Megan Eatman's blog

Assignment: The Flexible Final Project

Megan Eatman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:26:28 +0000

Screenshot from student project Evolution, Not Revolution by Lacey Teer

Last semester, I wrote my final blog post about using iMovie in the classroom. This semester, I attempted to correct some of the issues that arose when I asked all my students to use multimodal argumentation for their final papers. What follows is an outline of the final project I assigned and information about the changes I made to address various problems. This information will also appear on our "Teaching" page, along with sample student projects.

Assignment

Students were allowed to make their final argument in whatever means they felt was most effective. This decision allowed students to make decisions based at least in part on their individual skill sets. Students were given specific standards for their argument that applied regardless of its form; for example, they were required to designate an audience and place of publication, use the rhetorical appeals discussed in class to persuade that audience, and construct an argument that added something to the conversation they had been studying all semester. There were also specific warnings about what was appropriate--or, rather, inappropriate--for multimodal assignments. Students were warned not to turn in a single picture with words on top of it because that would not show the appropriate effort or skill.

Preparation

Because this was a unit-long assignment, students had a lot of preparation. Our in-class preparation focused mostly on multimodal argumentation because it was the least familiar and because, after receiving project proposals, I realized that all but a few students were making a multimodal text. There was also a fair amount of overlap; we could sometimes talk about both in the same class. We spent class time learning iMovie, the basics of Photoshop, and talking about the rhetorical power of sound. We looked at a variety of sample projects, some by actual students (from my previous class and other classes) and some that were created in other contexts, to talk about their effectiveness.

Assessment

These will be graded according to the successful execution of the standards listed on their assignment sheet.

Feedback

While I have not received feedback from students on this project, leaving the project open (rather than forcing students to argue a certain way) seems to have been a good decision. The quality of projects already appears higher, and I am sure the arrangement is less stressful for students. The purpose of this assignment is to encourage students to think about the available means of persuasion, including the various media available to them, and then use them to make an effective argument. I hope that this assignment has given students a chance to reflect not just on persuasive strategies, but on the advantages and pitfalls of various media for making specific arguments.

Lee Price and Exposed Eating

Megan Eatman — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:36:17 +0000

Lee Price, Sunday. H/t to Jezebel, Sociological Images

Lee Price paints photorealistic portraits of her subject (usually herself) consuming food that we might label "bad:" for example, McDonalds, cupcakes, pie, and so on. While Dr. Lisa Wade's piece for Sociological Images focused on the way these paintings make public what is often a shameful, private act and elevate it through the use of "high" medium (painting), I was most interested in the way these images seem to acknowledge these commonly held beliefs about indulgent consumption even as they complicate them. I'd like to take a stab at raising more questions about Price's work and how it formulates an argument about bodies, pleasure, shame, and excess. Pictures after the jump are NSFW.

For me, these images as a collection walk the line between embracing a bottomless desire (hence the sometimes enormous amount of food) and lingering painfully in a temporary and shameful pleasure. The bird's eye view in the image at the top of the post suggests spying; additionally, the subject is hunched with her face hidden. This composition contrasts sharply with the image below, which, while it retains the bird's eye view, is somewhat more focused on open indulgence.

Lee Price, Grilled Cheese II

The different settings in Price's work contribute to their arguments as well. The subject in Sunday appears to be in a living room, perhaps her own; the lovely furniture indicates some degree of affluence. While the living room is more public than the bathtub/bathroom or, in the image below, the bedroom, it is hard for me to read the affluence without thinking about the prevalence of eating disorders in upper middle class "Western" women. While the image in the bathtub seems more celebratory, the image in the living room almost seems to indicate an unproblematic open secret; that is, a behavior that is less secret than it is too obvious or ingrained to be worth mentioning.

Lee Price, Refuge

I will say that Price's more recent work seems to skew more toward the pleasurable sides of indulgence. The images below are all from the section labeled "current work" on Price's website, whereas Sunday and Refuge are both older pieces.

Lee Price, Jelly Doughnuts

Lee Price, Lemon Meringue

Lee Price, Happy Meal

When the piece on Price ran on Jezebel, several commenters also noted the rhetorical effect of Price's body size. While showing women of a variety of sizes--including obese women, who are more likely to be publicly judged for their eating habits--would make a different argument, but the repetition of the same woman also has an interesting effect. Looking at the paintings as a series constructs a narrative of repeated, consequence-free indulgence which is, in some ways, a fantasy. But the repetition also emphasizes a point: savoring something delicious, even when it is "bad" and even in excess, can be a source of decadent pleasure.

Being with Technology

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:25:55 +0000

Daniel Everett, detail ofGoals

Noel's post on tweeting with the body reminded me of Daniel Everett's work, which also deals with the intersections of man and machine. His pieces suggest, sometimes playfully, the myriad ways in which interaction with technology shapes selfhood.

Daniel Everett, two images from Search Queries

All three of the above images suggest the way the Internet in particular affects day-to-day life. While the first image, which invokes the consuming nature of online media, is amusing, the latter two seem somewhat darker. Their title plays on the frequent overlap of personal/emotional and online searching; if you have or think you might have a personal problem, you check the Internet first. Searching "self esteem" online may yield information that will actually help remedy low self esteem, but it also maintains the aloneness (if not actual loneliness) that can negatively affect happiness levels. I actually searched "something meaningful" and found a lot of self-help information which (depending on the particular advice) can also allow the individual to solve her problem without human contact. The spare, empty room in these words appear emphasizes the absence of others.

Daniel Everett, Speed Run

While I think Everett's work gets at the both personal and cultural functions of technology, I wonder what it would be like if it were more immersive. While these images invoke formative experiences with technology, they keep the viewer at a distance; they therefore draw attention to how certain media (photography, for example) work differently than others. How might someone accomplish similar arguments, but within a more interactive space? What work does the recognition of immersion through a more distant viewing experience do?

History Written on the Body: Of Another Fashion

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:26:31 +0000

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine, via Of Another Fashion

This week, I want to focus on a site I discovered when I was trying not to work. While browsing fashion blogs, I encountered Of Another Fashion, a digital archive of "the not quite hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of US women of color." In recuperating these women as alternative icons, the site emphasizes the complex historical intersections of public and private as they play out through clothing choices. It also provides needed role models to counter the often problematic and still white-dominated fashion industry.

Personal collection of Lisa Henderson; via Of Another Fashion

The site features both photos from other archives, like the Library of Congress, and images from contributors' personal collections. Blog author Minh-Ha T. Pham includes whatever information is available about the image and its subject, and these stories, even when brief, are one of the most enthralling parts of the project. For example, the image above is of the contributors' great grandmother, Bessie Henderson, who died in 1911 at the age of 19. The contributor tells us

She lived on a small farm with her ailing grandparents. Her arms are burned dark from work in the sun, but she would have shielded her fair face with a bonnet or straw hat. The lockets mystify and sadden me. Neither my grandmother nor her sister ever saw them. They had nothing of their mother’s, save this picture. (Lisa Henderson)

Photo by Francis Stewart, via Of Another Fashion

The image above, taken in 1942, shows a Labor Day fashion show at Tule Lake Relocation Center, an internment camp in California. The image highlights the day-to-day survival strategies of women in a very difficult situation. The staging of a fashion show in particular places the emphasis on beauty, play, and modernity, but also labor. Women within the camp would have made most of the dresses; in some cases, women probably modeled what they made, thereby showing not only their beauty but also their virtuosity.

Personal collection of Rosemary Garrido; via Of Another Fashion

Making fashion the focus of an alternative history gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of these women and how they were shaped by both personal desires and broader historical forces. For me, this blog really highlights the complex conditions that produce the visual rhetoric of fashion.

Disaster Pedagogy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:38:25 +0000

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

It seems strange to ignore the earthquake and tsunami in a class that is built around discussion of devastating events. We talk about upsetting topics in class, although I do tell students that what they consider "tragic" is open to debate; I have received (very good) papers on, for example, Lindsay Lohan's personal decline and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. However, I think there is a utility to discussing scary or sad events as they happen, too. Making students aware of these moments as rhetorical as they happen seems like a key way to increase day-to-day critical literacy. What is important, I think, is making it clear that seeing the rhetoric in these public images doesn’t take away from the victims’ pain. In this case, it is actually easy to keep their pain in perspective because a potential motive (and a definite effect) of most of these images is to show how heart wrenching this event is. It gives us an opportunity to talk about how photographers show someone else’s pain: through direct images of anguish, of course, but also through the fear and fascination of seeing a building sway or an enormous crack in the ground. We can ask, why are there so many amateur videos of the destruction available online? Why do people want to see this? What work does it do? It can encourage students to think about when images help and when they sensationalize without helping. This particular event also gives us the opportunity to talk about the rhetorical power of animals, since the news coverage features images and stories of animals in peril.

Via Buzzfeed

My concern, of course, is that photographs will be upsetting for one or more students. While we're all adults, and we've certainly looked at some upsetting material before (meth PSAs come to mind), I do want the classroom to be intellectually challenging but still comfortable; students shouldn't feel as if their feelings or personal losses are being disrespected. While that is a concern for practically all of the events we talk about (especially Hurricane Katrina, because of the geographic proximity and huge affected population), there is normally at least a little distance between the class and what happened.

"Support the Tsunami and Quake Relief," Dave CT

We will talk about this event, but in a particular way. I would like students to discuss what they have been seeing, if only briefly: what images appear, and what effects do they have? Why do you think this picture was taken, published, circulated, etc--what is its rhetorical power? Additionally, I'd like to spend some time talking about the art that has come out of the event, like the first and third images in this post. Students have the option to make a poster for their final projects, so I think it is useful for them to see what one might look like. Some, like the Red Teardrop, seem very effective; others, like the image above, are somewhat more confusing for certain audiences, but potentially still persuasive. Talking about these images is relevant to the students' own work and allows us to engage with the images and the event in a way that is less likely to rub salt on a very raw, very recent wound.

Steve Davis and the Unspectacular Death of American Falls

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:36:30 +0000

Steve Davis, via Lens

As a sort of continuation of my post two weeks ago about The Goggles' Welcome to Pine Point, I want to focus this week on Steve Davis' As American Falls. This series of photos documents American Falls, the now-declining Idaho town where Davis grew up. Davis describes the town's death as "as slow as it is unspectacular," and these images produce a feeling of stillness that differs in interesting ways from the retroactive intimacy that the Goggles' project produces.

While Welcome to Pine Point takes the audience on a journey filled with intimate, almost voyeuristic moments and the associative links that make up personal recollection, As American Falls feels more distant, if no less poignant. The composition of the above two images contributes to this distance; the viewer is far away from the houses, at a strange angle, as if lying in the mud; the second diffuses the viewer's focus, with a few scattered elements unified by a beautiful but slightly ominous sky.

There is distance in this image too; the subjects' faces aren't discernible, and it is difficult to tell what is actually going on. While this is presumably some kind of homecoming parade (what looks like a costumed mascot is visible on the far right of the photo), the information we need to be certain of that has been removed. The image is like a confusing childhood memory--there were cheerleaders, so-and-so was there, but what were we doing? When was this? Our access is highly limited.

What I really like about Davis' project is the way this lack of access can produce a strange, confusing longing in the viewer. The mood seems appropriate to this kind of loss, which is, as Davis points out, slow and unspectacular. What there is to know about the town is slowly slipping away, and what is left are paused moments, simultaneously vivid (particularly in the first two photos) and incomplete. In a way, the images construct the decline of a town as the gradual loss of personal memories of the town, thereby making the town's decline legible to anyone who has moved away from where he or she grew up or has just grown older, losing bits and pieces of a previously robust sense of place.

Brian Dettmer - Carving New Meanings into/out of Old Books

Megan Eatman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:34:22 +0000

Libraries of Health and Complete Antique, Brian Dettmer.

H/T to Brian Gatten, Lauren Gantz and NPR

In honor of World Book Day (March 3--but it's not too late to celebrate!) NPR's visual culture blog, The Picture Show, featured work by Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer. Dettmer takes vintage books and carves them into sculptures that, as Mito Habe-Evans explains, "[deconstruct] the linear narrative determined by the structure of the book" and open the door for new interpretations. In giving new life to a supposedly dying medium, Dettmer's sculptures make an argument about the cultural space of physical books, now and in the future.

No title provided on website; Brian Dettmer

While Dettmer himself seems more or less optimistic about the future of books, his art suggests multiple readings. The pieces seem to suggest the incredible possibility of paper as a medium by showing that more can be done with it than we might at first think; however, whether this possibility would translate to continued use of books is unclear. It seems that rendering the human/book relationship as an aesthetic object gives credence to the argument that continuing said relationship is just nostalgia; while the human/book relationship is beautiful, this art suggests that it isn't necessarily practical. Of course, depending on audience, the argument that the human/book relationship is beautiful is in itself enough to justify the continued production of print texts. The relationship would be at least a little different from that you might have with a text you read on your Kindle, but not worse.

Screen capture from Dettmer's website; no title provided

These works also suggest that the physicality of a human/book relationship is part of what individualizes the experience of reading. It is because the books are paper that Dettmer can engage with them in this particular way, producing individualized pieces of art that represent a human/book relationship. Kindles have the mark of mass production; the fact that Dettmer uses vintage books with limited availability gives the appearance of a distinct and special origin. Even if a Kindle can be modified, physically or through programming, to make a piece of art, Dettmer's use of vintage books, which invoke images of the artist searching stores and calling suppliers, suggests that the history behind the pieces, and therefore their messages, will always be fundamentally different.

Experiencing a Long-Lost Town

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

The project is constructed as sort of an enhanced scrapbook. The artists combine grainy video, including shots from a memorial video that was offered to residents before the town was destroyed, and old and new photos of Pine Point and its residents with text that reflects on the experience of rediscovering the town. The fragmentary nature of the documents and the scrapbook feel give the project a certain intimacy, as if the reader/viewer/user is discovering these traces of Pine Point herself. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the project draws on the nostalgia most of us feel for places we experienced as children. For viewers who remember the eighties, the poor video and photo quality (as well as the wardrobe choices the images document) will likely draw on that nostalgia as well.

The collection of different media into a digital format raises questions about how we remember, and the project at times seems to invoke these questions. The initial load screen features an illustration of a VHS tape rewinding, thereby replicating a regressive process that most of us haven't seen in a while and thereby drawing attention to how technology affects the process of remembering. A later load screen, which features the word "Town" and a progress bar, draws attention to Pine Point's fully digital existence. Wiped off the map, it exists primarily in its memorial website and in this project. While the disappearing town is by no means a new phenomenon, the project does raise questions about what will become of towns that are currently in decline and how they might best be remembered.

Staging the Past: Irina Werning's "Back to the Future"

Megan Eatman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Nico in 1990 and 2010, France; Irina Werning

This week, I want to draw attention to Irene Werning's Back to the Future project (website probably not safe for work; there is a small amount of nudity), in which the artist meticulously reconstructs images from her subjects' pasts. The results are always impressive, often funny, and sometimes touching in their illustration of how much and how little changes with the passage of time.

Lali in 1978 and 2010, Buenos Aires

In most cases, the images are recreated more or less exactly. Subjects wear identical clothing and mimic their earlier facial expressions. The small differences in the images then become especialy interesting. In the image above, Lali's outfit is noticeably different (a solid dress, heeled shoes) and the building she poses in has been updated. While the building's changes were outside of the photographer's control, I wonder about the wardrobe differences. While the shoes show the shift to adulthood, I am not sure what to make of the brown dress. There are smaller wardrobe differences in other images; perhaps they draw attention to the image as performance, creating a deliberate gap in the illusion that reminds viewers of the gap between the past and present.

Marita and Coty in 1977 and 2010, Buenos Aires

The images are often hilarious. The playfulness of performing your childhood self shows in the images, particularly those like the image above in which the subject has to replicate his/her expression as a baby. The incongruity of an adult with a baby-faced wonder seems silly, even though it seems like it would be depressing because the loss of innocence is at the core of what makes the disjuncture amusing. While these images can be poignant for a variety of reasons, they also seem to deal in a light-hearted manner with the departure of the past. The replication of the past (and the often uncanny resemblance between child and adult subjects) indicates that it isn't really gone, but things are different, and sometimes in an amusing way.

Damian in 1989 and 2010, London

If you go to Werning's website to see more of these images, I would also recommend her other projects. Her website shows interesting variety, including a series of photos featuring a Chinese crested dog named Chini in different costumes and a collection of photos called "After Army" that features images from a beach frequented by young people who have just completed their tour of duty with the Israeli army.

Cosplay and the Visual Rhetoric of Loneliness

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:19:05 +0000

The Anime Within, Elena Dorfman

The image above is from a photo essay on the Mother Jones website. The essay, entitled "The Anime Within," was disappointing to me, and while I don't want to malign Dorfman's project, especially since I am glad to see cosplay getting attention in a publication that might not normally address it, I do want to critique some of the messages that these images send.

In the picture above, the subject looks uncomfortably stranded between reality and fantasy. While in costume, she wears minimal if any makeup (thereby disrupting the illusion) and is noticeably withdrawn in posture and expression. The dark background suggests that she is nowhere; not in reality, not in fantasy, and certainly not in a community. She looks both alone and lonely.

Not all of Dorfman's subjects look as depressed. The man above's expression looks faintly playful; he has an attitude that seems appropriate to his costume. He is, however, still alone.

I know that photographing the subject alone is a convention of portraiture, but this essay made me more conscious of its effects in particular contexts. Few of the subjects have truly impressive costumes, which would not in itself be problematic if it weren't also for the fact that none really appear to be having fun. The combination of these two elements, combined with the isolation imposed by the dark background, makes the subjects seem less like artists engaged in a vibrant fan culture and more like sad loners half-heartedly trying to escape reality.

In this particular context, it seemed as if the composition choices helped enforce rather than dispel existing beliefs about people in certain fan cultures. While I would not suggest that a photo essay on cosplay ignore bad costumes or sad people, a practice that already has such circumscribed representation in many contexts deserves a photo essay that complicates stereotypes and emphasizes the complex issues of play, belonging, and performance that permeate this culture.

Documenting Need

Megan Eatman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:00:48 +0000

Stefen Chow, The Poverty Line

Earlier this week, I tweeted about Stefen Chow's The Poverty Line, a collection of photographs that documents what an individual can buy with a daily wage of 3.28 yuan (49 cents), and here I want to draw more attention to this project and another like it. In documenting the choices one might face with this daily wage (significantly below the World Bank's poverty line, $1.25/day), Chow dramatizes the plight of the poor while staying within the language of economics and exchange.

Chow's photos are less sentimental than many documentary projects that focus on poverty; there are no crying children or hardened, starving adults. By constructing the viewer as the person confronted with this meager harvest, however, these photos do ask that we consider the daily frustration of making life or death decisions about how to handle limited resources. By making the limits of these funds visible, Chow also makes them real for viewers who might not be able to conceive of what living on 49 cents a day in China would look like.

A similar project by Jonathan Blaustein has a different origin and different rhetorical effects. The Lens blog on the New York Times website reports that Blaustein's The Value of a Dollar began when he realized that both the single and the double cheeseburger cost a dollar at his local fast food joint. The resulting project is a meditation on food as a commodity with a constructed value. The quantities represented are about what you would expect; Blaustein was able to purchase very few organic, early season blueberries and a lot of potted meat, ramen, and white bread, thereby supporting the thesis that it is often cheaper to buy processed food (although, notably, he was able to get a lot of grapefruit).

Jonathan Blaustein, The Value of a Dollar

Perhaps most interesting about this project is the composition; the photos set up the food items without packaging and isolated, with a white background, as if presenting them as art objects. Here, Blaustein's project differs most noticeably from Chow's. Where Chow places food on a newspaper and the viewer above, emphasizing the quotidian nature of this dilemma and allowing for easy comparisons between one food item and another, Blaustein plays with scale, sometimes making it difficult to ascertain how much of, for example, a Burger King side salad one can buy for a dollar.

While both artists ask their viewers to consider food as a commodity, their requests take strikingly different forms. In a pedagogical context, these images might be useful for discussing visual rhetoric and illustrating the argumentative different that subtle changes can make.

American Apparel's Imagined Bodies

Megan Eatman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:47:07 +0000

Cropped version of American Apparel ad by Boris Lopez

I hate to be talking about this, because I hate to be one of the many people giving American Apparel attention, but I can't help but find their recently released ads, which feature line drawings of nude, young-looking women, worthy of commentary. While American Apparel's ads usually contain some degree of nudity, their foray into line drawing rather than a particular photographic aesthetic seems to invoke, maybe too obviously, questions about the nature of pornography in a virtual world. More photos, which are not suitable for work, after the jump.

While the critiques of American Apparel's ads are numerous, I have always found their ads more over-the-top and obvious than offensive (their policies--like not selling some items over a size 6--are another story). AA forgoes subtext in favor of selling sex as obviously as it possibly can; the clothes themselves are barely featured, and and young women's bodies become the primary consumable. These line drawings clearly follow that pattern. While the slogan "You can feel how good it looks" may ostensibly refer to the woman who would purchase and wear cotton undergarments, the drawing's beckoning expression suggests that it is, in fact, the observer who can "feel" how good the underwear looks through his/her attraction to the model.

One of the most noticeable features of these ads is, of course, the models' apparent youth. AA has always pursued a youthful aesthetic, forbidding its female employees from having "unnatural" haircuts, performing any obvious eyebrow grooming, or wearing more than minimal makeup, so the use of youthful women is not out of the ordinary. What interested me about these ads is that they could have been photographs; there are certainly models who look extremely young but are of legal age, and AA has obtained models from a variety of sources to get an "amateur" look (although it is untrue that, as the company claims, all of their models are amateurs). The use of provocative, underage-appearing line drawings calls attention to the line between fantasy and reality without fully surpassing it. Interestingly, the slogan could be used in arguments for legislation (extant in, for example, Australia and Canada) that forbids images that portray child sexual abuse even if no actual children were involved. By suggesting that this image, which draws attention to its own un-reality, can still inspire sexual sensation, the slogan suggests that the way a viewer feels about a drawing of an underage girl and a picture of an underage girl might not be that different.

Using iMovie To Talk About Tragedy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:55:41 +0000

Image: Mildly Amused

For their final paper, students in my Rhetoric of Tragedy class were asked to make a visual argument and write an accompanying reflection explaining, among other things, their use of rhetorical strategies and the relevance of their choice of medium. While I did not require that students use a particular medium, I taught the students how to make narrated slideshows in iMovie with the understanding that it would become the default medium. In this post, I will briefly discuss my experience with using iMovie in the classroom.

While only the last unit was focused on visual rhetoric, we had discussed visual rhetoric throughout the semester, in large part because of its particular relevance to the kind of events my students were talking about: events in which people are hurt or killed, natural disasters, even (and especially) celebrity downfalls. The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event. On the first day of class, we looked at a multimodal argument (pictured above) to begin thinking about the arguments we make about and with celebrity death. I also showed them the slideshow below, composed by Aric Mayer, as an example of what a narrated slideshow like this might look like.

Aesthetics of Catastrophe from Aric Mayer on Vimeo.

We spent one class period playing with iMovie. Since students were not required to use iMovie, I did not require them to work on their real projects in class; as a result, they made a lot of amusing slideshows, including several that prominently featured baby animals. I think engaging with iMovie in this way made learning the technology fun, but it obviously left little space for discussion of the medium's rhetorical possibilities. We focused heavily on these issues in other classes. Overall, the learning curve was minor and the students seemed to enjoy the process. iMovie also allowed easy improvisation, a quality that, as Eileen mentioned in her review, SoundSlides lacks. The fact that students could dive into iMovie without any prior preparation was very appealing.

Overall, I was happy with the students' final projects, and I was certainly happy with the program. I created a PBWorks workspace for students to upload their projects. Some students who had technical difficulties uploaded their projects as private movies on YouTube; this was an especially good strategy for presentations, since it took no time to get the video ready. I do think that next time I would frame this project as multimodal rather than primarily visual. As Eileen mentioned in her post, considering the auditory is an important part of this kind of composition, and while many students used narration and music in creative ways, the editing was sometimes clunky, which would lessen the slideshow's persuasiveness.

Below is an example slideshow that I made. I used an older version of iMovie than what is available in the labs, but was still able to achieve (more or less) the effects I desired. I did not show this example to my class this semester, but in the future I will likely include it, along with Mayer's slideshow, to give the students an idea of the different forms these slideshows can take. In particular, I wanted to highlight the use of video clips alongside still images.

For a list of images used, see Works Cited

Visual Rhetoric, Inhuman Gazes, and the TSA

Megan Eatman — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:56:57 +0000

Image via TripAdvisor

As the first big travel week of the holiday season approaches, there has been much discussion about the TSA’s new body scanners and “enhanced pat downs.” There is a lot to be said about both the scanners themselves and the images that comment on the controversy, so in this post I will highlight some points of interest to inspire discussion about conceptions of the gaze and uses of the image.

The TSA’s “advanced imaging technology” is now in 68 airports nationwide, including Washington Dulles, John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare and Boston Logan. The procedure has clearly been designed to counter privacy objections; a remote officer views the image, so he/she cannot match passenger to body scan. But for some, the very act of entering a scanner that produces this image is invasive. The gaze that assaults these travelers is disembodied and mechanical—not literally the same as, for example, an officer “touching your junk”—but it retains the invasive quality of a willful human gaze. It is, of course, a willful institutional gaze, which can feel equally if not more threatening; it makes the argument that individuals can be told to expose their bodies, even when those individuals are not under any particular suspicion.

The use of images to comment on the new security procedures is particularly interesting. FlyWithDignity.org uses provocative images in its ads to cover a variety of objections. While only one addresses body scans, it is especially creative:

Image: FlyWithDignity.org

Their other images illustrate objections to the enhanced pat downs. Both show women who appear traumatized by the invasive reach of gloved hands.

The use of only women in these images makes a potentially problematic argument, but one that could persuade a wide audience through an obvious allusion to sexual assault and trauma.

One last visual argument uses Xtranormal, which Ashley discussed in a recent blog post, to construct an argument against the TSA's new procedures. While I find videos made with Xtranormal basically unwatchable (in spite of my love for robot voices), this one provides an interesting contrast to the images above. The robot voices and limited gestural capabilities of the animated figures contrast with the very real emotions and bodies involved. This format can draw attention to issues of privacy and trauma without sensationalizing, which could be useful in a debate that can easily devolve into accusations of oversensitivity. Additionally, while I find the computer voices maddening, that irritation could be, in part, a positive rhetorical effect, since the video portrays a frustratingly hopeless conversation.

What's Eating You? Viewer Expectations and Food Art

Megan Eatman — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 02:32:36 +0000

Image (and recipe): Chow

When I discovered the true nature of the image above, which appeared to be a delicious carrot cake, I felt an unexpected disgust. Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian with a sweet tooth, so the fact that what appeared to be cake was, in fact, ground turkey was pretty gross to me. However, I imagine that someone who had been dooped might initially feel the same way, before, perhaps, shifting into delight that an entire Thanksgiving dinner had been contained in one slice, and so masterfully. My reaction, however extreme, made me think about food as a medium, the arguments it makes, and the arguments we make about it.

An interesting example is the KFC Double Down, which received criticism less because of its actual nutritional content (not as bad as you think, especially compared to other fast food sandwiches) but because of its iconic representation of American overconsumption, particularly of animal protein and fat. The Double Down, which Mark Morford labels "a horrible crapbucket of chyme," represents everything from the perverse side of low-carb dieting to the horrors of American meat production. It makes an apparently apocalyptic argument--but, also, an argument for deliciousness, at least in its professional photos. Customer action shots are sometimes less savory, at least for some audiences:

Image: Treehugger

Obviously, an argument made with or by food has appeals that function differently; an audience could be more physically moved by appeals to their hunger (or desire to taste something good) or by disgust. The Thanksgiving cake also made me think of Stephen J. Shanabrook, who uses chocolate to create representations of dead bodies, many based on actual corpses.

Image: Stephen J. Shanabrook

Shanabrook's "Waterboarding" pieces are somewhat more subtle, but potentially more haunting:

Image: Stephen J. Shanabrook, via Eat Me Daily

While Shanabrook's work is obviously at a different end of the spectrum from the Thanksgiving cake, I think it is productive to ask, in all these cases, what arguments do these foodstuffs make? Presumably, the mimicry in the Thanksgiving cake makes a definitional argument (I am a cake) and then expands the eater's expectations of what being a cake means. The Double Down reads in different ways, but it (or, rather, its creators) has often been accused of unfair persuasion, abusing for profit humans' natural inclination toward fatty foods. Shanabrook's pieces take the fragility and beauty of chocolate and shape it into the grotesque and the shameful; however, the ephemerality of chocolate seems consistent with the rapid decomposition of a corpse or the unseen impact of "clean torture" like waterboarding.

Discussion of creations like these could be useful in a classroom for expanding students' attitudes about medium. Since we have obvious expectations of what a cake, a sandwich, and a chocolate sculpture look like, all of these creations use medium to frustrate our expectations in a way that might not be immediately clear in other kinds of texts.

"Deviant Violence" and Schwarzenegger v. EMA

Megan Eatman — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:02:51 +0000

Screenshot from Postal 2, a video game that contains "deviant violence" under CA Law AB 1179; via CNet

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), which revolves around a California law that would fine merchants up to $1000 for selling a certain class of violent video games to children. The case and the court transcript raise questions about medium and about portrayals of violence more broadly.

While the fine itself may not sound unreasonable, the court transcripts raise issues about the separation of video games from other forms of speech. For violent games to be regulated in this way, they have to fall into a special category: not obscenity, which is not considered speech and is illegal to distribute to anyone, but still objectionable enough to require content-based regulation that goes beyond the gaming industry's extant rating system. For the Supreme Court to declare California's law constitutional, they would have to agree that violent video games pose a social threat significant enough to merit government intervention. Such a decision would suggest that a violent video game is more damaging than, for example, an extremely violent R-rated movie, and thereby distinguish this medium's influence over that of film; or, as the inevitable slippery slope argument suggests, the decision would lead to broader restrictions on other forms of speech, like film or even print. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's objections illustrate this concern over the vagueness of the statute, which is based on a modification of the Miller Test:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: What's the difference? I mean, if you are supposing a category of violent materials dangerous to children, then how do you cut it off at video games? What about films? What about comic books? Grimm's [sic] fairy tales? Why are video games special? Or does your principle extend to all deviant, violent material in whatever form?

Image: F1@1F

The Court is unlikely to reverse the lower court's decision and declare the law constitutional, in large part because of the vagueness Justice Ginsburg points out. The statute does not clearly define what constitutes "deviant" (as opposed to acceptable) violence and thus could be applied very broadly depending on community standards. While the often-cited example of Postal 2 (see the top image) would likely violate standards of decency in almost all communities, it is largely unclear from a legal standpoint what separates fun violence from bad violence, perhaps because such a distinction is audience dependent. Seeing these questions engaged in a setting that must draw absolutes draws attention to how complex and often arbitrary these distinctions are and, as Justice Sotomayor points out, how little people have apparently cared about them in the past. Citing US v. Stevens, Justice Sotomayor notes that, "we said that we
don't look at a category of speech and decide that some of it has low value . . . We
decide whether a category of speech has a historical tradition of being
regulated." For portrayals of violence, this history does not exist, particularly when compared with regulations of sexual materials; it might suggest, then, a broader acceptance for even violent material that has "low value" than might initially be apparent.

Reverse Searching with Images

Megan Eatman — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:50:56 +0000

Image credit: Tineye

A new resource added to our Images page is Tineye, a "reverse search engine" that allows you to input an image and find out "where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version." Using image identification technology, Tineye finds results from a database of over a billion images and includes the URL from which they originated so that the user can track the life of the image and, in some cases, determine its origin.

It is important to note that Tineye cannot search for similar images; rather, it finds the same image in various locations and incarnations. It is thus useful for tracing one's own work (commercial accounts are available for companies who want to do this) or any image of interest, but it will not find different images that contain, for example, the same person.

To give you an idea of what Tineye can do, here are a couple of examples of search results.

Original Image, via Tineye

One search result, via Baltgames.lv

Original Image, via Tineye

One search result, from Tweetlol

Picturing Survivors

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:43:48 +0000

October is breast cancer awareness month, so you may be seeing pink ribbons and products more frequently. While the pink ribbon is a powerful symbol of breast cancer awareness, "pinkwashing" (exploiting consumer grief or guilt to sell products, such as pink hair dryers or nail polish, with minimal donations to breast cancer organizations) has been the target of much critique, in part because it allows consumers to feel that consumption of material goods is a solution to a widespread health problem. The SCAR project, which takes and exhibits photographs of young breast cancer survivors, offers a different visual argument for cancer awareness. Depending on your office environment, the images after the jump may be NSFW.

Image: David Jay, The SCAR Project

SCAR stands for "Surviving Cancer: Absolute Reality," and the images the project produces clearly offer a counter to the disembodied pink ribbon. SCAR's strategy is not entirely new; campaigns raising awareness for other issues have often used images of injured or otherwise physically affected individuals to further their cause. These images, however, avoid falling into overwhelmingly sentimental appeals to pity, guilt, or shock. The women pictured are self-selected, volunteers who chose to show their bodies to help fight breast cancer. While absent or reconstructed breasts may be shocking to some viewers, the comfort that the composition projects steers the images away from pure shock value. Looking directly into the camera without fear or shame, these women do not seem to need help; rather, with knowing expressions, they are here to help you.

Gathering support for a cause is difficult, and I certainly wouldn't discount the effect that pink ribbons have had on breast cancer awareness. However, the SCAR project seems an important counter to "thinking pink." At the nexis of tragedy and hope, these images seem to balance between the incessant positivity that Barbara Ehrenreich critiques in Bright-Sided and an apocalyptic sadness. These women are survivors, but they aren't unharmed; getting better and being strong does not have to (and often should not) mean hiding the marks of what happened to you. That complex message, spelled out with these women's bodies, may not always be apparent in the more common iconography of breast cancer.

Beauty and the Bomb

Megan Eatman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:43:29 +0000

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

Inspired by Eileen's post, I focus this week on a fascinating image. If it weren't for the title of this post, or the image's caption, you might not be able to identify this image. Even with context, I spent a moment staring, attempting to understand how this could be what its caption claimed it was: the beginning stages of a nuclear blast, captured by a special camera placed two miles away from ground zero. In its deviance from the typical mushroom cloud, the image argues for an even more complex understanding of the massive destruction that humans create.

Technically speaking, this image is a close-up; it was captured with a special camera that was placed much closer than a regular camera (or a photographer) could be. But one of the provocative qualities of this image is the way it mimics a much closer close-up. Black and white, with darkness in the background, the image looks like something you might see through an electron microscope. While this aesthetic complicates perception of the actual scale of destruction, it also invokes the incredibly small action from which the massive explosion stems.

For me, the image also invokes the intersection of humanity and technology. The ball, filled with light, exudes a potentiality with no immediate point of origin; it grows on its own, as if alive.

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

This image is particularly explicit in invoking growth and reproduction. The bomb looks as if it is giving birth, but to what? A caption indicates that this image shows a fireball "begin[ning] to destroy the tower that holds the weapon aloft." While the first image, taken at a later stage of the explosion, shows no indication of the weapon's beginning, this image shows the destruction of the support structure, the development of the explosion as an independent entity, and thus hints again at growth. While biological creatures are certainly not the only entities that grow independently, the birthing image seems in particular to invoke human and non-human animal reproduction, providing a stark contrast to the elimination of human life that accompanies such an explosion.

The significance of these biological visual tropes might lead us to a somewhat overtrodden message: nuclear technology destroys its maker, humans are their own worst enemy, etc. I like to think that they can do more than that. If nothing else, they force us to think about an almost unimaginable scale of destruction in a different way, considering its processes and products anew. But there is also a beauty, one that I think complicates the concerns visual scholars have long held about the aestheticization of violence. The combination of beautiful image and historical knowledge might enable the viewer to both appreciate the glories of technology and its very serious consequences.

Celebrating the Everyday

Megan Eatman — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 20:42:13 +0000

Image credit: Peter Stults, Every Day Posters Every Day

While I know it sounds cheesy, a lot of us here at UT are thinking about appreciating the everyday in the wake of the week we've had. The website Every Day Posters Every Day provides an interesting example of such a celebration, and one with potential pedagogical use.

Image credit: Peter Stults, Every Day Posters Every Day

Every Day Posters Every Day is a Tumblr site devoted to "tak[ing] trivial activities and promot[ing] them with posters to give them a sense of importance they ordinarily would not have." Highlighting the routine nature of these actions through the contrast of presenting them as special events, EDPED suggests that these activities are worth celebrating because of, not in spite of, their mundaneness.

Image credit: Steven Masuch, Every Day Posters Every Day

I particularly like the poster above because it celebrates two daily events without making them seem particularly enjoyable. This poster, along with another for "Road Rage," suggests the sensationalism of a horror film in everyday life. The hyperbolic drama makes the mundane and sometimes unpleasant task of inserting and removing contacts actually seem funny.

The last poster is my favorite, because it plays on the fantasies and instincts that make what we euphemistically call "gossip" one of life's guilty pleasures. The image of an attractive woman whispering into a man's ear invokes sensuality and intimacy; the close-in shot suggests that the viewer is in an exclusive group. The curled font could be spelling the title of a romance novel or a soap opera. What it actually advertises, however, is a genre of entertainment much older than the either of those.

Image credit: Peter Stults, Every Day Posters Every Day

These posters could be useful in teaching students to talk about humor in visual rhetoric. Students will obviously be familiar with the activities discussed and likely with the genres invoked as well (some of these seem to be movie posters, some concert posters, etc.), so no background is needed to engage with the images. The incongruous rendering of everyday activity in special event form combined with a sometimes hyperbolic highlight of the silliness or unpleasantness of the event make these items potentially fruitful sources for class conversation.

Reboot: DADT and Public Sacrifice

Megan Eatman — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:33 +0000

Image credit: Chan Lowe, The Lowe Down

The above cartoon, republished yesterday on the artist’s blog, makes a very effective argument against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The use of flag-draped coffins, signifying shared tragedy, suggests that dying for one’s country has little to do with sexual orientation and that is rather the work that an individual does—in this case, sacrificing his/her life for the United States—that matters. In this kind of public sacrifice, the image suggests, everything individual is erased. However, this message seems more complicated when considered in relation to one of Tim Turner's earlier posts and the wider cache of meanings that these coffins suggest.

Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT,2/15/2009

Last year, Tim discussed speculation as to whether President Obama would change Pentagon policy and allow the publication of photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim suggested that this debate was in large part about the tension between public and private sacrifice (a difficulty that the eventual solution addressed), although there are obvious issues of information control as well.

When thought of in the context of public/private tension, Lowe’s cartoon could also be translated as an argument for making these coffins visible, as the coffins signify an act of public sacrifice, the death of a soldier, rather than a man or woman. The suggested erasure here could also be troubling in the debate on DADT. Lowe’s image’s suggestion that being a soldier is an overriding identity seems like it could actually be appropriated as an argument for DADT, suggesting that, in the military, you are a soldier above all else and can therefore be told to conform to gender and sexuality standards. Obviously,that argument is problematic (why these standards?) and extremely discriminatory, but it makes visible some of the complications that arise in the public/private tension around soldiers’ bodies.

Tim’s original piece is below, and here. For more discussion of images and DADT, see this recent post on No Caption Needed.

Start of Tim's post:

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Documenting Crime, Yesterday and Today

Megan Eatman — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:19:33 +0000

Image: Ángel Franco

Via Lens Blog, New York Times

The above image is a part of a series by photographer Ángel Franco that documents the aftermath of violence, but not in the way you might expect. The series, which is published weekly on Lens, the New York Times documentary photography blog, is filled with images that are haunting in large part because of what is not shown.

The images in Franco's series, At the Sirens' End, are all shot in New York City. Each is accompanied by a minimalist caption; the image above, for example, is captioned, "A woman fell--or was pushed--from a 15th floor window in the Mitchel Houses" (Lens). These captions provide context for what might otherwise be a mysterious, if unsettling, scene. Because this image is a close-up shot that eliminates any surrounding officers or crime scene tape, the gravity of the situation may only set in after careful observation. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of a deceased or grieving body, Franco draws out a strange emptiness by portraying a stranger's relation to the event. The image below, which captures a young girl moving toward the scene of a fatal car accident, has a similar effect.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"A young girl tries to catch a glimpse of the scene of a fatal car accident."

In obscuring the identities of both police officer and child, the images place the observer in an even more distant relation: a stranger watching strangers. The violence that the images allude to plays out not on the bodies of victims, but on the bodies of bystanders who encounter the event through daily life, and thus observers access the event through its traces.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Left behind after a shooting July 21 on East 132nd Street in Manhattan."

These images are especially interesting when considered in relation to one of Franco's previous projects. From 1979 to 1984, Franco worked with the officers of the 46th Precinct in the Bronx, where, at the time, "a murder occurred every five days on average" (Lens). These images often show victims and perpetrators, and their grittier aesthetic reflects a different relation between bystander and crime.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"An officer holding a gun to a man who had been stopped in his car."

While this image, like Franco's more recent work, withholds eye-to-eye engagement, it is frighteningly intimate. With the officer and suspect dominating the frame, there is little outside space with which to contextualize the violence of the officer's gesture. The image also suggests that this violence is strangely routine; the officer's posture hints at disengagement, as he appears to be using the gun as a management tool to keep the suspect under control while he or someone else investigates.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Officers carrying a boy who was caught in a gun fight while riding his bike. Shot in the chest, he survived."

These images could be useful for teaching students about both image analysis and rhetorical situation. You might ask, how are the arguments that the earlier images make specific to a 1970s/1980s crime-ridden neighborhood? How might we explain the visual changes in the later photographs? How can this shift be read as an argument about our changing relationship to violence? In seeing the way this artist's work has changed, students may be able to better grasp the importance of context in argument.

"Not a Game:" Performing Contemporary Violence

Megan Eatman — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:09:30 +0000

Image credit: Destructoid

The above is a screenshot from upcoming Electronic Arts (EA)/DICE title Medal of Honor, a reboot of the 8-year-old video game franchise. The game, set in the early stages of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, has drawn national attention both because of its setting and the developer’s decision to allow players to play as the Taliban in multiplayer mode. While I won’t take a side in the debate here, these images and the debate that surrounds them provide an interesting opportunity to think about the distinctions we draw between gaming and watching.

Image credit: Techpinger

Frank Gibeau, president of EA, suggests that books, films, and video games should all be granted the same license to represent contemporaneous violence. Gibeau explains, “Whether it’s Red Badge of Courage or The Hurt Locker, the media of its time can be a platform for the people who wish to tell their stories. Games are becoming that platform.” Gibeau argues that representation is the task of contemporary art and therefore video games can and should be set in ongoing conflicts. However, a poignant statement by Karen Meredith, whose son was killed in Afghanistan, takes issue with the medium rather than the mere representation of the conflict: “My son didn’t get to start over when he was killed. His life is over, and I have to deal with this every day . . . it’s just not a game.” According to Mrs. Meredith, the possibility of repetition and revision in virtually all games makes the medium inherently inappropriate for a life-or-death situation. Additionally, her use of “game” seems to connote frivolity; not only is Medal of Honor repetitive, as a soldier’s life actually can be, but it is fun, which being stationed in a combat zone often isn’t.

Gibeau and Meredith have different ideas of what a game is and what it can do, but both are provocatively vague. Given that the nature of the medium is essential to this debate, it seems that the distinctions they draw merit further reflection. Is this debate about representation or performance—or, to what degree do the argument and its subject blur that distinction? To what degree are recursiveness and revision features of other media as well? We might also reflect on when it is “too soon” to represent/perform a traumatic event in a certain way and what it means to insist on contemporaneous representation—because, as various speakers have pointed out, the game didn’t have to be set in Afghanistan. Recent discussion of Clear Blue Tuesday, a musical that deals with the aftermath of 9/11, and the perhaps under-discussed Hipster Hitler meme could also be provocative areas for thinking about interaction with and revision of violent events through different media.