Antipixel | Blog | 20th Century Voyage

Barcode Tattoo < Home > Flip Flop on Milk Fats

20th Century Voyage

Comments: 7

Shinobu Fukutake who did the astonishing ladybug icons you no doubt remember (deserved winner of the 2002 Pixelpalooza People’s Choice) got in touch to let me know about Futurismo Zugakousaku and “The 20th Century Voyage” (English, Japanese) screensaver for Mac OS X. It’s just gorgeous (not a word I use often).

It’s beautifully coloured and the layers are hypnotic, and when I say that the typography is not quite there yet (when setting short pieces like events and quotations, the punctuation is thrown into high relief and ought to be consistent: your dashes and commas become really important) it’s simply by way of saying it’s good enough to criticise.

Coincidentally, The Typography of Order, Emil Ruder, 1959 was one of the first items that floated up when I ran it yesterday (you can sit there and gaze at it).

From the site:

We are living in the 21st century now. However, many things were born and many important things disappeared in the 20th century. For better or for worse, We are here now because the 20th century existed. Let’s begin a voyage to the past, and think again. What did we lose at these 100 years? and… What was born in these 100 years?

From the voyage:

1997, Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
1914, Laughing Owl extinct, New Zealand
1950, First credit card invented (Diner’s), Ralph Schneider
1928, Bird in Space, Constantin Brancusi
1999, Taliban take Mazar-i-Sharif
1927, Pez Candy, Eduard Haas III

I’d love to see the location of the events highlighted on the globe in the background. The pinpoint could fade out in sync with the event.

•••
Posted to Computers • 2003.06.30 (Mon) • 12:01

Comments

Posted by Miguel Arboleda 2003.07.01, 13:52

Very beautiful. Something soothing about the slow transformations of the images and the presentation of information. It’s great to have a Mac!

However, I must say, the information in the English version (less so in the Japanese version) inordinately weighs toward an American/Eurocentric world. It is as if almost nothing happened anywhere in the world except America, Europe, and little snatches of Japan. Most of the news from the rest of the world tends toward war and violence. And, as a German, I take issue with the heavy focus on the atrocities of the Nazis, as if the five years of the 2nd World War were just about all that Germany contributed to the 20th century. There is nothing at all about what the Americans did in the Philippines or Hawaii or the US itself, about what the Japanese did in China, the British in India, the Australians in Australia, etc., etc. While it is of course true that the Germans committed great crimes, that is not all they did, nor is it a reflection on who and what the Germans are as a whole. I realize that for a screensaver only bits of information can be presented, but I also think it is a reflection of world society right now as to how it is heavily influenced by the media’s biases. It’s not nice being at the receiving end of the negative views all the time.

Posted by Ladaq Manganam 2003.07.03, 03:47

Miguel Arboleda: I agree that the quote selection about Germany is perhaps a bit questionable. Now, what are you willing to do about it? Do you have one of these big fat books about the 20th century, preferably in German?

Could you pick up 50 to 100 quotable Germany- or Germans-related items from such a book and send them to me? Surely there have been notable developments in Germany in the science, literature and film/art scenes in the 20th century ! I’m more than willing to translate them from German into English and lobby Shinobu, the screen saver’s author, to include them in the quote database.

MfG, Ladaq

Posted by Shinobu FUKUTAKE 2003.07.03, 14:13

Hi Ladaq,

Could I correct a your wrong? The screen saver’s author is NOT me, it is Zuga who is webmaster of “Futurizumo Zugakousaku(url:http://www.zugakousaku.com/e/)”. I just help him to make some a part of datebase, and got in touch to announce to Jeremy Hedley. If you have any idea for t20CV, you should drop a line to Zuga. I think, he will keep your ideas or comments for future reference.

Anyway, we are so glad to here many opinion from all of the world. It is our pleasure.

Thank you.

Posted by jh 2003.07.03, 16:21