viz.

I just came across this nifty new feature from blogspot called "Blogger Play." Its designers describe Blogger Play as "a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!"

While it may not actually be as exciting as their exclamation point suggests, it's still pretty mesmerizing. Most of the photos are pretty mundane, lots of them are weird, and of course there are tons and tons of baby pictures.

“A Soviet Poster A Day” serves up images of Soviet propaganda posters with commentary. This site would be a great resource for anyone studying propagandistic images. Here’s an entry on the Five Year Plan:

Let's accomplish the plan of great deeds!
Klutsis G., 1930

Industrialization in Russia took off in 1929. It was based on a 5 year plan, which implied building of more than 1500 of industrial sites: factories, powerstations, mines, refineries. This was an ambitious plan, which was made even more impossible to carry out because of Joseph Stalin’s call out: “Five year plan in four years!” Nevertheless, the industrialization proved to be extremely successful with heavy industry output to increase 3 times in only 4 years. The zero-level unemployment level was reached in 1930. And although the first Five year plan was not implemented fully in time, during the second one Soviet Union surpassed all world countries except the USA in gross industry output. The country was turning from agriculture to industry as the main source of its power and wealth.

This poster was created by Gustav Klutsis - a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He was one of the apologists of photomontage technique, he managed to bring to an impressive level.

via boingboing

Also via boingboing is this list of satrical, photoshopped propaganda posters from Worth1000. Most are quite funny. (Warning: some of the posters are mildly not suitable for work.)

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

PikiWiki is a free wiki service that adds drag and drop functionality to collaboratively-edited pages. If you are planning on using a wiki in your visual rhetoric class, PikiWiki might be a good option.

When I teach writing, I like to occasionally give my students imitation exercises to point out the features of a particular text. Robot Chicken, Seth Green’s stop-motion-animation show, has provided a pretty funny video example of this practice (my favorite touch is when they bleep out the bad language). It would be interesting to assign this type of video exercise for students to familiarize them with video conventions.

See the video here.

If you are teaching comics at all this semester, you might be interested in Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography by Andrew Helfer, Steve Buccellato, and Joe Staton. Slate is serializing the entire text this week. Slate also serialized The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (it’s no longer available) this time last year.

UT’s First-Year Forum text for 2007–2008 will be Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. Yesterday I sat in on a seminar hosted by the DRW where Domino Perez discussed some of the background and context of the issues that the book engages.

One theme of the discussion was the influence of film on the Urrea’s prose, as well as how images of Latinos can both support and trouble Urrea’s arguments. In the wake of that discussion, I thought I would post links to some Latin-American and Border Studies visual resources for use by DRW instructors and anyone else who is teaching a class that deals with these fields.

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example: