Own Label Sainsbury's Design Studio 1962-1977
"In 1962, when Peter Dixon joined the Sainsbury's Design Studio, a remarkable revolution in packaging design began. The supermarket was developing its distinctive range of Own Label products, and Dixon's designs for the line were revolutionary: simple, stripped down, creative, and completely different from what had gone before. Their striking modernity pushed the boundaries, reflecting a period full of optimism. They also helped build Sainsbury's into a brand giant, the first real 'super' market of the time. This book examines and celebrates this paradigm shift that redefined packaging design, and led to the creation of some of the most original packaging ever seen.
Produced in collaboration with the Sainsbury family and The Sainsbury Archive, the book reveals an astonishing and exhaustive body of work. A unique insight into what and how we ate, the packaging is presented using both scanned original flat packets and photographic records made at the time. With an essay by Emily King featuring interviews with Peter Dixon and Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
A personal profile of American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler
"This episode features Alvin Toffler. He is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism"
(Sciencedump, submitted by Jur on 30 October 2010)
Halperin, J. (2002). "Alvin Toffler – Futurist". Big Thinkers. USA, TechTV: 22 minutes [The Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250841/fullcredits#cast].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: the first true science fiction novel
"What many might consider to be true science fiction began to emerge during the Enlightenment in the early 16th Century as the Western world's understanding of science blossomed. Others identify Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818 as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, as the first true science fiction novel. Today it tends to be seen very much as gothic horror, but it relies heavily on extrapolating then current scientific understanding to extreme fantastical ends."
(Lynne Hardy, 1 August 2011, Celebrating Science)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Exposition Futur Anterieur: the future of an alternative past
"Articulée autour des trois axes convergents mais néanmoins autonomes que constituent le rétrofuturisme, le steampunk et l'archéomodernisme, l'exposition a pour enjeu de faire dialoguer des productions culturelles issues du passé, qui tentaient à leur époque d'envisager ce que pourrait être le futur – c'est–à–dire approximativement notre postmodernité – avec des œuvres d'artistes actuels qui revisitent le passé et réactivent certaines visions du futur ou de la modernité générées essentiellement entre le dernier tiers du XIXe et la première moitié du XXe siècle.
Structured around the themes of retrofuturism, steampunk and archeomodernism – a concept developed by the academic, critic and curator Arnaud Pierre, the exhibition FUTUR PERFECT aims to create a dialogue between past cultural output that imagined the future, what is essentially our postmodern era – with work from contemporary artists, which in both form and substances refer to the pas [sic] by revisiting and reviving certain visions of the future or of modernity, generated by mainly between the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition takes a transversal approach, intersecting different aesthetic and temporal veins. A selection of work from contemporary artists will be grouped with older work and documents – each giving perspectives to the others. In addition, one section will be dedicated to cinema and another to the various accessories, devices and artefacts developed by the steampunk community. in a separate section, the exhibition will also include the first French retrospective of the American magazine Retrofuturism, in the form of an installation designed by its originator, the artist and editor Lloyd Dunn."
(Commissaire de l'exposition / Curator : Jean–François Sanz, Galerie du Jour agnès b.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The evolution of Postmodernism
"On the way to postmodern, the struggle to reform modern capitalism's dark side, fragmented into a thousand strands. An era approach is rejected – dating the arrival of postmodernism is impossible as is the construction of a linear episodic narrative, moving from the premodern to the modern and then to postmodern. Instead postmodern methods, theories, and worldviews proliferate, as do modern and premodern ones. There are numerous postmodern approaches ranging from naive postmodernism (McPostmodernism) that hails the arrival of postindustrial and complex/adaptive organizations, Baudrillard's and Lyotard's versions of radical breaks from modernity, to others seeking more integration with critical theory. Some claim to have moved beyond postmodern to something called postpostmodern that would include hybrids (postmodern variants with modern and premodern), language 'heteroglossia' (the coexistence of many voices at the same time in tension with each other), and various 'dark side postmoderns' looking at global reterritorialization, postmodern war, postcolonialism and the ills of capitalism"
(David M. Boje, 2007)
1). Postmodernism – by David M. Boje (2007) To appear in Yiannis Gabriel's Thesaurus, London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
