are posters dead?

The idea of something ‘falling into the past’ is slightly depressing to me. This can be especially true when it’s a mode, process, or style.

For the first timeline I looked at how public information has been passed to and from people over about a 250 year span. Examples ranged from lighthouses, to posters and billboards, to the news, to the light-up skyscrapers depicted in ‘Blade Runner.’ Revisiting these subjects, I’ve come to think more seriously about them, especially in the context of risd.

Recently, large televisions were placed in various locations around the risd campus with the thought and intention being to use them to convey public information at high speed, immediate updating, that kind of thing. I think they fail, and I don’t like them.

This place (risd) is a home of creation, construction, culture, tactility, and passion. These huge televisions have taken the place or cork boards, posters, and flyers. That said, they have not improved upon the medium. While these televisions can show many images, they have to cycle through all of them in some kind of random preprogrammed sequence. And it sucks. I feel that I have not seen one useful amount of information on these televisions—rather, I’ve seen pictures of people at parties, a horse, and a snow storm, and one flyer that had too much text to be read in the 3 seconds it was on the screen. Useless. This transition to digital has spawned laziness in its participants. As many transitions to digital already have…

Has the administration forgotten that ours is a generation that loves to create posters and steal them for our own once the event is over? The process of creating a poster is not only incredible, but important. This is, of course, an understatement for the printmaking and graphic design departments. These televisions are, in my opinion, an effrontery to artists and designers and to a process that has been used for hundreds of years. If certain people think that this medium of digital projection is meant to replace posters here at risd, and let them fall into the past, then I think, I hope, that they are sorely mistaken.