viz.

Image: Screenshot from occupyaustin.org

If you couldn't tell from the past few days of viz.'s coverage, the Occupy Austin protests continue, if attendance has mildly abated from this weekend's high.  This blog is not an appropriate venue for the discussion of the movement’s goals (you can find more intelligent discussion about Austin’s own version of the movement here and here).  However, I am interested in the ways in which the Occupy Austin movement represents its constituents.  The Occupy Wall Street / Austin brief—which aspires to represent 99% of the American (some Austin material intransigently claims “world”)  populace—faces a particularly clear set of representational challenges even as social networking allows its images to proliferate in ways unimaginable even five years ago.  For the rest of this post, I’ll highlight some images from Occupy Austin’s affiliated website.  

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

Last Thursday afternoon, I borrowed a video camera from the Digital Writing and Research Lab and headed down to Occupy Austin, a gathering intended to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If you've been following the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, then you know that people are confused about what exactly it is the protesters in New York want, and in Austin it doesn't seem to be much different.