viz.

Slate V has posted nine soap commercials shot by recently deceased film director Ingmar Bergman. As Dana Stevens, Slate’s film critic, points out in the commentary below, Bergman’s ads challenged the conventions of most commercials—in one case, Bergman depicts a character being injured by the product, Bris soap.

Can you guess why these two are so happy?

Is it because

A. Online recipes are the best recipes?

B. The white powder in that bowl isn’t flour?

C. They have a standby electrical generator, so while everyone else in their neighborhood is cold and powerless, they can still surf the web and set their lights to supernova?

If you are teaching advertising in the visual rhetoric section of your course, you will probably be interested in Donald Gunn’s 12 Categories of Advertisements. Slate’s Seth Stevenson has recently posted a slideshow demonstrating them all.

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

Following up on Nate’s post about retouched photos, The Daily Show has revealed some contemporary presidential image-retouching:

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

Slate has posted a slide-show essay by Mia Fineman on the work of photographer Ryan McGinley. [This link may not be suitable for work.] Fineman makes the argument that McGinley’s work has been coopted by advertisers because he “has essentially created a successful lifestyle brand—a stylish fantasy of youth, beauty, and hedonistic fun” which they find appealing. The photos and analysis could be the start of a fruitful discussion of commercialism and art.

On Monday, the BBC reported on a “six-month research project” that revealed that “MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education” while Facebook users “come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.” In a Tuesday blog post, Clay Spinuzzi pointed out that the research project in question was not intended to be taken as scholarly research. While it is generally a good idea to take any BBC report on science with a Gibraltar-sized grain of salt, one should ask, why did so many others accept these results (Clay lists SmartMobs and BoingBoing as posting favorable comments)? I think the answer has more than a little to do with the visual aesthetics of the two sites.

Viz: The Future

First, a little background. For those of you who don't know, the re-design of the CWRL's Visual Rhetoric page as Viz and the addition of a blog was John Jones's idea. We revamped the site and added the blog in the spring while both he and I were working as the visual rhetoric developers for UT's CWRL. John was recently selected to serve as a CWRL Assistant Director, which is a two year position. He will continue to contribute to the blog, but his duties as an AD may limit those contributions. I will continue to serve as a visual rhetoric developer for the next year. Here's what you can expect to see on Viz over the course of that next year. 1) We will continue to add theory articles to the site. 2) We will continue to add assignments and bibliographic entries to the site. 3) The blog will get bigger and better. 4) We will add blog contributors and add a section to the site that will include brief bios on each contributor. 5) We will try to upload a non-copyrighted version of the visual rhetoric PowerPoint presentation we developed for use in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K/S classes last year, including the infamous Facebook Ambush. So, at a minimum these are the additions we're hoping to making to the site over the next year.

Dartmouth has a very interesting website I just discovered that documents the manipulation of photos with examples spanning photography's history. The site is well worth checking out. Many of the examples provided touch on sensitive issues, making them potentially rich for an in-class discussion of what's at stake (rhetorically, politically, journalistically, historically) when photos are manipulated by photographers, news editors or political leaders.