viz.

In this beginning part of 2010, our television screens repeat images of the injured, the displaced, and the dead in Haiti.  This emerging archive of profound trauma presents with questions of how we should feel and what we should do.  Here on the Viz. blog, we also ask what it means to capture and distribute images of tragedy.  During last Wednesday’s Oprah show, Haitian immigrant and R&B artist Wyclef Jean delivered a message to Americans from the Haitian people:  “No more photo ops.”  Jean, who documented himself and his crew collecting dead bodies from the streets, could not be clearer.  However, it’s unlikely that journalists like Robin Roberts (ABC) will accommodate the Haitian people in this way.

Last semester, Viz. bloggers asked what are the implications of representing political events, such as documenting the Vietnam war or mass killings, as in the case of the Fort Hood incident.

Image Credit:  R. Crumb

H/T USA Today

I got my copy of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb in the mail and have loved reading it so far.  It's richly detailed.  It's emotive.  It's revelatory.  But I’m wondering:  Will Crumb’s newest work will be controversial as expected? 

Image Credit: Chris Jordan with MidwayJourney

H/T Enviro Smith (Enviroart on Twitter)

This video was filmed as part of a project called MidwayJourney, which is documenting the ecological problems of Midway Atoll in the North Pacific.  Five artists, headed by multi-media artist Chris Jordan, have stationed themselves on this string of three islands to document the death of albatrosses, who mistake plastic for food and become filled with the plastic waste.  The birds eventually die of starvation.  Photographed by Jordan and his colleagues, the decaying bodies of the albatrosses dramatically reveal the culprit of this environmental disaster:  the collection of plastics with a macabre combination of feather, weathering flesh, beak, and delicate bone.

Image Credit:  The New Yorker

H/T:  Texas Performing Arts

This video is an interview with Francoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker, speaking about the multi-part cover of the Money Issue from this month, October 12, 2009.  The 3-part cover begins with Dan Clowes, who created the image of a wealthy woman ordering a hamburger, which inspired Zohar Lazar's illustration of the woman carrying the fast food to her chaffeur-driven car, and then, finally, Mark Ulriksen's idea of depicting a poodle being fed the burger.  Ulriksen notes that by his ending image, "You realize that some things never change for certain people." 

Image Credit:  Chuck Close

Via Austin Museum of Art

I recently went to the Chuck Close exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art, which gave me a lot to think about. Close is known for the scale of his portraits (think: 9-by-7 foot painting of a face).  He is also known for paintings that make you think you are seeing a photo. As Donald and Christine McQuade explain in Seeing and Writing 3, his style is "photorealism or super-realism, which attempts to recreate in paint the aesthetic and representational experience of photography."   In the recent exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art, Close's scale is not quite so collosal; there are several 8-by-6 foot tapestries, but most of the images are more like 2-by-1 feet (the digital pigment print pictured above), or even 15 very small images, which are 11-by-9 inches.  There are no paintings.

In 21st century rhetoric and writing departments, we don't teach geometry.  But like the sciences, we are developing computer games.  Here in the DWRL, graduate student developers have created Rhetorical Peaks, an interactive game, where students practice rhetorical terms and strategies. It's interesting, then, to compare how different fields use different kinds of computer-assisted gaming.  On Thursday, I saw these geometry games, which are visualizations for outer space created by Jeffrey R. Weeks.

Image credit: Screenshot from Geometry Games H/T to Jeffrey Weeks

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

This series of photos by Maureen Drennan resonates with the way I have been thinking about environmental activism. The photographs tell a story of ice-fishing communities in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and depict ordinary ice-fishers: bright-eyed children over plastic gallon fishing buckets, seasoned fishers in pullovers and camouflage, and bright cabins in contrast to the winter white. There are also pictures of cracks in the ice.