Feeling overwhelmed by TMI, too much information zooming in on too many platforms? Whistle up a graphic designer to edit, organize, prioritize and make sense of it all. That's what those smart mad men and wise women do in "Graphic Design: Now in Production," Walker Art Center's up-to-the-minute report on the state of the graphic arts.
BYO smartphone, and wear comfy shoes. You can use the phone to insert your own messages into a billboard-sized wall of ever-moving "posters" at the show's entrance. The shoes? Well, this is a huge, endlessly fascinating display that's likely to keep you on your toes a while.
Billed as the largest museum event of its type in the past 15 years, the exhibit presents a dazzling array of multimedia posters, logos, brands, fonts, graphs, charts, books, magazines and products by more than 250 international talents, including about 25 Minnesotans. Fun, fast and informative, it focuses primarily on the past five years.
Eclecticism is evident in the show's juxtaposition of high-tech and traditional posters. An electronic poster-wall, produced by a collaborative called LUST, offers an ever-changing array of colorful messages in poster-sized formats that seem to dance across a light box, advancing, receding and responding to visitors' movements. Computer algorithms generate up to 600 of these electronic "posters" every day by mining local websites for images and text. Visitors can use QR codes to add their own messages.
Nearby hangs a ceiling-to-floor cascade of silk-screened music posters by Minneapolis-based duo Aesthetic Apparatus, and a collection of type-only posters that British artist Anthony Brill created using woodblocks and, in one case, "ink" made from oil salvaged from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Albert Exergian cleverly revives Swiss modernist designs for conceptual posters about popular television programs ("Scrubs," "The Simpsons"), while Michiel Schuurman uses computer programs to create the kind of mind-buzzing psychedelic lettering that San Francisco stoners once drew by hand.
Designers really justify their existence by distilling complex data into crisp, memorable and witty graphs, charts and other visuals. In an absorbing short video, "The Joy of Stats," a hyperkinetic Swede named Hans Rosling uses colorful bubbles to chart 200 years of changes in world population, longevity, health and wealth -- factoids that would otherwise require a mind-numbing 120,000 numbers.
Sir Ken Robinson's cartoon video critiquing misguided education models shows how fun school could be if only all teachers could draw. Kai Krause dramatically illustrates how really big Africa is by turning it into a puzzle that holds, believe it or not, the entire United States, China, India and a half-dozen other countries.
Branding and typography get populist crowd-sourcing treatment. Visitors can vote on whether they prefer the original or redesigned versions of a wall full of familiar logos including Comedy Central, AOL and Popeyes. Some designers turn words and letters into products such as Eric Ku's "Chair," composed of large letters that spell "chair" when disassembled.
