SECOND ENCOUNTER: Manifest

Dear All, here is your next task from Frances! Would you now like to look for and post for the next topic, MANIFEST. Find examples of other artists' or designers' work you find interesting or even repellent. Whatever, the main thing is to also post 100-300 words of relection analysis and relevant context. My example is an old one from the early nineteenth century.

This is a graph by Charles Joseph Minard showing the 'terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia 1812-3' and it has six variables: the size of the army; its location on the earth; its direction of movement; and the temperature on various dates of retreat from Moscow. So starting at the left, we see the big fat block of 400,000 men setting out from Poland and moving eastwards to Moscow where the diminished army then turned back indecisively to retrace its footsteps. During October, then November and December the temperature fell almost in parallel with the path marked of the returning army ( the black line) so that when they got back to where they had started there was only a pathetic 10,000 men -only one fortieth of what they had to start with. This image still takes my breath away with its efficiency and force even though I have known about it for a long while. It is shown in Edward R. Tufte's book The visual display of quantitative information 1983 and this dry title is deceptive if you love to think about how images work. ------perhaps I should have saved this one up for 'storytellers' (our last blog)? The other thing that is exciting about this image is that it is about a story I have read often in War and Peace, so I have a lot of imaginary pictures that go with this. In addition, I know through my own research and interest that this graph comes from the very beginning of graph-making, so although we find it fairly easy to read right now, when it was made, the audience for it would have been a lot of nerdy tech. guys such as the engineering and military students from Napoleon's own educational foundation the high-status Ecole Polytechnique. Finally, it looks like this because it was intended not only to be expressive and economical, but also easy to print and reproduce: that is why it is black and white and line. So what is manifested by this? Firstly the belief that drawing could convey information sometimes better than words, secondly that organising data and presenting it together could allow you to see what was going on in complex events, and thirdly, the adventurous desire to make a speaking image in a way that had not been done before -avoiding representations of frozen artillery officers it gets this across only too eloquently like this instead.