Jillian Sayre's blog

Witness the artifact of the process

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:56:55 +0000

Derek Mueller over at Earth Wide Moth posted an interesting meditation on Google's recent mapping of the famously lost city of Atlantis.

Google's spokesperson addressed interest in the image by clarifying the lines, taken for ruins, that mark the ocean floor. S/he said in an email: "What users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process...The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

Derek's post (found here) focuses on this very issue of method, of the discovery of the trace even if it is not the trace of a lost civilization. Instead, on the map, we are left with signs or remnants of the mapper. Derek says:

"The conspiracy doesn't interest me all that much. Instead, I'm struck by the impression: the stamp left by the "systematic" tracing, the residue of the surface-to-sea-floor method (a term others have smartly untangled it into meta-hodos or something like 'beyond ways', even 'ways beyond'; this etymological dig lingers with me). The deep blue grid of "bathymetric data" elicits questions: why don't we see these in the adjacent areas? What was it about this boat, this collection process, this translation from sound to image, that left behind the vivid trails?"

It reminds me of recent work done on mind mapping in the Computer Writing and Research Lab here at UT:

Sean McCarthy recently presented on this tool and the alternative methods it offers not only for essayistic composition but also course organization and tracing resources.

You can find examples from his presentation here.

Remember the Vodka!

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:51:33 +0000

I want to take a break from politics for a second to address alcohol. Er, wait....hard to divorce the two when Absolut runs the following image in their Mexican advertisements:

It's part of Absolut's campaign to define the brand as "perfect" and follows in the footsteps of:

and

Of course the liquor ad must have its disclaimer. In this case, the "conocer es no excederse" is a 'please drink responsibly' plea that literally translates to English as 'to know is not to overstep.' The proximity of this particular warning to the revised map, an argument that relies on an understanding or knowledge of borders or limits, provides an interesting reading of the image (or readings - who must know his/her place/limits here?).

I'm Jack Nicholson and I approve this message

Jillian Sayre — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:27:50 +0000

Today I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's video endorsement of Clinton. It is currently making the rounds on YouTube:

Here's the problem I see with his montage-style endorsement: Nicholson lets his fictional characters do the talking and the most obvious problem here is that Nicholson rarely plays sympathetic characters. When the Joker asks me "Who do you trust?" and Col. Jessop from A Few Good Men tells me how military leadership should work, I don't feel benevolent towards their recommendation. Then there's the appalling moment when we return to Jessop to hear him talk about the sexiness of a woman in power. Is speaking through the mouths of liars, murderers, and psychopaths the best strategy to forward an endorsement?

Are these the cultural icons one wants associated with one's campaign?

At least, to follow up on Tim's post about the Devil and Hillary Clinton, we have no Witches of Eastwick

Rock the Vote

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:39 +0000

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

The corrido emphasizes Obama's humble roots, flashes pictures of him in crowds of people, and argues "his fight is our fight."

The second, recently composed by Austin singer Kat Edmonson:

The video asks the question "What would you do if you were president?" and flashes to different people holding their answers in the form of cardboard signs. What intrigues me about the Will.I.Am video and these two latest incarnations is the various ways that they argue an identification with Obama, in the "we" "our" and (notably missing) "I" that signifies a corporate or cooperative identity.
It makes me think of the larger ideas of collaborative composition that inhere to ideas of New Media and Web 2.0 and I think it is interesting to consider how this "new idea" for politics that people attach to Obama might be a larger "new idea" of culture.

The call is coming from inside the House!

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:53:14 +0000

Check out a new political ad from the Clinton campaign:

I almost didn't want to be the one to blog about this one, because we've got some pretty rich material here. My favorite thing about this piece, though, is that it reminds me of the old Babysitter horror stories we used to/still tell ourselves. It really puts the domestic in domestic threat.

The Serious Side of Sarcasm

Jillian Sayre — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.

Katie Couric, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and now Newsweek have all noted how Obama's rhetoric contrasts with the optimism and hopefulness of her husband's campaign. But while most of these sources will present the trait as positive (albeit dangerous), the Times for instance called Obama "Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy", Clinton is considered dour or angry.

The funny thing is, the visual argument seems to be presented in the opposite manner. Newsweek's profile of Michelle Obama featured a good deal of "stern" pictures, despite the frequent mention of her humor in the text (she pokes fun of her husband, makes frequent jokes that not everybody gets). Despite a few nostalgic young Obama shots (and the cover which features a controlled smile on a woman who seems almost to be physically restraining herself), most of them looked like this:

both images property of Newsweek

Hillary, on the other hand, as Tim's devil picture indicates and as Jon Stewart has pointed out, seems discomforting in her happiness, the "hard-nosed realist" who enjoys lambasting hope and faith. When she makes these sarcastic comments in speeches and during debates, she smiles, even laughs. While I think we would agree that this normally says, "hey, joke here!" it is read by these critics as over-rehearsed or abusively cynical.

Perhaps what I am most intrigued by in this debacle is the disjunct of rhetorical strategy and analysis. While Obama's serious posture is productively rebellious, making her a thoughtful as well as humorous (Newsweek says that she's not the expected "Stepford booster, smiling vacantly at her husband and sticking to a script of carefully vetted blandishments"), I think Clinton joyfully produces her barbs so that the listener is encouraged to hear her and laugh along, a sort of benevolence. The effect, though, is suspicion and distance; these critics argue that her smiles actually isolate the audience and I wonder what context creates this reading.

Fashion Speaks

Jillian Sayre — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:01:39 +0000

The Viktor & Rolf show in Paris this week sent a bit of a message:

The two behind the line (yes, Viktor and Rolf) say that the "No" was aimed at the general direction of fashion itself. "We love fashion," they told reporters, "but it's going so fast." The show was peppered with various NO outfits, along with some that read "WOW" and "Dream on" (the latter was their closing remark/outfit, apparently). It is an interesting act of resistance that participates in (to the point of exploiting) the fast-paced visual culture of Fall fashion season.

What I find particularly interesting about the performance/show is that the only phrase written on (instead of worn on) the models themselves was NO, scrawled across a few faces when clothes themselves had less visible or no text:

It strikes me as a bit more insidious when drawn on the flesh, at least a bit more radical in its disfigurement of the model's face (the seat of beauty?). To what/to whom is this NO addressed?

You can see the whole show at Style.com

“I don’t give a damn about Paris Hilton”

Jillian Sayre — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:02:23 +0000

Jezebel picked up on a story in the Washington Post and the The Daily Telegraph about the surprising shared cameraman (Nick Ut) behind the following well-known photographs:

Apparently bloggers had a lot to say about the coincidence and the Post does an interesting analysis of comparative wartime photography. Jezebel focuses on Ut's personal involvement with the subject: "When I look at my photograph of Kim and my photograph of Paris Hilton," he says, "I think they are both good pictures, in their way. I suppose the big difference is that I grew to love Kim, whereas... well, frankly, I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton." Turns out Nick Ut put down his camera, got Kim to a hospital and is credited with saving her life. This is an interesting issue with humanitarian rhetoric and the responsibilities of an author, brought to light by feelings of guilt expressed by photographers of trauma, as in the suicide of Kevin Carter

The Post talks about the pain in both pictures and the evocative potential of the pictures is captured in the photographer's reaction/non-reaction to the subject. The point is that we aren't supposed to give a damn about Paris Hilton and her ilk. They are creations of the narrative impulse itself, they exist because of the camera. In the 1972 photograph, the subject exceeds the frame of the photograph; her scream, her pain is a narrative excess that effects a call, a response-ability inherent to the work of witnessing.

For those of you interested in cartoons...

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:22:53 +0000

Wonkette runs a weekly feature in their "Joke and Dagger Department" in which they get the "Comics Curmudgeon" to look at the week's political cartoons. This week focuses on the (wo)man-beasts slouching towards the White House:

Photo Op

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:23:20 +0000

Interesting arrangement/focus in the leading photo on the front page of The New York Times:

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Gore finds himself in front here (a little too close) and President Bush smiles, leering over his shoulder. The entire composition feels uncomfortable and, if this weren't the feeling they were going for, I'm sure the awkward photo would have ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor.

Maybe I'm just feeling seasonal, but it seems they've chosen one of these men as the Grinch:

Wonkette offers a different shot in which GWB is somewhat less creepy.

The University: instituting culture, institutional culture

Jillian Sayre — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:44:27 +0000

This summer I taught a rhetoric course that focused on the idea of a University. The course used Cardinal Newman's nineteenth-century treatise as a jumping off point but also looking at other ways a university might define itself as an institution. One of the more interesting discussions in class was one in which we investigated the relationship between art and the university...

The University of Texas, our home institution and object of study, has an archive (describing itself as a "world-renowned cultural institution") that not only houses important pieces of visual, textual, and performing art but also has its own galleries to put these objects on display. The building itself was recently renovated, and the atriums converted into "galleries" themselves that display the Center's significant collections on etched glass windows:

This is in addition to the University's art museum (a "cultural gateway"), which opened one of its two new buildings last year, a 124,000 square foot space that houses more than 17,000 works of art. When the museum opens its second building next year it will be the largest university museum in the country.
The space, time, manpower, and of course money (the Blanton project is estimated at $85 million) that the University has invested in art is somewhat astounding and the questions we asked in class were somewhere along the following lines:
How does collecting and displaying art further the mission of the university? What do these collections argue about the nature of the university among other institutions? Of the University of Texas among other universities? Does this accumulation at the level of high culture stand in contrast to the modern, investment-model university or can it also serve its mission?

Their answers were varied and interesting, but I won't offer them here. What I will do is give you the outline of a related assignment from the class. One obvious connection the university holds to visual art is through its use of sculpture and statue. These are everywhere on campus, offering the public an image of the University's values through its association with the figure. I gave them a map of statues around campus and asked them to explore.

Umlauf's Torchbearers outside the FAC

I told them that their task was to find and analyze one piece of public art on campus. That it should be a statue or sculpture visible to the public (not inside a building or in the art museum). Their job was to discover the argument of the piece and to consider the argument the university makes about itself by making the piece part of its public space.

Women in Art (more rhetoric of the montage)

Jillian Sayre — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:04:45 +0000

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

Perhaps it is the chronological extension (this montage covers 400 more years than Women in Film) but the faces here seem to resist the homogenous beauty of the doe-eyed starlet. On the other hand, it is also interesting to note a similar lack of racial diversity. If modern cinema produces 3 African American actresses, 500 years of Western art produces none.

Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:21:31 +0000

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."

This reminds me of the Aggie's "Saw 'Em Off" campaign, ended by a UT lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and solved by the following alteration:

and then there's UT's reprisal:

I think the "Vick 'Em" case is an interesting move in the string of violence against mascots because the case is the first one that deemed truly offensive. Fed by this cartoon violence, this shirt crossed the line in referencing the very real abuse documented in the Vick case. The threat indicated in the other shirts reference real animals (Bevo and Reveille) but somehow the mascots themselves remain at the level of representation. It is the Vick in Vick Em that has everybody in an uproar.

The importance of what cannot be seen

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:14:21 +0000

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.

For me, the story has a few important intersections for the student/scholar of visual rhetoric. The need for the tattoo demonstrates the importance the visual representation of the body to even the most intimate of its observers. Without the nipple, the breast could seem incomplete, or even still sick. Even though it is just a "drawing," the tattoo brings presence back to the breast, or wholeness back to the subject. The nipple, similar to the increasingly popular inside-of-lip tattoo, therefore constructs an intimate or private language, an idea that is not frequently attached with the hyper-visibility of a lot of body modifications.

I also think that this is interesting in terms of the rhetoric of body modification itself, that is often thought to be reclaim the body for the subject. If cancer can make the patient feel that the body is not her own, taken over, invaded by the cancer itself, then this act of modification could serve as a ritual "taking-back" or assertion of ownership and control.
Last, I just want to point out the strange relationship between health and sickness for body modification. As Victoria Pitts points out in her book In the Flesh, body modification is often surrounded by the discourse of mutilation, perversion, self-harm and other ways of designating the body modifier as "sick" - with this new form of tattoo it is the body modification that tries to approximate "healthy" according to normative standards. In this way does the nipple reconstruction actually undermine the destabilization project that many body modifiers understand themselves to participate in?

Science as (body) art

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:53:35 +0000

Following our earlier discussions about the intersection of science, art, and rhetoric, I bring you the o-chem tattoo. I think the tattoo not only promotes science as a field of visual representation but is also among a growing corpus of "geek" tattoos. These tattoos frustrate the long standing assumption that body art and body modification is an unintellectual enterprise, one in which you tear at, pervert or destroy the body. In this way, these tattoos also work against the mind/body split, demonstrating how thought is not separate from but also occurs on and through the body.

Check out the following link to see a group of geek tattoos at ModBlog

corny monuments

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:37:20 +0000

Building off of John's blog about naval barracks, I offer another form of visual rhetoric made possible by the aerial shot:

They have corn in Phoenix?

Invasion of the fashion snatchers: copyright or class conflict?

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:51:10 +0000

This week the Village Voice reported that Anthropolgie is joining the legion of designers suing Forever 21, the chain that (re)produces trendy looks for the masses (read: their clothes are really cheap). Anna Sui campaigned against the store during Fashion Week (she handed out t shirts with the store's owners on a "wanted" poster) and Diane Von Furstenberg is lobbying Congress to "improve" copyright law when it comes to fashion.

DVF dress on the left, Forever 21 on the right

The chain, these designers argue, is too close for comfort on some of its clothes and it seems like the haute couture is determined to keep the hoi polloi out of their closets. But what is at stake here? Currently, you CANNOT copyright a dress, and many are suspicious of this debate because fashion has always looked to others for inspiration. So the designers focus on the details - like fabric instead of cut or resemblance to their trademark (Gwen Stefani). DVF's lawyers are actually arguing that someone might think that they are buying an original when they go for these knockoffs, but anyone paying $33 instead of $350 knows that this isn't just about getting a great deal. I think this has more to do with social capital than actual capital - no one I know who shops at Forever 21 (and I know a few) is choosing the store over a designer boutique: they don't have access to those modes of acquisition. Perhaps what scares these designers the most is the accessibility argued by the availability of their designs. By claiming copyright infringement and a "take back the dress" mentality, these designers are not only making claims of ownership over the clothes but over the clientele as well.