viz.

Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness.  Image Credit: Yahoo Sports

I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing.  In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon. 

As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go.  It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive.  [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers.  Discretion is advised.]

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traces its roots back to the oldest scientific agency in the United States: the Survey of the Coast established in 1807. Today's agency has a much broader purview, providing forecasts for the National Weather Service, maintaining orbiting satellites to monitor the Earth's climate, managing the nation's fisheries, and conducting scientific research. The database containing the photographic documentation of these varied activities provides the subject of this week's review.

                                                                                   Image Credit: Archives of General Pyschiatry

When historians seek gathering metaphors to describe the French Revolution--with its violent upheavals, experiments in re-arranging calendar time, and, of course, the demands for liberty and equality that underwrote these events--they rarely describe the atmosphere or environment of the period as particularly stable or "sane." And yet the work of Philippe Pinel--a progressive French physician who helped lay the groundwork for a major shift in mental health treatment--has been nonetheless remembered as a figurative crystallization of the Revolution's lofty, humanist goals--goals which in turn influenced the trajectory of ninenteenth century psychiatry. Today, I seek to briefly explore how 19th century visual re-enactments of Pinel's participation in a highly mythicized (and mostly apocryphyl) event--a ritualized "unchaining" of the captive patients-- were used to remind French citizens of the virtues of republican government during times of national upheaval.

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. 

I live on a one way street so I’ve always viewed the “One Way” signs in my neighborhood as good information for motorists and visitors. They are excellent reminders to people that cars should only face east on Washington Street. But this altered image (actually from one block over on Madison Street, where cars travel west) reminds us that street signs are not merely about expressing information about traffic patterns; they are also the banal markers that inform us about the presence of the state’s authority.