Over the last century scientific, technological and cultural developments have altered our sense of the passing moment and reconfigured our apprehension of eternity. New modes of production, transport and communication appear to bear on the rate of days. This exhibition explores these changes through graphic design, arguing that the designer’s exploration and representation of time is an expression of a more general understanding.

Encompassing print, film and interactive projects, the exhibits span Italian Futurism to contemporary programming. The emphasis is on the sensation of time not its management, yet in many cases there is a relationship between the two. As noted by the constructivist designer Karel Teige, the working week has a poetry of its own. More generally, the rhythms imposed by industrialisation and post-industrialisation have a profound hold on personal and collective experience.

Although not displayed chronologically, the exhibition is divided into five sequential sections: Avant-Garde Time, Commercial Dynamism, Missed Beats, Digital Layering and The Post-Millennial Moment. While the earlier periods are characterised by a feeling of increased speed met with a mixture of excitement and foreboding, latterly time has been rethought in a less directional manner. The concrete poets of the late 1950s and 1960s tampered with the rhythm of words on the page, often creating a sense of hesitation and stutter. Meanwhile, much of the print and film of the late 1980s and early 1990s, produced by the first generation of designers to work directly with digital technologies, communicates less dynamism than deluge. More recently practitioners have explored the way in which new technologies are subject to physical and biological reality. These programmer/designers are not limiting possibilities, but re-imagining potential. While it would be overly absolutist to suggest that they are returning to a natural sense of time, there is marked move toward a more humane view.

Above all, time is our most important asset. To be in control of time is to be free.
Emily King, curator