viz. - government

Violent Encounters

Laura Thain — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:39:42 +0000

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.]

What appears here is a somewhat experimental exercise in assembling and reading images of violence and gore. The images below all represent some intersection of sport, violence, and speculative practice. Let me explain why I’ve picked them.

Image Credit: Tumblr

Sporting events are ritualized violence.

Sporting events contain and set limits on the violent impulses of society, translating violence into spectacle for mass consumption and participation. It is for this reason that when violence occurs outside of the set script of the sporting event, the results are often traumatic for both the participants and the audience. Non-scripted displays of violence bring attention to the unstable nature of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” displays of violence. They also cause us to question the ethics of our consumption of violence by juxtaposing structural and non-structural violence; the pleasure of one is interrupted by the horror of another when we witness violence on the playing field.

Let’s look at an example of unscripted violence before the age of the internet:

The video above shows goaltender Clint Malarchuk during a 1989 Sabres game against the St Louis Blues. In a freak accident, the Blues’ right wing slashes Malarchuk’s throat with his skate, severing his jugular vein and very nearly killing him.

Note that the announcers demand the camera pan away from the accident and immediately begin to play a radio ad for Buick over the noice of the crowd’s reaction. Those present in the stands witnessed “many spectators physically sickened by the sight [of Malarchuk’s injury]. 11 fans fainted, 2 more suffered heart attacks and 3 players vomited on the ice.”

Present-day broadcast media is far less likely to pan away from injury in this manner. Kevin Ware’s NCAA March Madness injury, for instance, was replayed several times as they carried Ware away in a stretcher. How can we account for the dramatic difference in the way violence is portrayed and mediated now?

Speculative practice can help assuage anxiety about the unstable line between scripted and non-scripted violence.

When audiences engage in speculative practice about violence that occurs outside the realm of accepted social practice, they are asserting their own boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate engagements in violent behavior. In this way, speculative practice can help create a crowd-sourced discursive boundary where institutional boundaries fail—that is, these institutional boundaries are either inadequate or are subverted by violent offenders.

Speculative practice in response to violence is multi-faceted; it can pursue a variety of solutions to the breach of the code of institutionalized violence.

Tactical approaches can seek to bring violent offenders to justice, but they just as often can seek to levy judgment and punishment independent of institutional authority (i.e. vigilantism). Speculative practice is not, however, always tactical. Speculative practice can happen in sustained, maintained alternative media outlets (reddit, 4chan, conspiracy theory hubs, etc.). Often, speculation serves as a tool to process trauma among online communities that have established relationships with each other (reddit), although it can also happen in settings in which users operate in anonymity (4chan).

With these three principles in mind, let’s turn first to the case of Kevin Ware, the Louisville guard who suffered a dramatic compound leg fracture during March Madness.

Note, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the repeated replay of the injury, as well as the announcer’s focus on the absolute horror of Ware’s Louisville teammates. Spectators reported seeing his teammates vomit and other audience members lose consciousness at the sight of Ware’s injury.

Image Source: Imgur

High-resolution pictures of Ware’s injury were posted to Reddit immediately after Ware sustained his injury, and in a 2,000 long comment chain, redditors weighed in on the injury.

The top-ranked comments on Reddit regarding Ware’s injury were, strangely, not the ones that relished/disgusted in the gore of the injury. Instead, the top comments speculated on Ware’s medical prognosis. Redditors with a wide variety of medical experience made predictions about Ware’s ability to play again, why the wound bled so little, how the wound might be best healed, etc. Commentors also praised Ware for remaining stoic—for “performing” away the injury.

Though the image was clearly posted and became viral because of its gruesome nature, we can see from the example of Reddit that the audience’s speculation attempted to “heal” the wound discursively. The practice of speculation also helps us understand the extreme viral interest in and disgust about Ware’s wound as somehow reflective of a hierarchy of trauma. In general, as exhibited in the case of Ware, twisted or maimed bodies, especially limb injuries, rank higher on the gore scale than mere blood, head injuries, or dead bodies. Why? Because while we might reconstruct a maimed limb with speculative practice—be disturbed by its “inside out nature,” but comforted by the ability to right the inversion—we cannot repair blood spilt or life lost. The horror of seeing a body disarticulated from itself is more immediate but less final than a whole body stripped not of limbs but of life.

The extreme reaction to a Ware’s ghastly injury resembled a similar discussion on Reddit about the following victim of the Boston Marathon bombings:

Image Credit: Imgur

The disarticulation of this man’s legs became the most viewed and commented on image from the carnage following the bombing. And although photos in the same series (also posted to the same /wtf/ board on Reddit as the Ware photos) capture dead or nearly dead bodies, viewers find the spectre of dismemberment far more disturbing.

Image Source: Hug-a-Leg

Again, the top comments speculate on healing—they individualize each victim and speak of their chances for survival, the techniques they hope the paramedics used, the treatment they hope the victims are receiving, etc. In displaying medical knowledge (credible or otherwise), users attempt to, from their computer screens, heal the broken bodies of the victims of the bombing.

Speculative practice can also have very real effects on how a population deals with the aftermath of a trauma. On Thursday, 4chan’s /b/ board released detailed interpretations of FBI-released footage and claimed that the board on the whole had identified the “most likely” (that is, “99% confirmed) suspect. 4chan’s attempt at vigilante justice arguably created only more chaos (as parodied by The Onion here) and, despite claims of 99% accuracy, it took only 24 hours for the /b/ board’s claims to be disproved.

Perhaps I can end by suggesting that 4chan’s speculative practice may demonstrate an important issue for further discussion: that while a shift in the distance between violent act and viewer might result in different responses to that violence, the only way to decrease violent acts in society is to address candidly the disjunction between what constitutes state sponsored, socially-sanctioned violence and non-state sponsored, non-socially sanctioned violence.

Image Source: Designation Systems

Maybe we can start by ditching the drones.

Image Database Review: NOAA Photo Library

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:05:11 +0000

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: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The web interface for the NOAA Photo Library is presented to the user through a basic html webpage. The entry screen displays an Image of the Day. The NOAA Photo Library organizes some its holdings with a number of Collections. The Collections are linked in a frame to the left of the screen. The site also provides a simple search box that the user accesses through a link on a line of menu tabs that run below the "NOAA Photo Library" banner. The search function permits the user to input one or more terms, but it provides no advanced keyword searching, limiting or sorting functions. The search function is provided through Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Photo by Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Staff

The NOAA Photo Library contains many images related to oceanic and atmospheric research. Some of the Collections include "America's Coastlines," "Weather Service," "Fisheries," and "Coral Kingdom." There are also some interesting surprises among its holdings, including the "Treasures of the Library" collection which includes images from texts dating back to the 15th century relating to the study of the oceans and climate and a collection of historic prints on the "Histories and Methods of Fisheries" documenting American fisheries in the late 19th century.

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

While the search function is limited, many of the photos have extensive "category" tags, and those tags can be used in the search to locate related images. Many of the Collections include sub-categories organized in albums, providing another means to navigate the extensive number of images that reside on the database.

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

One valuable aspect of the NOAA collection and any collection of imagery authored by a federal agency is the lack of copyright attached to the works. According to section 105 of the Copyright Act, "Copyright protection...is not available for any work of the United States Government." Agencies often attach some limitations to the images they release. For example, NOAA suggests that their images should primarily be used for education purposes and require that their images be credited "to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. Where a photographer is noted, please credit the photographer and his/her affiliated organization as well." Other agencies, such as NASA expressly prohibit using images in a way that suggests NASA commercially endorses a product or service. Outside of such requirements, however, images may be used freely.

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

Another strength of the Library is its inclusion of higher resolution images for many of the photos. In some cases, the original photos themselves were not high resolution images, so the higher resolution images provided on the website are of limited use, but for other images, such as photos of the historic book plates and more recent nature photography, the image quality is quite high.

Representing a Revolution in Government and Medicine -- Unchaining the Insane

Ty Alyea — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of European physicians began to doubt the efficacy and morality of then-dominant methods of incarcerating the mentally ill--namely, the extensive use of chains and physical punishments to keep patients subdued, and, more generally, an emphasis upon containment rather than treatment. Additionally, on an institutional level, the asylums of France were objects of much suspicion; in the ancien regime, after all, any citizen might be one lettre de cachet away from imprisonment. In this environment, Pinel, along with several other French asylum directors, began a policy which tended to remove chains from non-violent prisoners and begin a new form of therapy called "moral treatment" in the second half of the 1790's. Though space limitations prohibit me from going into too much detail here, it should be mentioned that the "moral" treatment was based on a belief that madness--previously regarded as a totalizing condition that justified perpetual separation from society--was frequently only an imbalance in the mind that could could be realigned by various forms of therapy. As the years wore on and the lore surrounding Pinel grew, he frequently was portrayed as a single-handed avatar of benificent Revolutionary Republicanism.

Charles Louise-Muller's commemoration of the event,"Pinel Orders the Chains Removed From the Insane at Bicêtre" (pictured at the top of this blog post) was completed in 1849--near the dawn and collapse of the short-lived Second French Republic. As we can quickly notice, Pinel, who by most accounts, wasn't present when this kind of chain-removal took place, takes on a heroic pose here, dominating the center of the action amidst a band of lightness which separates him from the leagues of drab, darkened clusters of patients that line the sides of the image--almost as if he is parting a sea of madness. At the same time, the dominant colors of the image befit the flag of the Revolution: red, white, and blue. While several of the patients look at their newly free hands in shock, we also notice them looking to their savior--watching what he will do next. Largely docile, the patients accept the enlightened physician's gift of freedom and his authority.

Image Credit: Archives of General Psychiatry

Our next image is Tony Robert-Fleury's "Pinel Délivrant les aliénées," or "Pinel Delivering the insane." Painted in 1878--three year's into the third French republic--the image likewise returns to the liberatory power of the physician and the patients' debt to their liberator. In this case, however, the scene is the women's hospital of Salpêtrière, and Pinel is off-center, advising the manumission of a young, scantily clad, woman in white. As with the previous picture, we see a docile group of unfettered patients on the left hand side of the image looking calmly at the scene, and one of the women is actually kissing Pinel's hand while he stoically does his business. The women on the right, prostrate and languid, await their hoped-for freedom. Far in the background, meanwhile, we see two women moving as they please.

But ultimately, the woman in the center commands the most attention in this image, for she is both visually striking and the center of Pinel's attention as well. Susan A. Hawes of Antioch College argues that the female patient who takes center stage "assumes a position which suggests her unreason, her vulnerability to patrirarchal reason, and the taming of her dangerous sexuality." While the link portrayed here between sexual wantonness and madness is by no means a new one, Hawes points out that it became increasingly important "in this context of morally righteous 'humane' treatments." In this way, then, these images, which were likely comissioned to reinscribe revolutionary era values into France's later republican contexts, bear out Michel Foucault's claim that we should see Pinel's work as emblematic of a general shift in discipline and governmentality toward more discretely professsionalized forms.

Iranian Nuclear Facility Photo & Interpretation

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:30:08 +0000

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.

One Way to See the State

Brett Ommen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:30:30 +0000

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.

In my visual citizenship course last year, the students spent plenty of time talking about the images of state power. Flags, monuments, buildings all serve as powerful reminders of the relationship between citizens and authority. But as I discovered while walking yesterday, the most powerful markers of the state are likely the ones we have casually internalized as the routine images of our everyday lives. I wonder if this isn’t true of visual images generally: that the images we focus on with great attention are not nearly as important as the images we process and dismiss with great ease. When we process visual images with the swiftness of the glance, it may not necessarily mean we are inattentive or dismissive. We may actually be relying on an internalized reading strategy that is predicated on a particular relationship to power. Glancing, under this treatment, suggests a great deal of the rhetorical force of an image can be concealed in its ability to be processed quickly instead of inviting deep contemplation. And this image shows that sometimes it only takes a flippant bit of graffiti to uncover some of the more substantive operations that are implied by the visual markers of our everyday lives.

Of course, the stakes of this particular concealment aren’t terribly disconcerting. I don’t mind that obedience to the state means I don’t have to dodge other cars as I go down the road. And the concealment isn’t terribly tricky in this case either. Most of us would easily identify that the source of street signs is the government. But it still took the little bit of graffiti to spark even this minor bit of contemplation (for me at least—if other readers of Viz. contemplate their relationship to state power every time they encounter public signage, consider me duly impressed, and sympathetic for how overwhelming a drive to the grocery store must be).