Vision 65: World Congress on New Challenges to Human Communications (First Edition)

First edition of this documentary record of the inaugural Vision 65 congress, held at the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University, October 21–23, 1965—an unusually consequential gathering of designers, artists, educators and theorists concerned with the rapidly changing nature of human communication. 8vo (7” x 9.75”), printed wrappers, 280 pages. Published in 1966 by the International Center for the Typographic Arts in cooperation with Southern Illinois University. Participants included Will Burtin, R. Buckminster Fuller, Max Bill, Masaru Katsumi, Eugenio Carmi, Willem Sandberg, Stan VanDerBeek, Herbert Spencer, Bruce Mackenzie, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Wim Crouwel, Franco Grignani, Marshall McLuhan and Robert Osborn, among others. The congress brought the international graphic-design establishment into direct conversation with communications theory, experimental cinema, electronic media, cybernetics, environmental thought and the social responsibilities of design. Its subjects—the cultural effects of mass communication, the accelerating production of images, the relationship between information and technology, and the changing role of the designer—give the proceedings a remarkably prescient character. The volume preserves the addresses and discussions alongside the conference program, providing an unusually immediate account of a formative moment when modernist design confronted the emerging electronic culture. Light rubbing and chipping to extremities. Creasing to spine and bottom corners of wrappers. One leaf loose but present (pp 189-190); binding otherwise sound. Conspicuously scarce. A substantial and important primary document of postwar graphic design and communications history.…