CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/22/2023

Mindblowing info-design in Theo Deutinger's 'Joy and Fear: An Illustrated Report on Modernity'

Featured spreads are from Joy and Fear: An Illustrated Report on Modernity, info-design wizard Theo Deutinger’s brilliant update to the classic 1939 Otto Neurath study, Modern Man in the Making. Painstakingly researched and designed so as to provide immediate revelation, this 216-page hardcover collects illustrations and pictograms on such diverse topics as: The Manhattan Project, Iron Production, Contemporary Reasons for Going to War, Migration as a Weapon, The Plastic Age, Growing Old, Free Time and Superstition, to name just a few. "The effect of these pictograms finds its verbal equivalent in a poem by Muhammad Ali,” Deutinger writes. “During his commencement speech at Harvard in 1975, students asked him to give them a poem. He responded, ‘Me. We.’—one of the shortest poems ever. The ‘Me’ with its desires, dreams and fears is easy to grasp. It is the ‘We’—us as part of the eight billion others—to which we struggle to connect.… Joy and Fear provides snapshots of the existing version of modernity. Its broad approach is necessary to expand our field of view and survey the current state of modernity. After climbing down from this viewing platform, we are continuing to be modern and are thus continuing to produce large quantities. Hopefully, this short break with its chilling view will stimulate us to produce different and positive quantities. In eighty years, maybe someone else will attempt to continue this project and pick up where Joy and Fear left off. Whatever happens, each of us will end up in this book in one way or another as a Neurath figurine. Me will change; thus We are changing, and with us modernity as well.”