viz. - visual argument

A Window in Time: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion"

Ty Alyea — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center Photo by Anthony Maddaloni

Near the sorth-eastern quadrant of the Harry Ransom Center is a series of images of a jockey throttling a racehorse: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion." While these images may seem inconspicuous juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange's eminently recognizable photographs, their ability to bear witness to a horse's motion was both evidence of an event and a monumental event in itself. The product of two men's obsessions, "Horse in Motion" is both a fascinating example of a visual argument and a foundational episode in the history of motion pictures.

Leland Stanford (left) and Eadweard Muybridge (right) - Image Credit: Wikipedia

As the story goes, Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate who had just helped complete the transcontinental railroad, made a $25,000 bet with a Dr. John D. Isaac about whether there was a moment in a horse's gallop when all four hooves were off the ground. Although the bet never actually did take place, the question at the center of this mythical bet stands in for a hotly-debated question in racing circles. Many observers of horses on the track held to the assertion that a horse would definitely collapse if all of the hooves were to leave the ground at once. Stanford and several others, however, held to the belief that the horse would momentarily be "unsupported transit"--careening through the air with the force of their momentum. Advocates of these theories, however, were at a stalemate because, as Mitchell Leslie points out, "the human eye couldn't pick out enough detail to resolve the issue."

Seeking to put this question to the test and to develop technologies that could help him train and breed better horses, Stanford contacted Eadweard Maybridge, an eccentric but accomplished photographer who was living in San Francisco, to develop a scheme for photographing the horse's gallop in 1872. There was a slight delay, however: in 1874, Muybridge, who had been likened by his contemporaries to a blend between Walt Whitman and King Lear, pled insanity for killing a drama critic who had cuckolded him. With Stanford's help, however, he was found to be both sane an justified. With that little obstacle overcome, Muybridge came up with an intricate scheme that would prove to be a watershed moment in the history of film.

Image by Nigel Holmes: Stanford Alumni Magazine

In July of 1877 and June of 1878, Muybridge set up complicated photographic rigs to capture images of Stanford's horses at racetracks in San Francisco and Palo Alto. As the image above demonstrates, Muybridge laid out a series of cameras that were parallel to a horse's path. And as the horse would run across the course, it would set off a series of tripwires that would set off these cameras. He also succeeded in developing a method of capturing an image with a shutter speed of less than a hundredth of a second--a technique that would assure a crisp image of the horse's movement. By capturing this series of images at split-second speed, he was able to definitively prove that horses did indeed fly through the air mid-gallop.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Using a spinning Zoopraxiscope--a device that Muybridge invented--the photographer and inventor was able to mass-produce his discovery, presenting the series of images on a disc that was meant to spin like a record. A viewer who kept her eye on the bottom image would get an illusion of motion like this:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Fifteen years after capturing these iconic images, Muybridge set up an exhibit in the 1893 World's Fair that shared his discoveries to an even wider range of spectators. Brian Clegg, author of The Man Who Stopped Time, has called this the first commercial movie theater!

The Power of Sympathy: Perspective Shifting, Visual Argumentation, and the Gay Marriage Debate

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:16:50 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

I was delighted to hear that the Washington State Senate passed a bill Wednesday legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. The Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has been closely following the bill’s progress for several weeks, not only liveblogging the debate but also posting numerous excellent speeches on behalf of the bill. Eli Sanders highlighted Republican Senator Cheryl Pflug’s speech as the best of the night, which she ended with the following words:

“And so I commend this bill to you today because it is part of our struggle to recognize that everybody, whether they look like us or believe like us, has an opportunity—should have an opportunity to enjoy those personal freedoms we hold dear.”

The essential argument Pflug makes here—that gay citizens should enjoy rights equal to those of heterosexuals—relies on straight individuals being brought to recognize their commonality with gays. Harvey Milk long ago made this argument when he urged gays to come out, to represent themselves publicly as gay to “destroy the lies and distortions.” More recently, the Australian “independent, grass-roots community advocacy organization” GetUp! posted an ad on YouTube on behalf of same-sex marriage in that country. This beautiful, moving ad works because its visuals work in concert with old-school persuasive tools.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The distinguished philosopher (and originally professor of logic at Glasgow) Adam Smith briefly explains persuasion in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus:

“To approve of another man’s opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it.”

In other words, effective argumentation exists when two individuals share common opinions and the arguments used by one speaker are found convincing by both of them. This doesn’t quite work as the 1759 version of How to Win Friends and Influence People because Smith doesn’t explain what arguments are equally efficacious for you and your audience, but he does present a non-agonistic tool for persuasion: sympathy.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Sympathy, as Smith defines it, “may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (5). The purpose of sympathy is to bring individuals together in mutual understanding. While we cannot literally feel the emotions of others, Smith explains that we can use our imaginations to bridge the gap:

“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensation, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” (2)

Smith may seem to be a bit-outdated by about 250 years, but recent studies in cognitive science and social psychology offer some evidence for his views. Studies in affect like Teresa Brennan’s suggest that emotions can travel between individuals within social environments; more relevant, however, is the formulation by cognitive scientists like Alvin Goldman of “perspective shifting,” which is a state in which we “imagin[e] being in that other person’s position, and thus us[e] our imagined thoughts and feelings and decisions to determine what the other will think and feel and decide” (Coplan and Goldie xxxiii). In short, what the GetUp! ad does is to use visuals to create a moment of perspective shifting; watching the ad here will give you a sense of how this works

The ad notably puts the viewer right in the middle of a romantic comedy—there’s a meet-cute on a boat where a handsome man named Paul gives the viewer his number, and then the progress of the relationship follows all the way through fun in the sun, domestic disputes, personal tragedies, all the way to a marriage proposal. The ad beautifully subverts the Hollywood script, however, when the camera turns and reveals that the viewer has not been looking from the perspective of a straight woman, but a gay man.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, the ad does not deal in the extraordinary. While there are breathtaking views of riding on boats and rollercoasters, most of what is shown is extremely banal: grocery shopping, moving furniture, meeting parents, and even fights about driving directions. Yet it uses poignant images like a hand on a shoulder to invite the viewer to think about the experience of sympathizing with a partner losing his mother. These gestures taken out of any context read as truly loving, and the viewer is brought to see that this relationship, no matter the parties involved, is like any other romantic partnership.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In 2010 the New York Times reported on a study conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “that looked at the reasons behind society's evolving tolerance for gay people. It found that the reason cited most frequently by people who reported having more favorable views—by far—was knowing someone who is gay.” By using these images, GetUp! attempts to reach out to individuals who may not know a gay or lesbian person by inviting them to place themselves in the position of a gay or lesbian individual. The building violins at the ad’s end, in which the camera’s perspective performs the critical shift, create the kairotic moment that the only words in the ad echo: “It’s time. End marriage discrimination.” Hopefully, more ads like this one will bring that time closer.

Xtranormal in the Classroom

Cate Blouke — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:55:32 +0000

Image Credit: Adriana Cervantes, created as final presentation for my RHE 306 class

Particularly in technology-based classrooms like we have here in the DWRL, instructors are always looking for new ways to teach students non-traditional forms of writing. A few weeks back, Ashley wrote a viz. post about the on-line animation program, Xtranormal, whose motto is “if you can type, you can make movies.” Her post inspired/challenged me to give it a try with my students. It's extremely user-friendly, and we were able to create animations in a single class period. Users enter text, and the program animates the dialogue for them. Above and after the jump are examples of my students' work, and I'll talk more about pedagogical value of the program.

In addition to viz., the DWRL hosts Blogging Pedagogy, a blog that each of the instructors contribute to each semester. I already blogged there about my first classroom experience with Xtranormal, and you can view that post here. It explains the premise behind the video below. To avoid repeating myself, I'd like to use this viz. post to approach the program from a more theoretical standpoint.

In his seminal work, Understanding Comics, cartoon theorist Scott McCloud posits that “cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing.” He argues that cartoons are uniquely poised to amplify arguments through simplification. He explains that the less representational the figure, the more likely we are to identify with it, and this abstraction makes viewers more receptive to the message – less apt to focus on who is saying than what is said. This can be particularly useful with students - asking them to focus more on the argument itself than the person making the argument.

Image credit: Loraine Ng and Leticia Garcia, created in class

As you've probably noticed, because Xtranormal uses mechanized and predetermined voices for the characters, the emphasis can end up on the wrong syllable, and the resulting animation often makes familiar language sound foreign. In theories of performance, intentional distancing (or alienation), prevents audiences from identifying too closely with characters, and consequently encourages more critical observation. Here, this distancing can be useful to call attention to the soundness of an argument, especially because we have to listen carefully to follow what the characters are saying.

This combination of identification and alienation produced by Xtranormal animations is often both funny and informative. As Megan pointed out in her viz. post about the TSA, Xtranormal can potentially be used to depersonalize sensitive or inflammatory issues. It also encourages students to translate arguments across media, and to think critically about the substance of arguments without focusing so closely on the players involved. And while, like Megan, I find the robotic voices particularly irritating after about 2 minutes, my students loved the exercise.

"Cinematic Sound" and "Acoustic Portraits": DJ Spooky's Art

noelradley — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:58:17 +0000

Image Credit: DJ Spooky, "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," 2008

Via Robert Miller Gallery H/T Sean McCarthy

Last year, at about this time, I was writing my very first viz. blog post. In 2009, the series of photographs that had caught my attention were about ice fishing in the northern United States. The ice of the northern lakes, it seemed, had begun to diminish. New York-based photographer Maureen Drennan had been featured in the Times DotEarth Blog for the work of photos she called Thin Ice. I loved Maureen's shots of the fishing shacks and the people there, because they seemed potentially transformative, depicting the intimate textures of human life affected by climate change. My first post this year again returns to imagery of ice. Over dinner this weekend, one of my friends described DJ Spooky's latest performances on Antarctica, replete, he said, with stunning images. (The penguins above do have a point, after all. See after the break).

Image Credit: Screenshot of DJ Spooky performing Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

The iconic, militarized penguins with bomber planes above them in formation are part of a series of ink jet posters by Spooky, who visited Antarctica in 2007 and returned to create rich multi-media formats about the world's largest, and most threatened, mass of ice. One part of the project was recording and then remixing the sounds of ice, penguins, artic waves, etc. Other parts of the project included creating original art work, collaging Getty images of Antarctica, sampling 'ephemera' of Artic explorers, and revisiting a 20th century symphony on Antarctica, complete with a collaboration with a pianist, cellist, and violinist. Many who have heard of D.J. Spooky (aka Paul Miller) associate him with innovative, genre-bending turn-tabling, much of which he creates in collaboration with heavy hitters in a variety of musical fields, such as jazz and hip hop. Spooky has been performing, writing, and recording music since the 1990’s. But increasingly Spooky has become known for creations that stretch beyond the work of acoustics (his initial emphasis and the origin of the first part of his moniker“DJ”); he also becoming more widely recognized for his artistic multi-media formats and, as well, for scholarly writings.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

In October—sponsored by the Digital Writing and Research Lab and others here at UT-Austin—Spooky will be giving one of the large scale performances he has become known for as of late. The DWRL and Spooky have dubbed it a “Rip, Mix, Burn” event, a lecture that will highlight Spooky’s multi-media work, as well as his latest academic writing. Sound UnBound, a 2008 imprint of MIT features Spooky as editor with multitude of voices on sound, intellectual property, and the economics of 21st century media. The themes of Spooky's late work resonate with those of us invested in theorizing media, and also in those of us invested in crossing disciplines. Like us, Spooky wants the disciplines to start talking to each other.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

'DJ Spooky on Secret Song

Spooky's work attempts to blur the supposed boundaries between art and economics, for example. As he says in the interview below on Secret Song, an album that was a work of film and music, "The album was inspired by philosophers, economists, and, above all, a will to bring them all together.” Spooky's art itself is premised on the "juxtaposition of radically different materials." I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from the Secret Song interview, a quote that justifies writing about a musician on my first viz. post of the year: “Art and music are compellingly connected," Spooky said."There is nothing that separates them. Nothing[...]The world is a complex and compellingly linked place.” '

Illustrative Example: The Mimetics of Visual and Text

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:16:17 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Atlantic

Every time I sit down to write a blog post for viz, I struggle not only to think up exciting titles but to find striking visuals to decorate my posts. As we all know, the picture that illustrates the story plays a role in helping to draw meaning from the text. The above picture from The Atlantic shows a good relationship between the two: the sign in the foreground looms ominously over the house to stress the anxious idea implied by the headline “Foreclosure Sales Trap.” However, there are times when the visuals work to imply something that the text doesn’t warrant.

Recently, my friend Jillian Sayre drew my attention to a tweet from Rachel Maddow about a story on Politico:

Obama health proposal is 11 pages long. Politico story on it uses a photo of a 12 inch tall stack of paper.

When you pull up the story on Politico, entitled “President Obama releases health reform proposal,” the image that decorates the side is a triptych where Obama is at the center, on the right side you have a doctor holding up a sign advocating “Doctors for a Public Option,” and on the left you have a picture of a large stack of papers, meant to signify the bill. However, the article directly links to the 11 page proposal at the top of the screen—why would Politico deliberately use that stack of paper to illustrate the idea of the “health reform proposal,” especially if they’re providing the proposal for their audience to read? This may be a part of telling a larger narrative about government: that it’s complicated, the bills are too long, and readers need news organizations like Politico to fill in the gaps.

Image Credit: Politico

H/T: Jillian Sayre

However, as Tristram Shandy points out, sometimes the visual is meant to stand in for the text, to say what the text cannot say. In the case of the Politico story, the gap in meaning might be a political message that the picture implies. In Betsy McCaughey’s interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she brought a copy of the health care bill in a binder to use the visual of the bill to condemn it, just as her significant glances at the camera were meant to reflect to the audience the skepticism and doubt of Washington that she seemed to feel. Too bad her answers to Stewart’s questions were less than convincing.

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In thinking about this topic, however, I found an interesting study done in The Atlantic Journal of Communication that sought “to examine the effects of news photo presence and role-congruency in news stories of Hillary Clinton on reader interest and memory.” Its conclusion, according to the abstract, was that “mere presence of a photo meant the story would be ranked as more interesting, but photo presence and role-congruency with the story did not affect recall of story ideas.” While visuals do have the power to make arguments, authors Andrew Mendelson and Esther Thorson suggest, they don’t override an audience’s comprehension of the actual context of the text. Maybe, then, Maddow’s critical reading skills aren’t unique and Politico instead merely intended to draw attention more than make an argument. However, considering the effectiveness of visual arguments in many media, I wonder how readers might be influenced by such arguments, even as they separate them from the text, especially as those readers are receptive to those arguments before hearing them.

Mapping the Eighteenth Century: A Report from CSECS

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:03:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy. (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans. Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture: Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts. What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

As explained by Allison Muri, both the panel’s chair and the website's designer, The Grub Street Project’s goal “is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London.” The About the Project page also notes that

High-resolution “zoomable” maps from 18th-century prints associated with a database of bibliographical and topographical data, trades indexes, and literary texts afford new possibilities for not only seeing the relationships between trades, book production, and dissemination of ideas, but also for seeing the topographies of literary imagination.

As the incredibly topical (and topographical) texts of the early eighteenth-century require some previous processing for undergraduate students to understand the references, I was delighted to see how well The Grub Street Project works to help visualize these texts in intriguing ways. (I most enjoyed Kurt Kruger’s paper on “Gentleman and Topography in Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763,” and thought that his map of Boswell’s first month in London well represented how Boswell topographically conceives of gentlemanliness.)

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

I also enjoyed how this panel raised interesting questions about the pedagogical purposes of visual material not only in explaining the eighteenth-century, but also in making arguments about the eighteenth-century to students and scholars alike. While I know that our own distinguished Sean McCarthy has led the way in showing how Google Maps can work in the writing classroom, visual data can often be difficult for certain kinds of students to interpret, and its conclusions can sometimes seem “obvious,” for better or worse. As I’ve been thinking this week about Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric for a class I’m taking with Trish Roberts-Miller, I wonder if there’s something about visual arguments that may appeal to the universal audience, but that are similarly difficult to understand as constructed, just as rhetors can forget that the universal audience itself is a rhetorical product. Our language encodes the value of visuals in such maxims as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but how are we supposed to interpret that picture? And what safeguards are there to prevent misinterpretation? As we move into explicitly teaching digital literacies to students, however, these questions will help students to consider more carefully how they evaluate and analyze visuals as rhetorical objects.

At any rate, The Grub Street Project has great functionality and is very intuitive to use. In addition to things like UT’s eComma, I am beginning to visualize a literature classroom that integrates web materials fully.

Cover Art for The New Yorker's 'Money Issue'

noelradley — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:20:52 +0000

Image Credit: The New Yorker

H/T: Texas Performing Arts

This video is an interview with Francoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker, speaking about the multi-part cover of the Money Issue from this month, October 12, 2009. The 3-part cover begins with Dan Clowes, who created the image of a wealthy woman ordering a hamburger, which inspired Zohar Lazar's illustration of the woman carrying the fast food to her chaffeur-driven car, and then, finally, Mark Ulriksen's idea of depicting a poodle being fed the burger. Ulriksen notes that by his ending image, "You realize that some things never change for certain people."

Image Credit: Dan Clowes for The New Yorker

Via The New Yorker

The three illustrators as Mouly says, "give multiple points of view," the second two illustrations acting as points of departure from the initial image. The interesting thing is that this is the first time that the magazine has done a multi-part cover. The difference in seeing Clowes' image in isolation, as opposed to seeing the developing argument, points out the way magazine covers usually make more-or-less a singular claim, acting as a larger representative symbol for the texts that will follow. But the unusual 3-fold sequence here allows for interventions on the predominant signifier. In the video, Clowes, Lazar, and Ulriksen give their comments, as well as Mouly's narration. Mouly has a previous book on the subject of cover art called Covering the New Yorker: Cutting Edge Covers from a Literary Institution.

Image Credit: Zohar Lazar for The New Yorker

Via Zohar Lazar

I was especially drawn to Mouly (probably because of her lovely accent) but also because of the way she has surfaced her work areas with copious imagery from the previous issues but also of all kinds. Along with the video of her next to the walls of cover art from the last century, I got the sense that The New Yorker is whole visual universe unto itself. Nothing loosey-goosey about the iconography here; these are highly situated, self-conscious aesthetic choices.You can search the archives for the monthly covers of The New Yorker.

Ethics in the Abortion Debate

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:30:23 +0000

Credit: New York Times

H/T: Jezebel

I found an interesting article posted on Jezebel today about a New York Times story, with an accompanying video report, about anti-abortion protestors rallying together after the death of an anti-abortion activist, James Pouillon, in Michigan last month. The article specifically discusses the ethics of using such images within the debate, which is a particularly vexed question.

I happened to find Nate’s blog on here from February when several billboards were displayed in front of Gregory Gym with graphic pictures of fetuses. I also remember seeing such images, and feeling that their presentation seemed to lack enough context for me to judge whether or not the photos were credible evidence of the claim that they attempted to present: namely, that since fetuses look human, they are humans, and so that ending their lives via abortion is murder.

What impressed me in the article was the interview with Monica Migliorino Miller, the professor whose photographs are featured in the Times’ photo review. She claims in producing her images, she has “precisely documented each fetus she photographed, by date, location and — with the help of a doctor — gestational age.” It’s then important to note that all of the photographs presented by the NYT in their review are all of fetuses at least fourteen weeks or older, almost three months along, and thus are more fully formed than others earlier in the first trimester. What isn’t addressed is how the fetuses were obtained for her to photograph in the first place: does the mother have the right to decide whether or not her fetus should or could be so photographed?

Like Nate, I’m not sure what role such photographs should or can play in an ethical debate about abortion. The more the photograph’s context is described, the more it can usefully contribute. However, as pointed out to me by my colleague Sarah Orem, such images threaten to preclude debate by claiming an authenticity that cannot be easily disputed. What might also make these images especially fraught is how the photographic lens in these cases seeks to penetrate the intimate interiors of a woman’s body. I know that Andi has already discussed the ethics of war photography, but these images seem to hold a different status. Photographs make claims to presented “reality” which many of the images on this blog itself seem to disprove. How much responsibility does a responsible rhetor have to take on in using and arguing against such images?

Love For The Ruins?

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:32:22 +0000

Image Credit: Vice Magazine

I couldn’t resist covering this piece that Tim brought to my attention. NPR did a segment covering the evolving phenomenon of “ruin porn” by interviewing a writer, Thomas Morton, who wrote an attack on this phenomenon for Vice Magazine. Morton argues against these images because he says they mislead audiences about the actual economic state of Detroit.

I think Morton makes a really interesting point about the nature of visual rhetoric, and how easily it can be abused, to his interviewer, Bob Garfield, in the NPR piece: “I think when you’re presented with a photo and then a little bit of description of it, the image stands so strongly that it’s almost hard to argue it; you’re throwing what seem like minor quibbles at this shot of utter desolation.” He’s specifically addressing photographers illustrating stories about contemporary urban blight with photos of buildings abandoned in the 1950s, but he also raises the larger ethics of photographing urban blight for aesthetic purposes.

When pictures like these from Vice Magazine, which are included in a story about abandoned schools in Detroit, work to argue for the reader to move beyond the pictures to agitate on behalf of Detroit’s schoolchildren, this seems to be non-exploitative. Morton points at articles and photo series like these from Time Magazine as examples of stories that edit out positive developments in favor of focusing on the bad. However, this isn't the only example of the phenomenon. Websites like Abandoned focus on ruined buildings exclusively for aesthetic purposes. What are the ethics of enjoying looking at ruins for the sake of looking at ruins?

I’m particularly interested in this question as a student of eighteenth-century British literature, as ruins came up again and again as a trope for arguments about lost religious values (focusing on ruined abbeys), and for arguments about rural redevelopment as discussed in Raymond Williams’ Country and the City (epitomized by Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem, “The Deserted Village”), but also as a trope for aesthetic enjoyment. Lord Elgin argued that he had the right to take the Elgin Marbles to Britain because Greece could not care for them appropriately, but this was at the service of cultural appropriation. Ruins seem to serve certain cultural purposes both in England and America today, but for what ends?

Is it still a protest?

erinhurt — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:05:11 +0000

How does the space in which protest art appears affect the ways in which people respond to it? Or, even, if they see it as a protest at all?

In my class the other day, we talked about protest art. Among other things (Shepard Fairey), we looked at anti-war peace protester Brian Haw. Haw has lived in a peace camp in Parliament Square in Britain since June 2, 2001, remaining at the site full time, leaving only for court appearances.

Over time he amassed a large collection of signage (over 600 signs) that took up considerable space in the area. However, after continuous struggles with the police over his right to be there (and their attempts to remove him), Haw finally applied for a permit and was approved, but only under the condition that his demonstration site did not exceed three meters in diameter.

But the story gets better. Mark Wallinger recreated Haws' signs in an exhibit called State Britain. The description on the Tate Gallery website reads:

Mark Wallinger has recreated peace campaigner Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest for a dramatic new installation at Tate Britain. Running along the full length of the Duveen Galleries, State Britain consists of a meticulous reconstruction of over 600 weather-beaten banners, photographs, peace flags and messages from well-wishers that have been amassed by Haw over the past five years.

Faithful in every detail, each section of Brian Haw’s peace camp from the makeshift tarpaulin shelter and tea-making area to the profusion of hand-painted placards and teddy bears wearing peace-slogan t-shirts has been painstakingly sourced and replicated for the display.

While the Tate website argues that "bringing a reconstruction of Haw’s protest before curtailment back into the public domain [...] raises challenging questions about issues of freedom of expression and the erosion of civil liberties in Britain today," I would argue that thinking about both of these visual collections raises questions about efficacy and intent. Do those who see this exhibit in the museum consider this a protest? Or do they view it more as something removed? My students argued for the latter concept, and I am tempted to agree with them. But, something should be said about Wallinger's project's ability to "save" Haw's artificats, which otherwise would be gone from the public eye. But can the exhibit still do the work that these signs did at Haw's camp?

You've never seen sports bras like these.

erinhurt — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:16:03 +0000

I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:

See the other two ads after the jump:

Here are the others:

For me, the blood on these women's faces has overtones of violence, especially domestic violence. Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that an advertising agency wouldn't be aware of these connotations.

This is what a feminist looks like

erinhurt — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:54:46 +0000

On Feministing the bloggers who write for the site have started vlogging (video blogging). These first vlogs feature several of the website's various writers explaining how they came to be involved with the site.

Watching these vlogs, what immediately came to mind for me was the difference between how I perceived these bloggers' written commentary and how I perceived the same bloggers in their videos. The very medium of the video blog seems to add a kind of uncertainty to what one is saying, especially when what's being said is done so informally. While my reaction to the vlogs doesn't necessarily affect how I view the website's written commentary, these video blogs do seem to undermine the assertiveness and confidence that characterizes the writing found on the website. This is not to knock the medium of the vlog - rather, I am interested in how those viewers and/or readers will react who are ambivalent to the site's core values (as opposed to those who come to the site already in agreement with its values). What kind of effect will this have?

God's Eye View

mkhaupt — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:53:14 +0000

Back in July, the Creative Review blog posted an entry regarding an art exhibit that imagines scenes from the bible as seen via Google Earth.

The entry's author quotes James Dive, one of the artists from the collective responsible for the work as saying, "As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.”

With that in mind, it's particularly interesting to read the comments on his entry, which range from head-scratching as to whether they got the time of day right for the crucifixion to a condemnation of "the ‘art’ of discrediting a trusted source like satellite imaging, with lies and deceit."

And here I was, thinking it was pretty cute to look up my address on Google Earth to see how bad my yard looked when the photo was taken! (Thanks to Jodi Egerton to alerting me to this topic.)