Symbol Soup (9 volume boxed set) - Softcover

Platteel, Andre; Rohde, Carl C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500281270 ISBN 13: 9780500281277

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 1999

Synopsis

Today's media and today's brands promote a global landscape of symbols, only to see them re-animated, re-appropriated, and made personal by an explosive popular culture. This extraordinary boxed set of nine illustrated volumes, each created by an avant-garde designer or design company, explains the desires and fantasies, the aspirations and the commitments of the new "visual generation." Experience, lifestyle, and identity are now expressed through media-disseminated symbols. Lara Croft or Calvin Klein, McDonald's or Netscape, The X-Files or Star Wars--all evoke images of individual desire. Each of the nine volumes in Symbol Soup takes on a different theme--gaining enlightenment through The Mix, seeing how Digital Characters operate as scouts for the future, how the past forgot to die in Retro, or what emissaries from tomorrow's world will make of today in Random Access. Body adornment and mutilation is about reclaiming the body, religion has become Spirituality, Aliens embody a modern mythology, fashion icons can be transformed into a new Look, and everyone can find a profile that is exactly You. Symbol Soup provides the key to youth culture for anyone involved with the media, design, fashion, graphics, popular culture, and marketing.

About this title

Review:

Is this a multivolume book, a stack of magazines, a collection of stickers; is it anything coherent? Aptly titled, Symbol Soup is the product of a team of cultural critics, including a sociologist and a communications specialist and a lineup of cutting-edge designers. It is a collection of and commentary on the plethora of images that are part and parcel of contemporary culture. This is a virtual primordial soup of images, including but not limited to tattoos, logos, advertisements, aliens, TV stills, and digital animation. The pages are wildly overdesigned, but overdesign is the point here. The curators of this collection test the limits of what they call "the visual generation's" affinity for comprehending signs and symbols. The first slim paperback in the set provides a theoretical overview of the project; each subsequent volume attacks a different area of visual stimulation. One is filled with huge, bright text; another borrows its look from zine culture; while another includes mix-and-match logos in which readers can find their own meaning. Each includes some very sharp commentary, which will undoubtedly get readers thinking about their own complicated relationship to the signs of the times. Nine paperback volumes in a slipcase--500 full-color images in all--comprise the set. --J.P. Cohen

About the Author:

Andr Platteel is founder of SomanyDynamoS, a company that creates alternative ideas for business strategy and communication. Carl C. Rohde is president of the research institute Signs of the Time and lecturer in Mass Communications at the University of Utrecht.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0500281270
• ISBN 13: 9780500281277
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272