Catalogue Number
NMLH.2023.69.10
Object Name
Poster
Title
Information age
Date
1972-1982
Description
The Poster Collective was a collective formed in 1971 at the Slade School of Art,  a group formed to initially produce posters in response to the miners strike and on the wars in both Vietnam and Ireland. It was formed on the basis of developing a coherent visual style, which addressed the political issues of the time. This included the armed struggles against colonialism in Africa, the struggle of women for equal rights and the continuing struggle against racism. The collective was active in the 70's and 80's, producing posters on a wide range of issues, including for educational purposes. The group was not-for-profit and used a variety of hand-printing techniques to create their posters. This poster is part of a set, 'Future Fictions', produced when the collective moved to the North London Polytechnic is a set of posters reflecting on technological development and leads us to address environmental issues of today. This poster is black with green and white detail. It shows a green
figure walking through space, a white shuttle behind them. Green text at the top reads "INFORMATION AGE" and smller white text at the bottom reads: "Forty years ago computers weighted 30 tons and occupied 1500 sq feet. Today devices of greater power fit into a wristwatch. The moon landng in 1969 was made possible by the use of tiny electronic components manufactured cheaply and to a high standard. Within a few years there was hardly any area of civil society from the factory, to the office, to the home that had not been profoundly affected by this new microtechnology. Increasingly large areas of manual factory work became automated, word processors transformed office work, and a flood of new electronically based products became available for home consumption. With the advent of the computer more new information has been generated in the last 30 year than in the previous 5,000 years. Whereas machines amplify, modify, distribute and transform energy the computer processes and produces
information. Already we are at the dawn of the second computer revolution (the fifth generation of computers) that promise a qunatum leap in the generation of artificial intelligence. Vast reaching changes are taking place in the sphere of biological engineering. Fertility and embro-technology, new biologically based drugs, genetic engineering, behaviour modification programmes are all features of a transformation in appraoch to the human organism. Technology is now operating at the core of the life process itself."
