This article is from WeChat official account:Xu Xu Duoduo (ID: xxddkids) , author: Big Bear, editor: Xu Junjie, assistant editor: Zhou Jiayi, title picture from: Visual China
Tape? You probably haven’t heard of this thing, right? But 20 years ago, the most popular way to listen to music was it. You can ask your parents, they must have a lot of tape collections when they were young.
But at the beginning of this month, the designer of this “antique” product left us. According to Dutch media NRC Handelsblad, Lou Ottens, the former Philips engineer who invented the cassette tape, passed away on March 6, local time at the age of 94.
The story of the grandfather and the tape
Grandpa Ottens was born in 1926 and graduated from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands with a degree in mechanical engineering. He joined Philips in 1952 and became the head of the Philips R&D department in 1960. He officially began to get involved in the audio field.
In 1962, he and his team launched the first cassette tape. Compared with previous reel-to-reel tapes, the design of Ottens is much smaller.
In 1963, at the Berlin Radio and Electronics Fair, this new invention achieved great success with the slogan “less than a pack of cigarettes” and completely changed the way music is consumed.
Old-fashioned tape recorders and tapes on the streets of Shenyang/Visual China
Since the advent of cassette tapes in 1960, more than 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.
In 2016, Ottens said in the documentary “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape”: “Cassette tape taught us how to use our voice.”
Zack Taylor, the producer of this documentary, said: “Ottens hopes that people can easily carry and enjoy music. His goal is to make it affordable for anyone. Therefore, Ottens advocates that Philips license this new format for free. For other manufacturers, paving the way for cassette tapes to become a global standard.”
American music consumer media from 1973 to 2018: vinyl, tape, CD , MP3, streaming media
The glorious period of magnetic tape lasted from the 70s to the 90s. But after entering the new century, it almost disappeared.
In recent years, with the popularity of film and television works such as “Guardians of the Galaxy”, a retro wave has gradually emerged, prompting the sales of cassette tapes to rise.
A tape from Guardians of the Galaxy
In 2020, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Ozzy Osbourne and Selena Gomez all released music albums in the form of cassette tapes.
However, compared to the “counter-attack” in music, the impact of cassette tape on design aesthetics is actually more extensive and profound.
The tape and the design aesthetics it affects
In sci-fi literature and film and television works, people have different style settings for each stage of historical development, such as “span class=”text-remarks” label=”note”>(steampunk) and “cyberpunk” (cyberpunk).
The movie “Howl’s Moving Castle”
Steampunk was popular in the 1980s and 1990s. It is an imagination of technology in the distant industrial revolution era.
Here you can see a world full of mechanical installations, such as Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Miles Under the Sea” and “Around the World in Eighty Days”, as well as Miyazaki’s “Sky No. City” and “Howl’s Moving Castle”.
Cyberpunk style “Ghost in the Shell”
Cyberpunk is more popular now.
It imagines the more distant future of the 21st century, where there are tall buildings, flying vehicles everywhere, and neon lights flashing 24 hours a day.
Most of the story backgrounds are “combination of low-end life and high-tech”, that is, there are both advanced science and technology, but also a certain degree of collapse of the social structure for comparison; the story frame is usually about the social order being affected by the government Or the high degree of control of consortia and secret organizations, the characters used the loopholes in them to make some kind of breakthrough.
Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner are good examples.
The tape represents another aesthetic style called “Cassette Futurism”(Cassette Futurism).
The elements contained therein are often based on electronic products from the 70s and 80s, such as a walkman that plays tapes.(Walkman) . These electronic products are different from current mobile phones and tablets. They are not completed with a few clicks on the screen, but have many buttons, knobs, and levers.
This style is square, square and angular. In the eyes of children nowadays, does it look like a Frankenstein’s laboratory?
Interactive design full of buttons and keyboard
Different “punk” cultures
In the beginning, the term “punk” (punk) was just a derogatory term for the “marginal people” in society. However, driven by punk music and punk social culture, it eventually became a cultural banner for “marginal people” to endorse themselves and oppose the mainstream. It is like a mask given the meaning of “freedom” and “individualization”. The mask is put on top of science fiction culture, and various kinds of science fiction punk have been formed.
In addition to the steampunk, cyberpunk, and tape futurism we talked about, there are many other sci-fi aesthetics.
Dieselpunk(Dieselpunk)
It is similar to steampunk, except that the steam engine is replaced by a diesel engine, which is often associated with the theme of world wars.
Representative works include “Mad Max 4: Fury Road”
Atomic Punk(Atompunk)< /strong>
Science fiction works originated from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, so it includes some elements of Soviet aesthetic style and atomic weapons.
The Jetsons in 1962 embodies the aesthetics of atomic punk.
Raypunk(Raypunk)
With the background of the universe and space, it is similar to atomic punk, but without the elements of nuclear technology, it is more of a surreal imagination.
For example, the early “Star Trek” series.