Hello Human: A History of Visual Communication

A kaleidoscopic journey tracing the methods and means of visual communication from the cave paintings of the earliest humans to the ‘photograph’ of a black hole in deep space. Since the beginning of our time as humans, we have never stopped making images and inventing channels for visual communication. From the cave dweller creating paintings on a wall at the dawn of civilized time to Instagram influencers today, technology may keep changing, but our need to reach one another, to move one another, to persuade, inform and entertain, has never been so vital. Hello Human traverses the entire landscape of our diverse, expansive and yet familiar means of visual communication. From the use of the human hand as a symbol, the power and use of gestures and the genesis of the printed book, to the movement between dimensions of reality and the digital realm, pixilation, optics and the understanding of light, Horsham takes his readers on a journey full of unexpected twists and turns, laying out a temporal narrative in the form of an intricate map of objects, events and people tied together by a common purpose – to communicate.   About the Author Michael Horsham began working with the acclaimed design collective Tomato in 1994 after training as a design and cultural historian. He has written extensively on architecture and design for a number of publications including the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times, as well as working with the BBC. Michael is a multidisciplinary creative and design educator and image- and music-making are key to his practice.