was interested in the reduction of complex theory into simplified signs, glyphs, and patches of text which were accompanied with an LP for mass consumption to demonstrate the hysteria of the new sonic audible electronic information age, as differentiated from the linear rationality of type.
