viz.

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

Illustration of Edison's original phonograph from Scientific American in 1877.

Between the visual origins of the phonograph and a robust consumer market centered on record labels, there was a period of time during which the invention had to establish its own utility. According to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, utility always comes after the act of invention:

The link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things, and objects are the first artifacts): backward. (96)

Grooves from the original phonograph recording, reproduced in Scientific American in 1877.

Most of us do not process audio recordings in a vacuum. There is a visual dimension to our aural world. Although, sadly, liner notes are impoverished in the digital realm (although not absolutely or irrevocably so), we still have a world of visual information when navigating sound in digital spaces. Whether digital or analog, sights and sounds coevolve. This may sound overly simplistic, but just under the surface, things get complex. When you drill down into the relationship between audio recording and its associated visual media, a complex ecosystem of delivery technologies, mechanical inventions, distribution channels, and marketing efforts emerges. We might begin to explore this complexity by looking at some artifacts. Fortunately, the recording industry is an artifact-generating machine.

(Image credit: Image capture of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece from Google Earth)

A fellow graduate student recently mentioned to me that his rhetoric professor had used Google Maps to show classical Athens to the class.  He told me, “I kept thinking how much cooler it would have been if we were looking at it in Google Earth, walking around down there in street view.”

It’s true.  As shown above, a street view of the Acropolis is, indeed, pretty cool.  There is a simple and undeniable “wow” factor about flying to and viewing sites in Google Earth.  But it’s been my contention throughout these blogs that the use of the Google Earth technology can go beyond the “that’s so cool” factor and can actually enhance and expand composition pedagogies. 

(Image Credit: Google LitTrips)

As I’ve been previewing Google Earth educational applications on the web, I’ve noticed that while many disciplines (science, geography, history) are using Google Earth to engage students and invite them to create within the software, applications for the English classroom (at least those that are featured and discussed on the web) overwhelmingly take the form of teacher-made presentations.  I imagine that this tendency speaks to an ongoing conservatism about the design of writing assignments, a desire to retain the five-page paper as the product of the literature and writing classroom. 

In the fall of 2008 Viz. contributor Nate Kreuter interviewed Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaties about their book No Caption Needed and their blog of the same name. Here is the transcript of that interview.

* * *

I recently incorporated the Garry Winogrand photo below into an in-class writing exercise. The exercise is essentially the same as one that I came up with when helping Brooks Landon teach his Prose Style course at the University of Iowa a few years ago. Keep reading to learn more about the writing exercise.

I bring a photo in to class, usually one that depicts something weird, something that probably has a story behind it but that doesn't make that story explicit. I project the photo and don't tell the students a word about it, not when it was taken, by whom, nothing. Then the students have to write about the photo. It's a creative assignment and in this case I was trying to get them to think about form. Specifically, after a workshop on the subject in the prior class, I was asking them to write "cumulative" sentences. Cumulative sentences, for those of you who aren't prose style junkies, are described in Francis Christensen's essay "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." So, the photo was just a prompt to get the students writing in a new mode that we had been working on. The exercise went very well and my students generated some whacky, but stylistically adventurous, prose. If I get their permission, I will post some of their writings in the comments soon.