Naqoyqatsi: Life as war is a documentary film released in 2002; it is the third and final film of the Qatsi trilogy by Godfrey Reggio. The film focuses on society’s transition from a natural environment to a technology-based industrial environment.
In the opening chapter, the first scene is a zoom in of the Tower of Babel as portrayed in the Bible, then, shots of an abandoned building from both interior and exterior are shown, followed by a black and white series of shots. One shot is one of a strong wave, followed by a mountain with an effect behind the mountains of stars falling like comets, then a natural scene, then a black and white animation of a mountain’s framework growing is shown, after that, inverted, black and white, layered people are seen walking. Many lines come above the scene, and then the title is revealed in big, red writing.
Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation is the 1988 sequel to the experimental 1982 documentary film Koyaanisqatsi, by Godfrey Reggio. It is the second film in the Qatsi trilogy.
Powaqqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “parasitic way of life” or “life in transition”. While Koyaanisqatsi focused on modern life in industrial countries, Powaqqatsi, which similarly has no dialogue, focuses more on the conflict in third world countries between traditional ways of life and the new ways of life introduced with industrialization.
As with Koyaanisqatsi and the third and final part of the ‘Qatsi’ trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, the film is strongly related to its soundtrack, written by Philip Glass. Here, human voices (especially children’s and mainly from South America and Africa) appear more than in Koyaanisqatsi, in harmony with the film’s message and images.
Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by minimalist composer Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke
The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means 'life of moral corruption and turmoil, life out of balance', and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.
In June 2005, Kai Bernau, a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague, asked us (among some other designers) to participate in Neutral, a graduation project that was both a neutral typeface, and a statement about neutrality. Apart from contributing to an e-mail discussion on the subject of neutrality, he also asked the invited designers to create a poster displaying the Neutral typeface. These posters were shown during Kai’s graduating exhibition. More about this project can be seen at Letterlabor
Thinking about the idea of introducing a new sans serif typeface, we suddenly remembered a quote about Stanley Kubrick, a quote that has been posted on a lot of (typo)graphic forums. It’s a quote pulled from an article in The Guardian, describing Kubrick’s obsession with the typeface Futura: “It was Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant”.
We used this quote as a starting point for our poster. Since Kubrick was supposedly so interested in sans serif type, we figured that the best context to show a new typeface would be a poster for one of Kubrick’s movies; the ultimate testing environment for a sans serif. Also, a movie poster is a very recognisable format, so we thought it would fit quite naturally in Kai’s series of posters.
While we were thinking about this plan (to design a completely typographic poster, as a sort of hybrid between a film poster and a type specimen), we suddenly had another idea. We realised that the most ‘neutral’ letter of a sans serif alphabet would be the ‘I’, as it is just a black vertical bar: it could be either a capital ‘i’ or an undercast ‘L’. In fact, it is the context (the word in which the letter is placed) that decides whether the ‘I’ is an ‘i’ or an ‘L’. At that point, we made the connection between this neutral ‘I’, and the black monolith that plays a central role in Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
From the screenplay of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1965), by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark:
Dr. Heywood R. Floyd:
Any clue as to what it is?
Dr. Bill Michaels:
Not really. It’s completely inert. No sound or energy sources have been detected. The surface is made of something incredibly hard and we’ve been barely able to scratch it.
Floyd: But you don’t have any idea as to what it is?
Michaels: Tomb, shrine, survey-marker, spare part… take your choice.
So that is, in short, the idea behind the poster. The neutral sans serif ‘I’, shown as black monolith, in the form of a film poster.
The term Postmodernism was coined in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, founding the postmodern architecture.
And later of, relating to, or being any of several movements (as in art, architecture, or literature) that are reactions against the philosophy and practices of modern movements and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques. Postmodernity is the derivative to refer to non-art aspects of history that was influenced by the new movement.
When the idea of a reaction, or even rejection, of the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields,
it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity, a term for the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.
The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, élitist culture.
Postmodernism is said to be marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the International Style, or an artistic period characterized by the abandonment of strong divisions of genre, “high” and “low” art, and the emergence of the global village.
If used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (incl. criticism) in reaction to modernism, not “post” in the purely temporal sense of “after”. Largely influenced by the disillusionment of the First World War, postmodernism’s many manifestations tend to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.
Hypermodernity (in some cases synonymous to supermodernity) is a type, mode, or stage of society that reflects a deepening or intensification of modernity. Characteristics include a deep faith in humanity’s ability to understand, control, and manipulate every aspect of human experience. This typically is manifested in a forward-looking commitment to science and knowledge, particularly with regard to the convergence of technology and biology. The emphasis on the value of new technology to overcome natural limitations lends itself a diminution or outright repudiation of the past, since yesterday’s knowledge is always less than today’s.
Hypermodernity
There can be a profound lack of integration between the past and the present since:
1. What happened necessarily took place under “lesser” circumstances than now, which generates a fundamentally separate context.
2. Artifacts from the past superabundantly clutter the cultural landscape and are seamlessly reused to generate an even greater superabundance from which individuals are unable to discern original intent or meaning.
Hypermodernity (also called “Supermodernity”) differs from Modernity in that it has even more commitment to reason and to an ability to improve individual choice and freedom. Modernity merely held out the hope of reasonable change while continuing to deal with a historical set of issues and concerns; hypermodernity posits that things are changing so quickly that history is not a reliable guide. The positive changes of hypermodernity are supposedly witnessed through rapidly expanding wealth, better living standards, medical advances, and so forth. Individuals and cultures that benefit directly from these things can feel that they are pulling away from natural limits that have always constrained life on Earth. But the negative effects also can be seen as leading to a soulless homogeneity as well as to accelerated discrepancies between different classes and groups.
Postmodernity differs here in that it rejects the idea of “reasonable change” while at the same time accepting that the past and its artifacts have as much value as the present. The value is primarily expressed through provisional constructs that have no lasting meaning; we cannot discern truth but we can play with the nonsense. Postmodernity is meant to describe a condition of total emergence from Modernity and its faith in progress and improvement in empowering the individual.
Supermodernity
If distinguished from hypermodernity, supermodernity is a step beyond the ontological emptiness of postmodernism and relies upon a view of plausible truths. Where modernism focused upon the creation of great truths (or what Lyotard called “master narratives” or “metanarratives”), postmodernity is intent upon their destruction (deconstruction). In contrast supermodernity does not concern itself with the creation or identification of truth value. Instead, information that is useful is selected from the superabundant sources of new media. Postmodernity and deconstruction have made the creation of truths an impossible construction. Supermodernity acts amid the chatter and excess of signification in order to escape the nihilistic tautology of postmodernity. The Internet search and the construction of interconnected blogs are excellent metaphors for the action of the supermodern subject. Related Authors are Michael Speaks, “After Design Theory”, and Marc Auge Nonplaces: An anthropology of supermodernity.
Modernism is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic.
