Brett Ommen's blog

10 Pin Politics

Brett Ommen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:10:16 +0000

So Barack Obama went bowling the other day, and it turns out he’s not very good. I just saw a Clinton speech where she suggested a winner-takes-all bowl off with the Senator from Illinois and she graciously agreed to spot him two frames.

It’s an odd kind of visual to provide. Obama has been trying really hard to look presidential over the last few weeks, but is this the kind of presidential pose he wants to (sorry) strike?

Maybe he was going for a different look.

According this site, Truman wasn’t really an avid bowler, at least not like Ladybird Johnson was. Clearly, Obama is trying for a kind of blue-collar aesthetic when he paces the oily boards of the bowling alley. It is interesting to note, however, that he has embodied a rather familiar presidential visual grammar, and while its most famous iteration is Richard Nixon (clearly not the best president to imitate) it turns out that the Nixon image enjoys a much more interesting and hip afterlife than Nixon himself receives.

Photo credits:
Obama: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Nixon: Ollie Atkins Photograph Collection, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University Libraries
Truman: President Harry Truman bowling in the White House, The National Kegler magazine, June, 1947

The inconsistency of Easter imagery

Brett Ommen — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:48:04 +0000

Easter is one of those odd holy days turned secular holidays that creates a lot of incongruous images. Why do we have baskets with marshmallow bunnies instead of a nougat filled crucifix? Perhaps it is that kind of visual confusion that lead a group of protestors to create a new kind of visual Easter mix up.

On Sunday , a group calling themselves Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War stood up in Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral right before Cardinal Francis George’s homily and sprayed stage blood on themselves and other worshipers. The gaps between visual display and reality are as confused here as they are between the Easter story and Peeps.

The problem, in my estimation, is that the protestors assumed a kind of visibility that exists in a vacuum. The image of protestors covered in fake blood, while perhaps a bit cliché, is powerful. It forces people to imagine bloodshed in everyday life to call attention to the real bloodshed war-torn nations experience. The protestors’ choice of venue was in some ways a wise one. The press was on hand to cover the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Easter celebrations, and so a broad kind of exposure was guaranteed. And so if good visual performance were limited to the creation of a powerful image that has a strong channel of circulation, this protest would have been a success. But visual communication, being communication, needs to recognize the other contingencies of meaning production.

The Catholic Church, by way of the global voice of the Pope and the national voice of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been clear in its opposition to the war. The setting of Holy Name Cathedral, then, serves as perhaps the most incongruous location for this protest. What’s more, the Chicago area has experienced a few high profile acts of public violence in recent months along with the unfortunately typical violence of urban life. And so a Catholic Church in Chicago is doubly problematic as the setting for this protest. The failure to recognize the setting that serves as a backdrop for the visual protest causes all kinds of problems for the protestors and undercuts their message. Some of the protestors suggested that the setting was appropriate because Cardinal George has visited with President Bush, but that line of reasoning suggests that leaders who disagree with the President over issues relating to the war should avoid him, and that indicates a certain lack of faith in the prospects of communication. Of course, if I were as poor at communicating as the Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, I suppose I’d have a certain lack of faith in the prospects of communication as well.

Elections and Visual Conventions

Brett Ommen — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:23:21 +0000

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

Cooper was terribly excited about his 3-D pie chart prior to the coverage, as evidenced by his blog earlier that day . But his excitement was certainly tempered after he gave the chart a whirl. The technology relies on Cooper holding a board flat so that the pie chart can be inserted above it. When Cooper failed to keep the board flat or attempted to move around, the pie chart would dip and bob wildly on screen, obscuring talking heads and causing a general threat to CNN’s punditry. I never saw Cooper pick it up again, and had to chase down a screen grab from the fine folks at Inside Cable.

One could use this as a nice illustration of the problematic of new media. Does rendering a pie chart in 3-D so that Cooper can carry it around the set make it something more than a pie chart? And what does it do to CNN’s other pie charts? In the end, it was difficult to read and wholly deficient to its old media counterpart. Even if Cooper perfects his pie chart toting skills, it’s still just a pie chart. From what I saw, CNN was really pushing the visual information envelope Thursday night, much more than Fox or MSNBC. In addition to rogue pie charts, CNN added a little battery-charger like image below the number for percentage of precincts reporting. Fox and MSNBC, luddites that they are, relied merely on the number. CNN was also coming under fire in the blogosphere for leaving Ron Paul off their Republican pie chart. On both blue and red pie charts, CNN placed the top 4 candidates. CNN had room for Bill Richardson’s scant 2% on the Democratic chart, but no room for Ron Paul’s 10% or Giuliani’s 4%. I didn’t see how the other news networks excluded or included candidates, but that’s just because I was hoping to catch Anderson Cooper wield his pie chart once more.

Video of Cooper and the pie chart.

The Face(book) of Campus Violence

Brett Ommen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:42:54 +0000

If you hadn’t heard, two Penn State students dressed up for Halloween as victims of the Virginia Tech campus shooting. These pictures popped up on facebook, and last weekthe mainstream media caught the story. This week, Northern Illinois University rescheduled the first day of final examinations after a threat was found scrawled in a dorm bathroom. These two events are linked, not merely because the NIU threat made reference to the Virginia Tech shooting, but because both events, and the Virginia Tech tragedy along with them, are funded by individuals’ odd attachment to a kind of transgressive iconic visual performance.

Certainly, it seems disrespectful and tasteless that anyone would dress up as victims of a tragedy as part of a playful party. But part of the trouble with the Penn State incident is that the offenders didn’t merely cross the line for their own pleasure, but for some perverted form of civic pride. One student explained: “It's not that it was funny, it's that we are notorious and infamous in the state college, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value." In his estimation, offensive is what Penn State is known for, and so to be recognized, to be seen, to be the embodiment of a state college student, you have to produce something severe.

A Penn State official counters the offensive sentiment by saying: “Most Penn Staters are as offended by this as anyone from Virginia Tech would be-- and rightfully so. These two people do not represent 90,000 Penn State students. They represent themselves.” The struggle, once these images become broadly public, is a fight over the iconic Penn State student.

Of course, how the images reached the public is significant. Many a college career counselor is fully aware of the damage a social website can do to a student. But these websites are so pervasive that it seems innocuous to place visible details of one’s history on the internet for all to see. We are hyper-visible, and our students more so, and the result is a presumed devaluation of the visibility we have. What’s the harm of posting pictures if they won’t cut through the noise? And what are the chances of the images cutting through the noise? It certainly is difficult to gain a kind of broad recognition in a facebook age, but as these students show us, it is possible.

But what these students did in costume is a re-enactment. Not merely a re-enactment of the tragedy, but a re-enactment of the twisted visual imagination that is at play in these public spectacles of violence. The Virginia Tech shootings were the end result of a student who felt anonymous, and whose recourse to that invisibility was to imagine a kind of undeniable visibility that comes with being an agent of violence. The middle ground of visibility falls out for both the Penn State students and the campus shooter. One is either invisible or iconic, there is no middle ground in the visual noise of a facebooked world.

But of course, that isn’t true, and that may be the lesson we can learn from the NIU incident. At NIU, the Black Student Union came out to increase their visibility on campus rather than be visible only in the epithet scrawled on a stall door or potentially visible only as victims of threatened violence. This is a group that does not want to escape banal visual anonymity by way of the extremist’s iconicity.

Display on Display

Brett Ommen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:55:15 +0000

This video does a great job explaining the economics of display at play in contemporary advertising. While visual communication research does a nice job reading visual content, sometimes we tend to overlook the basic necessity of surfaces of display that anchor visual communication in particular spaces. To that end, the video also might serve as a nice way to introduce questions of visuality that may be prior to an image’s content.

The video comes by way of GOOD magazine, who ran a print version of video a while back. GOOD’s website has an entire section called Transparency, “a graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us.” These videos and graphics are intriguing discourses as well as interesting examples of information design.

Video by Max Joseph and Erin Bosworth
Music by Tom VanBuskirk

Slippery Images

Brett Ommen — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:04:09 +0000

Paul Lukas, who runs a weblog called Uni Watch (the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics), has an entry up on the swastika and uniforms from the early 1900s. This picture shows the Edmonton Swastikas from 1916. Lukas details the popularity of the swastika graphic prior to its ignominious use by the Nazi party. Lukas’ piece is interesting for a variety of reasons (including some nice images and a link to a “Canadian artist/mystic” devoted to rescuing the swastika from its association with the Nazis), but it got me thinking about the ease with which images become iconic (at times unintentionally or at cross purposes with an image’s original meaning) and the kinds of control this easy iconicity demands in visual practice.

Lukas’ blog shows the swastika emblazoned on everything from hockey jerseys to golf clubs to the Finnish airplanes. Of course, we don’t see many of these images because the swastika’s meaning has been so fully determined by the Nazis that we have, in many ways, wiped out the graphic’s history prior to 1920. What was once an extremely portable and popular mark has become a placeholder for all of the disturbing events that occurred under its most prominent and nefarious use. What Lukas calls “the power of design,” the ability for graphic marks to stand in for larger discourses and contain emotional values, has the potential to become a liability for visual practice. The swastika wasn’t offensive in its design, but by way of its easy ability to turn into an icon for those who would use it as a banner for hate. The image condenses all of the complexities of the Nazi regime and becomes a simple synecdochic substitution for a larger discourse.

And so, proprietary control seems hugely important when practicing visual communication. Corporations have long been careful to defend the use and circulation of their marks (with Paul Rand and IBM creating one of the first comprehensive brand image guidebooks), and it seems a reasonable strategy. But it is also at odds with some of the normative demands we typically place on public communication. The idea that a political figure would copyright his or her speech in order to prevent it from circulating in ways unfavorable to figure would strike us as decidedly anti-democratic. Because visual images have a particular materiality to them, and because the meaning of images can be created by way of circulation and display, the proprietary issue is exceedingly important for scholars working in the area of visual culture. If images are made and allowed to circulate unchecked, what once was a marker for good luck on a hockey uniform can become a marker for oppression and death on a soldier’s uniform. Perhaps it could be asked this way: how do we manage the desire for images to be particularly meaningful against the need for open circulation of images that secures the status of public communication?

If you’re attending the National Communication Association’s convention in Chicago in a few weeks, I’ve organized a discussion panel on the intersection between visual communication and intellectual property issues. Participants include Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois), John Logie (University of Minnesota), Kevin DeLuca (University of Georgia), Ted Striphas (Indiana University), and Eric Zinner (editor, NYU Press).

The above image comes by way of ManWoman, the aforementioned Canadian artist/mystic. As ManWoman explained to me via email: “I have little info except that it was in the Edmonton area in 1916 and one of my friend's grandmother was on the team. I have the original in my collection and it was first published (recently) in Modern Primitives from RE/Search in 1989 in an interview with myself.” You might want to peruse ManWoman’s website for more images and information.

A Compendium of the Visual Tropes of War

Brett Ommen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:03:10 +0000

The music video above is by Serj Tankian (lead singer of System of a Down) and directed by Tony Petrossian. Depending on your taste in music, you may want to watch it with the volume turned down.

The video does an excellent job compiling nearly every imaginable visual trope of the current war. The use of children in the video provides an excellent polysemous context for the war as well. In one sense, the video illustrates the ways imagery becomes incorporated in the play of children as a way to indoctrinate them into a war state. On the other hand, the video makes a compelling critique of the war as directed by immature leadership. The coda of the video refuses to allow the imagery of war to function in isolation as child’s play by bringing the children out into the street before a military funeral. The video might prove an apt resource in the classroom for the above reasons, or any that you might post in addition.

One Way to See the State

Brett Ommen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:30:30 +0000

I live on a one way street so I’ve always viewed the “One Way” signs in my neighborhood as good information for motorists and visitors. They are excellent reminders to people that cars should only face east on Washington Street. But this altered image (actually from one block over on Madison Street, where cars travel west) reminds us that street signs are not merely about expressing information about traffic patterns; they are also the banal markers that inform us about the presence of the state’s authority.

In my visual citizenship course last year, the students spent plenty of time talking about the images of state power. Flags, monuments, buildings all serve as powerful reminders of the relationship between citizens and authority. But as I discovered while walking yesterday, the most powerful markers of the state are likely the ones we have casually internalized as the routine images of our everyday lives. I wonder if this isn’t true of visual images generally: that the images we focus on with great attention are not nearly as important as the images we process and dismiss with great ease. When we process visual images with the swiftness of the glance, it may not necessarily mean we are inattentive or dismissive. We may actually be relying on an internalized reading strategy that is predicated on a particular relationship to power. Glancing, under this treatment, suggests a great deal of the rhetorical force of an image can be concealed in its ability to be processed quickly instead of inviting deep contemplation. And this image shows that sometimes it only takes a flippant bit of graffiti to uncover some of the more substantive operations that are implied by the visual markers of our everyday lives.

Of course, the stakes of this particular concealment aren’t terribly disconcerting. I don’t mind that obedience to the state means I don’t have to dodge other cars as I go down the road. And the concealment isn’t terribly tricky in this case either. Most of us would easily identify that the source of street signs is the government. But it still took the little bit of graffiti to spark even this minor bit of contemplation (for me at least—if other readers of Viz. contemplate their relationship to state power every time they encounter public signage, consider me duly impressed, and sympathetic for how overwhelming a drive to the grocery store must be).

There's Enargeia and then there's Enargeia

Brett Ommen — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:50:22 +0000

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

Hariman’s sequence is as follows: 1) the moment of the second plane impact at the WTC, 2) President Bush as Air Force pilot, 3) the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph, 4) a photograph of (presumably) a former American soldier and his 3 prosthetic limbs, 5) the wreckage of a Baghdad neighborhood, and 6) the wreckage and casualties of a Tikrit car bombing. Images 1, 3, 4, and 6 are particularly disturbing. But seeing these images and hearing them brought up in speech are two very different experiences. It would not shock anyone, I don’t think, to hear a U.S. politician reference the plane attacks of the WTC, or to speak of a former solider dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of war, or to call attention to the violence and loss of life of street violence in Baghdad. And yet the violence of the images in the No Caption Needed post seems much more acute, potentially offensive, and may even execute a metonymic kind of violence on the viewer. This may make images more effective in imparting the emotional register of public memory, but a counterpoint to that utility is that speech offers a type of protection against the pathos of those images. I offer the contrast between visual reminders and vocal reminders, in part to show how the visual might refuse a kind of whitewashing that is possible in non-visual discourse. More importantly, I think comparing and contrasting the No Caption Needed sequence to other discourses on the public memory of 9/11 and the war on terror is an exercise that can create a more precise account of the virtues and limits of visual rhetoric in general.