viz.

J O’Shea at SuperTouch has posted a review of an art show by Mr. Brainwash (AKA Theirry Guetta). According to O’Shea, Brainwash is a hack, ripping off the style of pop artists like Warhol and street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey.

After following pioneering street art legends like Banksy and Shepard Fairey around, camera in hand, shooting hundreds of hours of footage, however, the lure of cheap & easy fame began to eat away at [Guetta]. The desire to mint an original style proved more elusive. It all began several years ago with a series of uninspiring wheatpaste posters in the style of nearly every stencil artist that came before him depicting Guetta, with trademark facial hair and fedora, holding a camera, fused to the walls of Hollywood’s most heavily trafficked corridors. Further inspired by the success of Banksy’s self-produced “Barely Legal” solo show in 2006 (and with the encouragement of Sir Banks himself—possibly his biggest art prank on us all to date?), and having established sufficient ”street cred,“ Guetta began to plot his own ascent. The result is the exhibition in question, titled “Life is Beautiful” that currently occupies the formerly vacant CBS Studios on Sunset Blvd. . . . In the words of one of LA’s most pioneering street art provocateurs, Skullphone, “if Disneyland wanted to open a street art ride, this is what they’d have done.”

The antics of Mr. Brainwash, and the reaction of O’Shea to them, made me think of Richard Lanham’s at times scathing review of pop art in The Economics of Attention. It is interesting to note that artists like Duchamp and Warhol, who Lanham calls “attention artists” or “attention economists,” were pranksters who may have really liked the joke that O’Shea so deplores: somebody sees how much money and prestige comes from making pop art, declares himself a pop artist, and starts to receive money and prestige through the wholesale copying of other artists’ methods and works. Mr. Brainwash is merely manipulating what Lanham calls the “Interpretive Bureaucracy of Attention Economists,” the establishment of art critics and promoters who can be trusted to find importance and meaning where there is none.

I would be interested in hearing from other readers of Lanham’s book to see how they think Mr. Brainwash’s work fits into the author’s description of the Attention Economy.

via Right Some Good

Scientific American has published a short guide listing five methods that researchers use to spot altered or retouched photographs.

For example, in the image above, some of the soldiers in the background have been “cloned” to make it appear that the crowd was more dense than it actually was.

While the guide details the mostly algorithmic methods used by Hany Farid and his fellow researchers, it also has some practical tips which can be used to identify altered photographs with the naked eye.

To infer the light-source direction, you must know the local orientation of the surface. At most places on an object in an image, it is difficult to determine the orientation. The one exception is along a surface contour, where the orientation is perpendicular to the contour (red arrows right). By measuring the brightness and orientation along several points on a contour, our algorithm estimates the light-source direction.

For the image above, the light-source direction for the police does not match that for the ducks (arrows). We would have to analyze other items to be sure it was the ducks that were added.

Related:
Digital forensics
Photo-retouching guru

The New Yorker recently published this profile of Pascal Dangin, the most sought-after photo retoucher in the world of high-fashion. Author Lauren Collins notes that retouchers are often forced to work in secret:

[R]etouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

The article should be great fodder for studying the rhetoric of the body and the use of photography in our society.

CNET reports MIT has a new project that provides information about videos that have been removed from YouTube. From the article:

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

This site should be a helpful resource for online video researchers, particularly those interested in copyright issues.

Tim Turner has posted a new pedagogical article, “Visual Rhetoric and Propaganda,” in viz.’s assignments section. The article explains why rhetoric instructors should teach their students about the methods of propagandists, and outlines a course unit based on the topic. In the article, he argues that conversations about the use of visuals in propaganda

are useful because they illuminate for students a range of rhetorical possibilities, including the fact that “bad” arguments can be quite influential and that modes of persuasion cannot (and should not) be divorced from ethical considerations. From this perspective, discussions of propaganda may also be useful in that they help illuminate discussions of the fallacies of argument (in which case, “bad” is taken to mean specious, illogical, or poorly reasoned). But discussions of propaganda may also lead to discussions of the ethical dimensions of persuasion (in which case “bad” is taken to mean ethically or morally suspect).

If you teach rhetoric and technology, you might be interested in “Googolopoly,” a version of the classic Parker Bros. game that charts the search giant’s quest for web-wide domination.

FYI: Rich Uncle Pennybags’ pitchfork is a clue that the creators are ambivalent about Google’s quest to “organize” your data and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those of you who have time to kill in during these last few weeks of class can download the entire game here.

via TechCrunch

As the Democratic primaries have continued on throughout the winter, columnists and pundits have been reaching out to find ever more ways of distinguishing between Obama and Clinton. Salon has posted an article analyzing the design of the candidate’s logos, while Clay Spinuzzi has blogged on the contrasting designs of Obama and Clinton campaign flyers being distributed in Texas (without any images, unfortunately).

The blog garfield minus garfield contains some wonderful examples of the ways in which images can be recontextualized to create new meanings. According to the site

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Garfield the strip is mostly lame; but, by removing the dull main character, the strip is completely transformed. I particularly enjoy the empty panels, and the effect their silence has on the meaning of each strip.

Timothy Noah at Slate has been keeping an eye out for evidence that Barack Obama is, in fact, the Son of God. In his latest post, he linked to this picture of Michelle Obama from Reuters:

According to Noah, the framing and Obama’s posture suggest a passing resemblance to this woman:

Google and Twitter have gotten together to create a mashup of Super Tuesday related tweets.

via TechCrunch