The Pictograms, Signs of Life, Emojis: The Society of Signs catalog explores the questions: What objectives, and hopes are linked to the development of the modern language of images, including emojis? To which issues of their time are they each reacting to? Do they expand our possibilities of expression or do they limit them by defining stereotypes? The focus of this catalogue is on lexicons and systems of pictorial signs devised by designers and artists like Gerd Arntz, Marie and Otto Neurath, Otl Aicher, Yukio ta or Wolfgang Schmidt and others. How functional or engaging do the designers consider their pictorial signs to be? Are they interested in universal forms of communication or personal spaces of retreat, rapid transmission of information or complex or poetic forms of language, abstraction or individualisation? Texts by: Anja Dorn, Isabel Herda, Christine Litz, Philipp Nielsen, Michaela Stoffels, Maxim Weirich, Lukas R. A. Wilde

Klappentext

The life of signs: a century of pictograms by artists and designers from Otto Neurath to Harun Farocki

What are the broader aims and aspirations implied by the development of icons and emojis since the modernist era? What historical issues inform them? Do they expand our possibilities of expression or do they limit them with stereotypes? The Society of Signs examines lexicons and systems of pictorial signs devised by designers and artists such as Gerd Arntz, Marie and Otto Neurath, Otl Aicher, Yukio Ota and others, examining the ideologies and cultural factors at play in their respective oeuvres.
Designers and artists include: Otl Aicher, Moritz Appich, Jonas Grünwald, Bruno Jacoby, Gerd Arntz, Johannes Bergerhausen, Ilka Helmig, Karsten de Riese, Antje Ehmann, Harun Farocki, Juli Gudehus, Pati Hill, Heinrich Hoerle, Timothée Ingen-Housz, Shigetaka Kurita, Warja Lavater, Marie Neurath, Otto Neurath, Yukio Ota, Wolfgang Schmidt, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Lilian Stolk, Augustin Tschinkel and Edgar Walthert.