Ty Alyea's blog

Hoodies, Identity Politics, and Murder

Ty Alyea — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:56:37 +0000

Almost two months following the fatal shooting of the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, which occured on February 26th, 2012 in a gated community in Florida, the circumstances surrounding his death have been refracted through a variety of lenses: local and national protests have claimed solidarity with the fallen teen; gun control advocates and gun ownership advocates have debated the efficacy of "Stand your Ground" laws; and conflicted media reports have coursed through the charnal houses of cable and network news, presenting and altering evidence along the way. The whole thing started with George Zimmerman, his alleged killer, looking at the young man in a hoodie; and the response to this dimension of the event will be my subject today.

Image Credit: Nola.com

Early in the case, Trayvon Martin's hoodie was singled out as a factor which allegedly piqued George Zimmerman's suspicion about the young man. Though it had been raining, it has been said that the self-appointed neighborhood watchman saw this as a sign that he was suspicious. "This guy looks like he's been up to no good, or he's on drugs or something," Zimmerman told the 911 dispatcher. Carrying a gun, Zimmerman followed Martin and, after an altercation, Martin, who was carrying a can of ice tea and a pack of Skittles at the time, had been killed. Claiming solidarity with the fallen young man, thousands of protestors (like those pictured at the New Orleans rally above) donned Martin's apparel, protesting racial profiling and Zimmerman's alleged inferences. Before being removed from the floor of the House of Representatives for violating the House dress code, congressman Bobby Rush explained: "Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum."

Image from Geraldoinahoodie.tubmlr.com

There was a counterreaction to this visual argument, however. Four weeks after Trayvon was killed, Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera argued "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as Zimmerman was." Geraldo argued that, as a person of color like himself, Martin should have been aware that this would have made him vulnerable to the racial anxieties of whites who would stereotype him. Geraldo's comments, which he has since distanced himself from, have prompted the advent of the "Geraldo in a hoodie" Tumblr blog, which features the newsman taking exception to his injunction. Taking an opposite tack,Missisippi rapper and producer David Banner, who thinks that all of this emphasis on the hoodie simply plays into Geraldo's argument, says that the emphasis on clothing could get in the way of the deeper issue of racial justice: even so, he argues that "America is showing young black men: If you don't make us comfortable around you, we will kill you," he told MTV News on March 29. "As much as people don't want to admit it, that's what this is about."

A group of Howard University students present their response: "Do I look Suspicious?"

"This is Water"-- Remediating David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech

Ty Alyea — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Delivered in twenty-three minutes, David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College had an audience of a few hundred. However, in the years which followed, the transcription of Wallace's speech became an internet phenomenon, coursing through millions of email boxes and introducing the writer to people unfamiliar with his complex fiction. "Thanks to the enthusiasm" of people who knew nothing about Wallace's work, and the "magic of the cut-and-paste function," Tom Bissell remarks that the address likely ranks "high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote." But perhaps the most significant testament to the speech's popularity is that the short speech would eventually become a book in its own right. In the year after Wallace's passing, the "Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address" became This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009). And yet, even as Little, Brown's publication of the lecture gave the speech permanence and stability, it also aroused significant debate about whether the form of this publication worked with or against the speech's message. In examining the remediation of Wallace's speech, I suggest that the debate refracts core concerns that Wallace addresses.

Image credit: Edrants.com

In the beginning of his address to 2005's graduating class at Kenyon college, David Foster Wallace begins with a parable: "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" Demonstrating a self-reflexivity that marks all of his fiction, he follows up that this anecdote follows a standard convention of the "bullshitty" commencement speech genre, and that he is not going to presume the role of the "wise old fish" that tells the younger ones what the water is like. In the words which follow, Wallace concisely makes an argument about the need for a capitalist society's "students" to reflect upon their surroundings and to be aware of the generative possibilities that might exist behind frustrations and antagonisms we confront every day.

While many of the speech's fans first encountered the speech through an endless chain of email forwards, nested in forwarding arrows [>>>], Little, Brown's publication of This is Water is a highly polished, even reverential rendition of Wallace's words. In order to emphasize the weight of each line, and, undoubtedly, to draw the text out into a saleable book form), each of the 135 sentences of Wallace's speech (minus one--which we will get to in a moment) is given its own page. Hence, the opening page (above) is followed by the subsequent three sentence-pages.

While readers familiar with Wallace's Kenyon speech will find that most of the content has maintained intact, This is Water does include a single, but very substantial, revision that has raised some criticism. Following Wallace's point about the mind being a "good servant and a terrible master," Wallace states in the original speech: "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master." In This is Water, the final sentence from the quote above was taken out. This line was, in fact, a go-to line for the authors of many of Wallace's obituaries, who see in this moment an ominous foreshadowing of his eventual suicide. For Tom Bissell, the textual excision is understandable because "Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace's work...now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it." Thus, Bissell suggest that the oft-cited line might distract readers from the core elements of the speech.

Reception of the posthumously-published edition of Wallace's speech has been divided in ways that point to, on one hand, the lasting power of the content of his speech, but also a concern about its place and meaning of a society that has had to "commence" going on without him. While reviews of the content of the speech have been almost uniformly positive, there has been criticism of the format of This is Water. After all, one may ask, does the omission of the line "they shoot the terrible master" and the stretching out of Wallace's prose into sentence units refigure and protect an image of Wallace as the "Wise old fish?" Zach Baron of the Village Voice points out that lines like "I am not the wise old fish," take on the feeling of zen mantras, certainly gaining emphasis, but perhaps doing so in the wrong way. Ultimately, he cannot shake the feeling that the format goes against the principles of the speech: "The net effect is to imply an entirely different kind of wisdom--of the Tuesdays With Morrie variety--than whatever actual wisdom is contained therein. " Fans of the book, on the other hand, including the most "liked" Amazon review of the text, argue that the book format finally gives the speech the "stature it deserves," and argue that the knee-jerk resistance tot he speech is evidence of the kind of cynicism that Wallace speaks out against in the speech. These debates also inevitably intersect with the question of whether Wallace's speech was mostly to be taken as a survival guide to life within modern capitalism or an affirmation of it.

Image Credit: Maniac.com.sg

Hosting a different rendition of the Kenyon speech--one which includes various asides that do not make it into This is Water. Manic.com reframes the issue of Wallace's speech and its relationship to consumer culture by depicting it as a nourishing and replenishing text that is in itself understandable as a commodity. Ironically, the debate over the commencement speech's remediation echoes a kernel of ambivalence within the speech itself. Midway through the address, Wallace suggests that it can be useful to have it within your power to "experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things." Wallace then follows, "Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship." Thus, we might also see our perception of Wallace's speech in its various contexts (for "free" through the hypercaptilized system of the world wide web, or for pay under the auspices of Little, Brown) as a situation in which we can exercise similar choice.

An Audio Transcript of Wallace's speech is available on Youtube. Part One. Part Two.

View a written Transcript of Wallace's speech here.

A Window in Time: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion"

Ty Alyea — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center Photo by Anthony Maddaloni

Near the sorth-eastern quadrant of the Harry Ransom Center is a series of images of a jockey throttling a racehorse: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion." While these images may seem inconspicuous juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange's eminently recognizable photographs, their ability to bear witness to a horse's motion was both evidence of an event and a monumental event in itself. The product of two men's obsessions, "Horse in Motion" is both a fascinating example of a visual argument and a foundational episode in the history of motion pictures.

Leland Stanford (left) and Eadweard Muybridge (right) - Image Credit: Wikipedia

As the story goes, Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate who had just helped complete the transcontinental railroad, made a $25,000 bet with a Dr. John D. Isaac about whether there was a moment in a horse's gallop when all four hooves were off the ground. Although the bet never actually did take place, the question at the center of this mythical bet stands in for a hotly-debated question in racing circles. Many observers of horses on the track held to the assertion that a horse would definitely collapse if all of the hooves were to leave the ground at once. Stanford and several others, however, held to the belief that the horse would momentarily be "unsupported transit"--careening through the air with the force of their momentum. Advocates of these theories, however, were at a stalemate because, as Mitchell Leslie points out, "the human eye couldn't pick out enough detail to resolve the issue."

Seeking to put this question to the test and to develop technologies that could help him train and breed better horses, Stanford contacted Eadweard Maybridge, an eccentric but accomplished photographer who was living in San Francisco, to develop a scheme for photographing the horse's gallop in 1872. There was a slight delay, however: in 1874, Muybridge, who had been likened by his contemporaries to a blend between Walt Whitman and King Lear, pled insanity for killing a drama critic who had cuckolded him. With Stanford's help, however, he was found to be both sane an justified. With that little obstacle overcome, Muybridge came up with an intricate scheme that would prove to be a watershed moment in the history of film.

Image by Nigel Holmes: Stanford Alumni Magazine

In July of 1877 and June of 1878, Muybridge set up complicated photographic rigs to capture images of Stanford's horses at racetracks in San Francisco and Palo Alto. As the image above demonstrates, Muybridge laid out a series of cameras that were parallel to a horse's path. And as the horse would run across the course, it would set off a series of tripwires that would set off these cameras. He also succeeded in developing a method of capturing an image with a shutter speed of less than a hundredth of a second--a technique that would assure a crisp image of the horse's movement. By capturing this series of images at split-second speed, he was able to definitively prove that horses did indeed fly through the air mid-gallop.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Using a spinning Zoopraxiscope--a device that Muybridge invented--the photographer and inventor was able to mass-produce his discovery, presenting the series of images on a disc that was meant to spin like a record. A viewer who kept her eye on the bottom image would get an illusion of motion like this:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Fifteen years after capturing these iconic images, Muybridge set up an exhibit in the 1893 World's Fair that shared his discoveries to an even wider range of spectators. Brian Clegg, author of The Man Who Stopped Time, has called this the first commercial movie theater!

Storytelling in Motion: Jacob Lawrence's "The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis. The King James Version."

Ty Alyea — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Lawrence, no. 1: ("In the Beginning--All was Void") Image From: Bill Hdoges Gallery

Replete with bright flashes of color, the "Genesis" series of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), currently on display on the back wall of the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible exhibition, pulled me in like a tractor beam from across the room. It is perhaps only appropriate, then, that the subject of this series is an enthralling spectacle of storytelling and creation.Though Lawrence is perhaps best known for his "Migration Series," a sixty-panel retelling of the African-Americans' migration across the United States, Lawrence's comparatively short (8 panel) portrayal of the narration of Genesis deserves attention for its ability to express a powerful sense of motion in a single place.

Lawrence, no. 2 "(And God Created Day and the Night and God put Stars in the Sky")

Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As the Savannah College of Art and Design tells us, Lawrence based his paintings on his memory of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s sermons at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. Throughout the sequence, we can see that while the setting remains the same, the preacher's sermon literally transports the parishoners around the room, and, seemingly through space as well. The world outside appears to totally change, filling in from the "Void" pictured above and yielding to a rich world of plenty.

Lawrence, no. 4 ("And God Said -- let the Earth bring Forth Grass, Trees, Fruits and Herbs") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As we move through the images, we can see how the preacher's expressive motions remain at the front and center of the image, capturing a sense of direct inspiration from above and radiating from the text itself. The shifting colors of his cloak, the flower vase near him, and the room itself capture a feeling of constant transformation as well. We also notice gradual changes in the arrangement of the congregation. Enthralled by the story being told, we see the congregation shifting their seats, sometimes staring at the preacher, sometimes looking up to the heavens, and on other occassions looking out the window. The neighborhoods of Harlem were in fact a major influence for Lawrence's artistic motiffs and color schemes, and their arrays of clothing, frequently synchs up with the varieties of colors inside the church and outside the windows.

Lawrence, no. 5: ("And God created all the fowl of the air and the fishes of the sea") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

Another significant image that we can trace throughout the images is a small box filled with tools.

Lawrence: nos. 6 ("And God Created all the Beasts of the Earth") and 7 ("And God Created Man and Woman") Images from Savannah College of Art and Design

As the images progress, we see the box behind and next to the pews (visible at the very top in image 6 and at the rear of the pew in image 7). But in the final image (below), which places the entirety of the congregation near the window showing a completed creation, the box sits in front of the group of parishoners.

Lawrence, no. 8. ("The Creation was done--and all was good") Image from Savannah College of Art and Design

This shift, I suggest points to the passing of the torch from God to the people. With his work completed, it's time for people do their own work as they look at the feast of plentitutde and creation before them. In doing so, Lawrence demonstrates a legacy between the holy text, its mediator, with the community's sense of common purpose.

Whirling Futuramas: Norman Bel Geddes's Practical and Aesthetic Transport

Ty Alyea — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Magic Motorways

Following up on my previous post about Norman Bel Geddes's ambitious application of hydro/aerodynamics to develop concept vehicles which imparted a strong sense of motion, I would like to follow up on the legacy of Bel Geddes's aesthetics of transportation in contemporary popular culture, taking a journey from his famous World's Fair exhibit, Futurama (pictured above), to Matt Groening's contemporary television show, Futurama. Bel Geddes's futuristic view of a world of connectivity involved literal as well as aesthetic transport. By looking at aspects of his work that have been translated into modern title sequences, I suggest we can get a better sense of his ability to capture a feeling of crossing threshholds and ushering us into strange, exciting, and entertaining worlds.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

Bel Geddes's Futurama, the predominant feature of the 1939 World's Fair, was geared to give people a sense of the future of transportation by 1950. He tried to simulate this feeling by giving World's Fair Guests a simulated "plane-ride" through the exhibit that was powered by a conveyer belt system that moved them through the system. This was meant to give Depression Era spectators of flying through the air as they pondered the possibility of an increasingly connected future--one that they might help build. Of chief interest was to fulfill the deeply seated needs of human community without presenting a dehumanizing future. "Throughout all recorded history," Geddes writes in his 1940 manifesto, Magic Motorways, "man has made repeated efforts to reach out farther and to communicate with other men more easily and quickly, and these efforts have reached the climax of their success in the twentieth century. This increasing freedom of movement makes possible a magnificently full, rich life for the people of our time. A free-flowing movement of people and goods across our nation is a requirement of modern living and prosperity" (10). However, he was concerned that contemporary traffic conditions--characterized by stops and starts, traffic lights and standstills, would make people feel more like sheep than human beings.

Image Credit: Magic Motorways

Futurama, Bel Geddes argues, "gave them a dramatic and graphic solution to a problem which they all faced" (4).

Matt Groening has acknowledged that Bel Geddes' Futurama was an inspiration for his television's show which bears the same name, and the show's title sequence captures some of the reasons for this perfectly. Viewing the opening title sequence for Matt Groening's Futurama and the image of Groening's fictive New York pictured below, we notice a similar sense of continuous motion. Flying vehicles of all sorts follow one another in perfect lines, as do people flying from place to place in tubes. And yet, they do not appear like sheep. People and objects maintain their individuality while moving in harmony . The same goes for the tubes that transport people through the city.

Image Credit: Futurama Wikia

Geddes' aesthetic helped poeticize the value of transportation at a time when the first major U.S. freeways were beginning their construction, and by the end of the Eisenhauer Presidency the Interstate Freeways system was rapidly growing, connecting disparate parts of the nation with roads that emphasized speed, flow, and forward momentum over intersections and frequent stops. The world of possibility is especially emphasized in the title page of his manifesto, Magic Motorways. The shadows which make up the words on the title page emphasize that he is pointing to what's possible with the motorways, and the sharp angle of his lettering gives a sense of a new horizon being approached.

Image Credits: Magic Motorways and David Lynch's Lost Highway

We might also notice that the opening credits to David Lynch's Lost Highway bear some resemblance to the font and word angling that Bel Geddes used in Magic Motorways. Though his stories are rooted in the present, Lynch's films frequently invoke a sense of nostalgia for bygone times, and the most consistent trope of his work involves tight focus on the roads of America. Though a dark, gothic film, the metaphor of the highway invokes the same kind of feeling of possibility that Bel Geddes associated with the road. And the opening credits emphasize that the film's erratic portrayal of split identities is more about motion and connectivity than it is about stagnation and fragmentation. If Bel Geddes helped invoke a sense of magic in the motorway, I suggest the possibility that Lynch might be riffing off of Bel Geddes, like the title credits for Futurama, demonstrate Bel Geddes's powerful strategy of inspiring spectators--past and present--with the feeling of crossing into the threshhold of a strange and exciting new world, characterized by motion and awe.

Bel Geddes's Flying Car -- The Great Chimera of the Streamlined Era

Ty Alyea — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Stanford

Perhaps everyone born in the last century has grown up fantasizing about the possibility of driving a flying car. At the age of ten, Norman Bel Geddes would have heard the news of the Wright brothers' first flight. And by the time he was twenty one, Henry Ford's advances in mass-production were able to produce cheap automobiles at a rapid pace. It was perhaps only natural that he would attempt to combine these innovations into a single machine. After all, as I discuss below, his vision for the ground automobile was powerfully shaped by innovations in industrial design that came from developments in the realm of aviation.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

During the 1930's and 40's, Bel Geddes came up with several innovative car designs that seem very futuristic--even by today's standards. They were also rather sizeable: most of his designs were meant to accomodate eight passenters. In keeping with his desire for liveable technology, however, they had gigantic windows that would allow for a very wide field of vision. Covered in chrome, and curved at every surface, they look a bit like a jet. And this was precisely what Bel Geddes was going for.

Image Credit: The Industrial Design Reader

In The November 1934 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Bel Geddes authored "Streamlining," a four-page survey of the principles and applications of "streamlining" a term for increased aerodynamics that one can find reflected in many "futuristic" devices of the early 1930's. As he exlpains in the article, the concept of steamlining began in the field of hydrodynamics but was quickly applied to the field of aviation. The sciences of streamlining, Bel Geddes argues, "have been highly effective, but not understood....both in theory and practice, it is still in embryo." On a practical level, this meant the eiimination of elements of the car that could create drag: "headlights, fenders, door hinges, spare tires." Additionally, "clean, continuous lines from front to rear would aid in reaching all objectives." In the article, he mentions that streamlining has made little progress in the domain of the automobile--and the designs we see here reflect his attempt to move this progress forward.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

These designs may have appeared downright strange to some people--a resistance that Bel Geddes sought to overcome: "The weaning of public taste from its illogical prejudices in the matter of appearance is paving the way for whatever form will best meet the automobile's requirements." We might notice that some elements of Bel Geddes's streamlined design were even assimilated by later generations of cars. In this concept design, for example, we see how the verticle wing gives the car a fish-like appearance. Indeed, some of us may recall the explosion of "fishtails" that appeared on American cars throughout the mid-century--a metonymic nod to the hydrodynamic origins of streamlining. Bel Geddes gave special admiration to the Chrysler De Soto--an image of the 1957 model can be seen below.

Image Credit: NFSCars

So while Bel Geddes's vision of a flying car never came into practical fruition, his concept designs did help American automakers consider the. For now, we will have to take solace in the ways in which he, like Buckminster Fuller, created designs that continue to set the imagination racing.

Plights of the Murdoch Media Empire

Ty Alyea — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:37:22 +0000

Image Credit: PR Daily

Some of you may know that the U.K.'s Sun newspaper-tabloid--said to be the tenth largest in the world, in terms of circulation--has suffered some serious blows at the hands of the British authorties lately. This, of course, is not the first time that the Sun's owner--News Corp--chaired by the mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch--has faced such travails. In fact, the current shake-up at the Sun appears to be the next domino to fall in a series of of blows precipitated by last year's phone hacking scandal--a scandal which led to the fall of the lesser tabloid News of The World (explained in another useful infographic here). But just how big is News corp? Would they be permanently damaged by the fall of the Sun, or would it just be a minor burn? Today, I've included some infographics that can help us visualize the size and global reach of this mecia conglomerate.

Image Credit: PR Daily

Time will tell if the taint of the recent scandal--and the subsequent investigations--will involve Murdoch affiliates, friends, and enemies in the States. But there are signs that one Anglo-American celebrity may be affected. CNN fans may be anxious to learn about that Piers Morgan is facing increased scrutiny as well. In a 2006 article for the Daily Mail--a paper unaffiliated with Murdoch, Morgan reported on the very sad, very personal voice mail messages that Sir Paul McCartney sent to his soon-to-be-ex-wife during a marital squabble. One of these messages, Morgan Reported, included the Beatles superstar crying "We Can Work it Out" to Heather Mills. How did he get this information? Morgan has vowed not to reveal his sources, but Ms. Mills fervently denies that she handed the message over. Morgan was--some may remember--the editor of the ill-fated News of the World in the 1990s--could his source trace back to his News Corp friends?

Angst and Paralysis: Visualizing Melancholia from Albrecht Durer to Lars Von Trier

Ty Alyea — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.

Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancholia .4VS Image Credit: NIH - Images From the History of Medicine

Though a predecessor in some ways to depressive disorders and depression, the concept of melancholia carries with it a number of spiritual and behavioral connotations that cannot be mapped onto contemporary (American) diagnostic categories without losing a number of significant and complex meanings; the complete edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), for example, devotes 1400 pages to the topic. Thankfully, a multitude of paintings and woodcuttings can help us demonstrate dimensions of melancholia that depart from contemporary mores of classifying and understanding such diseases.

Though melancholia proper was frequently associated with men as well as women, a significant contingent of artists chose to visualize the malady in the representation of dejected women. One can notice a number of significant similarities in the works of Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), pictured at the top of this post, and Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancolicus .4 VS (1514-1562), directly above this image.

Cranach's painting depicts the melancholy figure as an angelic figure who is sitting in the corner of a room, looking blankly ahead. Since antiquity, Melancholia was understood in humoreal terms as an overproduction of black bile--in fact,the word "melancholia" simply means "black bile" in ancient Greek. And we can see this blackness in the top-right corner of the image. In the darkness we can barely make out the images of what appear to be witches on broomsticks--perhaps haunting the mind of this angelic figure whose countenance and posture seems to be in stark contrast to the disposition of the swinging cherubs. One almost gets a sense of a kind of swirling of the mind contrasted with the body's immobility. Likewise, we see a little dog sleeping at her feet. Solis's image includes some distinct similarites: the woman in this image sits with her face buried into her hands amidst a grouping of animals. As a counterpart to the stick held by the subject of Cranach's painting, we see that Solis's toga-wearing figure seems to be holding a sort of measuring compass. Does anyone have an idea of the significance of these items?

Albrecht Durer's Melancholia I Image Credit: Wikipedia

These images, in turn reflect some of the elements found in Albrecht Durer's depiction of melancholia. Durer (1471-1528) was an instructor of Cranach's, and we can see some similarities in their stylistic choices. Once again, we see the reclining dog at the feet of an angelic woman, and a sphere image as well. To take a guess at an answer to the question I offered in my previous paragraph, I will venture to guess that the compas in Solis's image, like the spheres in Durer and Cranach's pieces, may have something to do with rational/scientific creation--perhaps to an extent that it has an effect on spiritual existence. We may also note that Durer's image is replete with images of bells and (what appear to be) time pieces. And in the background of this otherworldly image, we see light (or perhaps the rays of "melancholia" itself) radiating from the distance.

Which brings us to our final images from Lars Von Trier's film, Melancholia (2011). As we see halfway through this trailer for the film, we notice a nude Kirsten Dunst laying on rocks, taking in the glow of a rogue planet, aptly named "Melancholia," which is on a collision course with the earth. Given this contemporary setting, Von Trier's choice to depict depression as a personal and cosmic apocalypse seems to be a throwback to the way in which the malady has been depicted for the bulk of its history. An analysis of the film yields further comparisons, as Dunst's character rejects scientific explanations (or in this film, wishes) that attempt to mitigate the danger. However, somewhat subversively, we see that the main character relishes in her melancholy, and fully accepts the doom it brings. Viewers might also note that one of the first images in the film is a horse that sits on the ground just as we first see Dunst's character--a strange image that nonetheless fits perfectly with five centuries of melancholia's representation.

Representing a Revolution in Government and Medicine -- Unchaining the Insane

Ty Alyea — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Archives of General Pyschiatry

When historians seek gathering metaphors to describe the French Revolution--with its violent upheavals, experiments in re-arranging calendar time, and, of course, the demands for liberty and equality that underwrote these events--they rarely describe the atmosphere or environment of the period as particularly stable or "sane." And yet the work of Philippe Pinel--a progressive French physician who helped lay the groundwork for a major shift in mental health treatment--has been nonetheless remembered as a figurative crystallization of the Revolution's lofty, humanist goals--goals which in turn influenced the trajectory of ninenteenth century psychiatry. Today, I seek to briefly explore how 19th century visual re-enactments of Pinel's participation in a highly mythicized (and mostly apocryphyl) event--a ritualized "unchaining" of the captive patients-- were used to remind French citizens of the virtues of republican government during times of national upheaval.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of European physicians began to doubt the efficacy and morality of then-dominant methods of incarcerating the mentally ill--namely, the extensive use of chains and physical punishments to keep patients subdued, and, more generally, an emphasis upon containment rather than treatment. Additionally, on an institutional level, the asylums of France were objects of much suspicion; in the ancien regime, after all, any citizen might be one lettre de cachet away from imprisonment. In this environment, Pinel, along with several other French asylum directors, began a policy which tended to remove chains from non-violent prisoners and begin a new form of therapy called "moral treatment" in the second half of the 1790's. Though space limitations prohibit me from going into too much detail here, it should be mentioned that the "moral" treatment was based on a belief that madness--previously regarded as a totalizing condition that justified perpetual separation from society--was frequently only an imbalance in the mind that could could be realigned by various forms of therapy. As the years wore on and the lore surrounding Pinel grew, he frequently was portrayed as a single-handed avatar of benificent Revolutionary Republicanism.

Charles Louise-Muller's commemoration of the event,"Pinel Orders the Chains Removed From the Insane at Bicêtre" (pictured at the top of this blog post) was completed in 1849--near the dawn and collapse of the short-lived Second French Republic. As we can quickly notice, Pinel, who by most accounts, wasn't present when this kind of chain-removal took place, takes on a heroic pose here, dominating the center of the action amidst a band of lightness which separates him from the leagues of drab, darkened clusters of patients that line the sides of the image--almost as if he is parting a sea of madness. At the same time, the dominant colors of the image befit the flag of the Revolution: red, white, and blue. While several of the patients look at their newly free hands in shock, we also notice them looking to their savior--watching what he will do next. Largely docile, the patients accept the enlightened physician's gift of freedom and his authority.

Image Credit: Archives of General Psychiatry

Our next image is Tony Robert-Fleury's "Pinel Délivrant les aliénées," or "Pinel Delivering the insane." Painted in 1878--three year's into the third French republic--the image likewise returns to the liberatory power of the physician and the patients' debt to their liberator. In this case, however, the scene is the women's hospital of Salpêtrière, and Pinel is off-center, advising the manumission of a young, scantily clad, woman in white. As with the previous picture, we see a docile group of unfettered patients on the left hand side of the image looking calmly at the scene, and one of the women is actually kissing Pinel's hand while he stoically does his business. The women on the right, prostrate and languid, await their hoped-for freedom. Far in the background, meanwhile, we see two women moving as they please.

But ultimately, the woman in the center commands the most attention in this image, for she is both visually striking and the center of Pinel's attention as well. Susan A. Hawes of Antioch College argues that the female patient who takes center stage "assumes a position which suggests her unreason, her vulnerability to patrirarchal reason, and the taming of her dangerous sexuality." While the link portrayed here between sexual wantonness and madness is by no means a new one, Hawes points out that it became increasingly important "in this context of morally righteous 'humane' treatments." In this way, then, these images, which were likely comissioned to reinscribe revolutionary era values into France's later republican contexts, bear out Michel Foucault's claim that we should see Pinel's work as emblematic of a general shift in discipline and governmentality toward more discretely professsionalized forms.

The SOPA/PIPA Blackout: Two Ecologies of Discussion

Ty Alyea — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:08:00 +0000

Image Credit: Al Jazeera Stream

As we discussed yesterday, January 18's SOPA "blackout" generated a massive reaction that catalyzed a collapse in legislative support for the Congressional Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Today, I will explore how some analysts are currently using images to depict SOPA's notoriety on the web during the blackout and, additionally, chart out SOPA/PIPA's relative obscurity in the realm of primetime television news before the blackout.

Image Credit: Media Matters

In the months before the blackout, SOPA and PIPA receved very little coverage by organs of the mainstream television media such as MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN--all of which are owned by parent companies that were in favor of the bill's tough legislative stance against piracy. MediaMatters.org -- a left-leaning media watchdog -- released a study demonstrating that SOPA was mentioned in two prime-time segments released between October 26th, 2011 and January 12th 2012. This is less than one-twentieth of the coverage devoted to the British royal family and the conduct of Tim Tebow, the quarterback for the Denver Broncos. SOPA coverage was also dwarfed by coverage of Alec Baldwin's confrontation with a flight attendant and Kim Kardashian's divorce.

Image Credit: GeneralSentiment.com

Looking at the circulation of Internet discussions about SOPA, Steven Kwon's study (published at GeneralSentiment.com) highlights the tremendous size of the SOPA/PIPA blackouts as internet events. As pictured in the image at the top of this article, the SOPA/PIPA blackout received more buzz on the web than some of 2011's most hyper-mediated events; it received more attention than the 2011 super bowl and Oprah's finale combined.

It is possible that the absence of televised attention toward SOPA and PIPA had a negative impact on the bills. On one hand, it fed into a growing opinion that media companies wanted to push the legislation through without public consent. On the other hand, this neglect did little to foster support for the bills. Steven Kwon argues that less than 1% of twitter-driven traffic offered support to SOPA or PIPA.

Image Credit: GeneralSentiment.com