viz.

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.

When teaching a rhetoric course, I love to use the Apple Commercials to show my students an example of real-world ethos.

Slate has posted a slide show featuring functional architecture, emphasizing the function and versatility of buildings over Gehry-esque flashiness. This article from Good Magazine makes a similar point.

Earlier this week, my lunch was liberated from the refrigerator in the grad-student lounge. After I sent a gently scolding email to our listserve, my friend pointed me to passiveaggressivenotes.com, where readers submit exchanges between themselves and coworkers, roommates, and strangers when conflict arose. (more below the fold)

I’ve spent the past hour trying to think of an educational or theoretical reason for posting this link, but I can’t come up with anything. Here it is anyway.

Following our earlier discussions about the intersection of science, art, and rhetoric, I bring you the o-chem tattoo. I think the tattoo not only promotes science as a field of visual representation but is also among a growing corpus of "geek" tattoos. These tattoos frustrate the long standing assumption that body art and body modification is an unintellectual enterprise, one in which you tear at, pervert or destroy the body. In this way, these tattoos also work against the mind/body split, demonstrating how thought is not separate from but also occurs on and through the body.

Check out the following link to see a group of geek tattoos at ModBlog

Building off of John's blog about naval barracks, I offer another form of visual rhetoric made possible by the aerial shot:

They have corn in Phoenix?

Manohla Dargis just published her NYT review of Lake of Fire, a new documentary directed by Tony Kaye about the "abortion wars" in the U.S. (Kaye is probably most famous as the director of American History X.) Apparently, Kaye has been making this film for over sixteen years, and the duration of his effort may show in the length of the film, which clocks in at 152 minutes.