Multimedia programme for the 9th ICSID Congress, Moscow, 1975

For the 9th ICSID congress, held in 1975 at Moscow’s Rossiya Hotel with the theme of ‘Design for Man and Society’, the film director Yuri Reshetnikov (1939–2011) and the artist Yuri Sobolev (1928–2002) put together a specially commissioned multimedia programme for which a special system of screens was built on the stage of the hotel’s concert hall. The programme introduced the five subthemes of the congress: ‘design and state policy’, ‘design and science’, ‘design and work’, ‘design and leisure time’, and ‘design for children’. Making use of slides, films, and live television broadcasts, the creators of the programme sought to create an immersive visual space reflecting a saturation with consumer goods.
The centrepiece of the programme was an eight-by-eight-metre ‘superscreen’ consisting of sixteen fields, which could show either a single unified image or many independent ones. This concept was reminiscent of the ‘polyekran’ (multiscreen) design created by Czech theatre designer Josef Svoboda (1920–2002), who had employed it in Expo pavilions. The musical accompaniment to the visual presentation featured the folk music of the Soviet Union’s various nations.
The programme’s slogan was rather critical: ‘With the aid of design, man creates a second nature, thereby destroying the first’. Following an official preview of the multimedia programme just a few days before the congress began, the Committee for Science and Technology of the Soviet Council of Ministers banned its showing at the congress.