“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified.”
Warner Bros.
What do we say to the Lord of Death? Not today.
Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News
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Flickr: Jimmy Emerson/Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND http://2.0) / Via Flickr: auvet
Tracy Clayton was one of few black students at Transylvania University, a small college in Kentucky, in the early 2000s. She wrote about being reminded, every day, of just how unwelcome she was there. (The university's administration later sent an email urging students not to share the essay.)
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When Ramona Emerson left New York City and moved back into her parents’ house on a tiny island in the Puget Sound, she found out that people who aren’t in their twenties do seem to understand some things more clearly.
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In which Ella Sackville Adjei discovers, to her regret, that racists don’t wear badges – especially on a sweaty dance floor on a Greek island.
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When Susan Cheng was growing up, being one of the few Asians in her school was hard enough. Working at her parents’ Chinese restaurant didn’t make it any easier.
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A true love story by Erin Chack, written for her boyfriend on their 10th anniversary.
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What do you do when you can't make a living as an adjunct professor? Get a job bagging groceries. A tale of trying to be middle class in today’s America, from Matt Debenham.
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On the verge of ending his own life, Terrell J. Starr chose instead to overcome the stigma surrounding African-Americans and depression, and to find a supportive community on Twitter.
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Kaye Toal explained why anyone who really wants to understand what’s at stake in the debate over abortion should spend some time outside the places where it happens.
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As the child of Somali immigrants, Sarah Hagi inherited an obligation to send money to relatives she had never met. In this essay for our Inheritance Issue, she explained why that connection is so important to her.
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Alanna Okun achieved a victory over her own anxiety by finally letting the ticking clock run down in her favorite video game.
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Jamilah Lemieux was told to find the love of her life at Howard University. She wrote for our Black Colleges Issue about why that didn't happen.
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Matt Ortile described his search for good sex and some kind of permanence in New York City.
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Lauren Paul's dad is old and white; she is young and brown. It’s often been more complicated than it should be.
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Sara Bivigou wrote vividly about the complicated reality of living with sickle cell, and everything she does to feel normal in spite of her sickness.
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Meredith Talusan's partner has severe ADD and is on the autism spectrum. They wrote about seeing his neuroatypicality not as a disorder, but as a big part of why their relationship works.
Made by Herbert Bayer for General Electric in 1942
At the dawn of electronic era, in the mid-20th century, artists and advertisers faced a new challenge — illustrating the unseeable world of the electron.
“Everyone knew electronics were changing the world, but artists had to explain and visualize those changes,” Megan Prelinger, author of this year’s Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age, told BuzzFeed News. “And companies had to sell them.”
When radio, television, and computers came on the scene, old-fashioned advertising — typically a slogan and a line drawing of a light bulb or radio — just wasn’t up to the task of explaining, or at least celebrating, the vacuum tubes, transistors, and printed circuits that powered those inventions.
But a more modern and abstract style of marketing emerged in the 1940s. The 1942 “Earth Bulb” image above, for example, bottled the Earth inside the triode tube that was opening up the new world of FM radio transmission. “Modern art was what artists turned to, to show what couldn’t be seen,” Prelinger said.
General Electric (artist unknown), 1960
Invented in 1948, the tiny transistor amplified electrical signals, making circuitry cheap and reliable for the first time. And Prelinger noted, the transistor also made electronics “small, cool, personal, and efficient.”
Portable radios and car radios suddenly sprouted everywhere, and firms such as Texas Instruments struggled to explain how tiny transistors boosted radio signals. Ad-firm artists turned to the transistor symbol — a “T” crowned with an arrow and sprouting a tail — invented by engineers to design circuits. The transistor depiction above, for example, was taken from the back cover of a electronics handbook published in 1960.
“Both modern art and engineering were responding to technology becoming part of everyday life, and so maybe it is not surprising they came together,” Prelinger said.
Willi Baum for The Martin Company, 1961
Abstract art also popularized the moon race in ads, depicting one of the era’s signature technologies: space rockets. In ads for radios, computers, and other electronics, the cylinders and cones of spacecraft circled ball-like planets, following elliptical orbits on imagined journeys to other worlds.
In a bid to look futuristic, recruiting ads for rocket firms and national labs turned widely to abstract artists to design posters and promotions. For example, the Martin Company (now Lockheed Martin) commissioned celebrated space artist Willi Baum to create the stylized rocket resembling a Japanese pagoda, seen above, in a 1961 hiring notice for engineers whose rather mundane job was to figure out how to to shave weight from spacecraft. The poster also included a calculus equation, another hallmark of the era.
NASA took an interest in art as well, asking children’s illustrator Paul Calle in 1963 to document astronaut training for the moon. Calle created the U.S. Postal Service’s commemorative stamp art celebrating Apollo 11’s first lunar landing.
Bureau of Engraving and Printing / U.S. Post Office / Via en.wikipedia.org
Later on, as computerization and the information age dawned, artists turned to numbers and symbols to explain programming and the inner workings of electronics.
Taking a cue from graphic designers, they looked to “found” art — clipped from textbooks, studies, and shop manuals — to create mash-ups of numbers and symbols, according to Prelinger. Artists also took inspiration from Swiss designs that strung different text fonts along grids in displays.
Jacqueline Casey for Lincoln Laboratories, 1963
In the 1963 recruiting poster for MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory shown above, for example, artist Jacqueline Casey mixed and matched elements from nine scientific papers.
“A lot of this art filtered out, starting in trade publications and then into advertising that a broad swath of the public saw,” Prelinger said. “We see a lot of the art from this time still influential today.”
Cover of the Proceedings of the IRE, artist unknown, 1959
Cybernetics, the merger of man and machine, also influenced the art of the electronic era in ways that are still familiar. As transistors made hearing aids possible, words like “cyborg,” “bionics,” and “artificial intelligence” migrated into popular awareness.
Graphic artists reached for old-fashioned representational art depicting the human body and mixed it with the graphics and symbols of the electronic era, Prelinger said. A collage like the one shown in detail above, taken from the 1959 cover of an Institute of Radio Engineers report on medical technology, exemplifies the trend.
Cutaways of human skulls with computer parts or symbols replacing the brain also became particularly popular, Prelinger said.
As modern art became postmodern, and computers went from the mainframe to the “cloud,” depictions of technology in ads have drifted away from showing the physical devices themselves. Photography has replaced drawings to depict the real world.
Data Processing for Management, 1961
But some technology fans, particularly those in today’s “do-it-yourself” movement, have reacted against this removal, Prelinger said. Their retrofuturism hearkens back to the days of amateur radio, vinyl records, and vacuum tubes. “This is where art meets electronics with an enthusiasm that again moves in the direction of the future.”
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