Morning Comrades! As the year is winding down and I am forcing myself to slow down a little, I managed to have a little think about the work being done here on my Sunday morning. Almost out of reflex I was thinking about doing another run over on IG on the “Eye Candy Sunday” theme and then a few espresso’s laster stopped myself and thus, you’re getting a different type of email today, that is going to look into the history of Isotype, the guiding light that the Gramscian school of Modernity in Communism played, filled with imagery to hopefully inspire you and make your day a little better.
Before all that, of course, we have ourselves a new playlist. Another 3hr banger filled with whatever tunes made my previous week that much better - for the new comrades here, these playlists are just that, tunes that I enjoyed the week before and there is no other “curation” involved here - hit shuffle, follow these, share it and just enjoy. This week flips in out of the alternative 80s music scene, some brand new tunes and remixes, some darker tunes as well as some deep cuts from the electronic side of the fence. Do enjoy.
So, Isotype. You are probably asking yourself why the fuck I am dedicating an entire newsletter to this and what the big deal is. Glad you asked. Essentially, it was the attempt to create a new visual, international language that could be applied to any and all situations through simplicity, modernity and one that eschewed nationalism and fostered internationalism. That today would be a groundbreaking idea, but considering, that, in line with the Bauhaus school of Creation, this was started almost 100 years ago in post WW1 Europe the clarity, scope and vision to this day is absolutely groundbreaking. More importantly, for our purposes it serves as a brilliant example of creating modernity that is non-reactionary, internationalist and communist at its deepest core of linguistic expression. Essentially, you are looking at the starting point of an internationalist language and the set of tools to communicate through universally understood graphics, info-slides we call them today and the story is breathtaking, especially in light of fascism coming into full force, once again.
Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition.
It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz and Maire Neurath were the artists responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist, respected in his fields of work by contemporaries like Wittgenstein he also worked prominently in the Red-Vienna Republic ( a separate National Identity apart from Austria following the end of WW1 ) as as Social-Democratic, then Socialist and ultimately a Communist Economic Theorist.
German Born Gerd Arntz, a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD (KAPD) and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s. In 1928 Arntz contributed prints to the AAUE paper Die Proletarische Revolution (The Proletarian Revolution) calling for workers to abandon parliament and form and participate in worker's councils.
Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister was a German designer, social scientist and author. She coined the acronym Isotype in 1935 on the analogy of Charles Kay Ogden's "Basic English”. In 1940, as the German army invaded the Netherlands, Reidemeister escaped with Neurath to England, while Arntz stayed behind in The Hague. In 1941, after release from internment as "enemy aliens", Marie and Otto Neurath were married and resumed their work in Oxford, founding the Isotype Institute. The Isotype Institute produced more than 80 illustrated children’s books, half are dedicated to science education. After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath carried on the work with a small number of English assistants, moving to London in 1948.
After her retirement in 1971, she gave the working material of the Isotype Institute to the University of Reading, where it is housed in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication as the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. Thereafter she devoted much energy to establishing a record of Otto Neurath’s life and work, and editing and translating his writings. She died in London in 1986.
ISOTYPE was intended as a method of pictorial statistics that could clarify scientific relationships for non specialists. This was part of the early European Communist plan to transform a largely illiterate Working Class into an Internationalist, literate one. A huge and ambitious project that worked brilliantly, partly due to the work of these three. Large data volumes were translated in a comprehensible and memorable visual form. The data was illustrated and interconnections were to be presented, the result was a promoted democratisation of knowledge. Neurath collected the information, Arntz developed the pictograms and graphics and Reidemeister converted the information and data into a visual understandable presentation. She linked technical experts and graphic designers as well as the target audience. Otto Neurath called this position the "trustee of the public".
The first rule of Isotype is that greater quantities are not represented by an enlarged pictogram but by a greater number of the same-sized pictogram. In Neurath’s view, variation in size does not allow accurate comparison whereas repeated pictograms, which always represent a fixed value within a certain chart, can be counted if necessary. Isotype pictograms almost never depicted things in perspective in order to preserve this clarity, and there were other guidelines for graphic configuration and use of colour. The best exposition of Isotype technique remains Otto Neurath’s book International picture language (1936).
“Visual education” was always the prime motive behind Isotype, which was worked out in exhibitions and books designed to inform ordinary citizens (including schoolchildren) about their place in the world. It was never intended to replace verbal language; it was a “helping language” always accompanied by verbal elements. Otto Neurath realized that it could never be a fully developed language, so instead he called it a “language-like technique”.
The fascinating aspect to this work is the mindful execution, and marriage between theory and praxis. Born into the the shocked and destroyed societies of post WW1 Europe, combined with the reality of the Communist Revolution in Moscow, presented the materialistic and philosophical realities of their lives, a theoretical solution to a number of problems and traumas was constructed and diligently executed. Reading into their biographies it becomes clear how closely they held the communist ideals of a communal, progressive world not bound by the centuries of capitalist war and oppression that working towards creating an universal, internationalist language to bring together people, to help explain complex notions in the most effective terms. The determination to create a new modernity, an anti-reactionary body of work bound by theory and philosophy, created through action and hard work is precisely the type of inspiration I wanted to offer with this historical excursion.
I hope it worked and that essentially concludes today’s email. We will return with more regular content, well, probably, on Wednesday and I remain until then, without compromise, yours,
V.