viz.

Dear Viz. Readers,

Four years ago John Jones, Tim Turner, and Vessela Valiavistcharska and I founded Viz.  We couldn't be happier for the recent  Lovas weblog award that Kairos bestowed upon Viz.  I will remain sporadically active with Viz., but I am also happy to unveil 3 x 3 in Cullowhee, my new blog about tranitioning from the life of a grad student to the life of an assistant professor.  Please check it out and add it to your RSS readers.  I am still working on the static content, so keep checking back. 

From the web comic XKCD:

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine.  The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran. 

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq.  I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us. 

Image credit: James Richards, via Strange Maps

The dark corners of the intertubes are populated by weirdly animated detritus. In one particular corner I found Strange Maps, an intellectual terra incognita. Here is one map from the site, in which map-author and vexillologist James Richards has filled in United States states with the flags of other nations with populations equal to that of the correlate United States state. What is the point of such a map? It takes us nowhere. It is trivia, contrived comparison, meaningless. Indeed.

This *is* an odd land, and there is perhaps no better way to understand, as a stranger in a strange land, the strangeness than that quintessentially American experience and myth, the road trip. "Buy the ticket, take the ride," someone screams in Jack's ear as he discreetly tries to fill in his fantasy baseball roster.

In the Lonestar People's Republic of North Texorea . . . imagine it . . .

The high plains meth labs have been bulldozed. Justice remains swift. And decisive. The governor's call to secession has been fulfilled. President Rick Perry, in his paramilitary uniform of high commander, sings along to the Lonestar Republic's national anthem and reviews the People's Army, parading forth from Camp Mabry and into the Austin city streets. "Keep Austin Weird," the buzz-cut forces shout in unison as they pass the review stand. The death penalty endures, but the process has been expedited. The workaday Texicans have traded in their Pearl for Pulrosul (an alcoholic concoction bottled with a dead adder inside), and good ol' boys, no longer satisfied with whiskey and rye, swill the juice of the alcohol addled adders, and later bite their heads off. The mezcal worm has turned, into a snake. Our trip begins just out of reach of the center of State power in Austin, on Interstate 35. We drive north. "Keep the Weird in Austin."

Check our new Creative Commons Introduction to Visual Rhetoric in the "assignments" section.

A new interview has been posted the the views section. Viz. contributor Sarah Wagner interviews Jan Eliot, the creator of Stone Soup. Read it here .

Recently LIFE magazine released previously unreleased photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the day of his assassination. I'm not sure how that works, since LIFE is a now defunct publication, but it may have something to do with their parent company, who surely still exists in some form or another.

It's interesting to think how much the photos of that day that were previously released inform our memory of it (and I use the word "memory" very loosely, since that was well before I was born).

*I haven't posted an image here simply because LIFE, or whoever their parent company is, is probably the kind of company that would sue our poor asses, even though the use would clearly be under the provisions of fair use. I'm wary, especially after the RIAA came after one of our instructors a couple years ago when I student used a clip from a song in a student project that ended up online, which was hosted on the instructor's website. I feel my paranoia is well founded.

I am a desperately addicted fly fisherman, (click here to see my favorite fly fishing blog, Sexyloops) and I recently took note of the pornographic qualities of a genre of angling pictures. In an era of catch-and-release fishing it's customary for fishermen and fisherwomen to pose for impressive shots with their catches before returning their catch (hopefully) safely to the water. Consider this typical example:

A new interview has been posted to our views section. Viz. contributor Dale Smith speaks with author Roberto Tejada about Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography.

Roberto Tejada is a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Mirrors for Gold and National Camera, as well as a founder of the periodical Mandorla.

Check out the interview.

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*Today's post is more of a question, and rather than reproduce the images of the discussion, I will write about them.