viz.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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: 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.