viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles

Computing and New Media Technologies UWSP

For those of us wondering what it means to compose in New Media, one answer appears to be Flash.  Visit Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles for a seriously funny example of a student Flash project.  Fellow Flash neophytes should also know about Anthony Ellertson's "New Media Rhetorics in the Attention Economy" from C & C Online. Ellertson discusses the advantages of Flash and showcases student Flash "essays." And yes, as the title of this blog entry indicates, the DWRL  UT-Austin is sponsoring a Flash workshop this Friday.  The workshop announcement is after the break...Stay tuned for more on Flash and New Media composing in the coming weeks on viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot of viz. 

Elizabeth's post earlier this week on visual representations of Twitter reminded me of a blog entry from about a year ago by Emily Bloom, who often highlighted New Media pedagogy in her blog posts, and who contributed a wonderful New Media Pedagogy and Visual Rhetoric page.  You can see Emily's "Visual Tweets" entry reposted after the break, or you can link to the original Visual Tweets post and the comments from September 2009. 

Image Credit:  Rob Mack for the DWRL

H/T Stephanie Stickney

We are really digging the poster for the upcoming DJ Spooky event!  The artist who did the poster for the event is named Rob Mack.  His new collection of art is displayed here at Philistine Workshop, and his more commercial portfolio is Eternal Return.  For more on DJ Spooky, see my post from last week on Spooky's Art.

Image Credit:  DJ Spooky, "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," 2008

Via Robert Miller Gallery  H/T Sean McCarthy

Last year, at about this time, I was writing my very first viz. blog post.  In 2009, the series of photographs that had caught my attention were about ice fishing in the northern United States.  The ice of the northern lakes, it seemed, had begun to diminish. New York-based photographer Maureen Drennan had been featured in the Times DotEarth Blog for the work of photos she called Thin Ice. I loved Maureen's shots of the fishing shacks and the people there, because they seemed potentially transformative, depicting the intimate textures of human life affected by climate change.  My first post this year again returns to imagery of ice.   Over dinner this weekend, one of my friends described DJ Spooky's latest performances on Antarctica, replete, he said, with stunning images. (The penguins above do have a point, after all.  See after the break).

Image Credit:  Know Your Meme H/T Hampton Finger

This youtube video explains the difference between fair use and copyright infringement involving Youtube videos.  It also shows how to dispute the take-down of your video on Youtube, if you have created a fair use work.

< 

Image Credit: "Hospitality II" by Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

For this entry, I want to point out two online texts that model best practices in the use of images.  Both texts also make powerful arguments. The first is Clinamen, an academic blog by James J. Brown, formerly of UT-Austin and the Digital Writing and Research Lab, who now teaches in Detroit at Wayne State.  The image above is from Brown's March 16 post. Indeed, all of Brown's entries are organized by a compelling, and beautiful, image (see screenshot after the break).  

Image Credit:  John H. White (1973) Image NWDNS-412-DA-13759

Portrait of Black Chicago for National Archives

John H. White's image of a sidewalk vendor in the South of Chicago in 1973 reminds me of Coye's and Laura's recent posts on the visuality of food culture.  Looking closely, one gleans an untold story of race, urban food markets, and of the style of life in Chicago in the 1970s.  White's series (Portrait of Black Chicago) was part of a program called Documerica, where the Environmental Protection Agency paid photographers to document environmental problems across America.  I really like White's photos for how they conveyed everything from emotionally saturating pictures of the Black Muslim community to pictures of abandoned housing in the ghettos to pictures of the lake and skyline.  White records narratives of race, which are intertwined with Chicago's political and religious history, but he also gives room to images of people's daily material lives in their environments, such as the initial photo above. I used this photo as part of the Best Practices for Digital images workshop, where we featured images archives that can enrich our teaching and scholarship.

Viz. will be hosting a workshop at the end of March, here at the University of Texas.  Click through to the DWRL page to read more.  

Image Credit:  Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty

H/T Seeing and Writing 3

For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above.  Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present.  I have a heart for this image.  The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992).  Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo:  "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

On the Viz. blog  September 2009, I discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming. I recently had an interview with Drennan about "Thin Ice" and being a finalist on the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition.  We discussed remote places, the scale of her project, the themes and the arguments of the photos, as well as the intersections of photography and story.