viz. - video

Why Suspense is Better than Action: A Plea to Hollywood to Adopt Psychological Realism for Action Movies

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 19:15:02 +0000

Part I: Analysis of the Problem

What ails action cinema? Why, it is Hollywood’s obsession with visual effect, which derives from a misunderstanding about how emotion is connected to looking.

Hollywood has put all of its eggs into the basket of “scopophilia,” Freud’s term for the pleasure a person obtains from looking. Hollywood’s action movie-makers, in particular, aim to visually stun.

South Park - Michael Bay on Pinkbike

Courtesy South Park: Season 11: Episode 10 "Imaginationland" and Pinkbike.com

The problem with aiming to visually stun is that the price of its success quickly inflates. Like a drug, that which visually arrests fails to satisfy a second time. Film-makers must needs ratchet up the visuals, and indeed the last half-century of action cinema attests to a breakneck race to feed the addiction. Explosions, pictures of Earth from space, drooling monsters, time-lapse: the quiver of visual technique bursts at the seams, and yet one begins to feel that none of the arrows aims true.

Image Credit: Deep Impact (1998)

What is worse, there is no longer anywhere left to go. 3D held our attention for a moment, no doubt, but as only a technological solution, it fails to address the real problem. We are bored with action cinema. All the visuals in the world no longer do anything for us. We have seen enough!

Image Credit: Avatar (2009)

The real question -- and the one I am making a plea to Hollywood to reconsider -- is, What makes a sight arresting to a person? What visual information is capable of starting up in our bodies a feeling? Hollywood’s answer has been, for the most part, that which is big gets a response. The bigger the better. Their mistake has been to disregard how little we viewers are. In a word, the movies have gone big without retaining anything small, with the result that we do not really sense the bigness of even the biggest visual effects.

Add Action FX to your iPhone video; Image Credit: Bad Robot Interactive

This brings us, Hollywood, to the one and only step necessary to reinvigorate the action genre: adopt realism!

Action cinema cannot afford to disregard the claims of realism. What makes a situation exciting, gripping, scary, intense is the possibility that bad things could very easily happen to a person. American action cinema is filled with super-people, but people are really rather clumsy and ineffectual. When situations get tight, it’s scary because chance plays such an indomitable role in deciding the issue. There is only so much that a person is capable of. The most highly trained people who deal with “action” scenarios in real life will be the first to tell you that there is no such thing as super. There is only fortunate. One gives oneself the best chances by being disciplined and knowledgeable, and it can still very easily go terribly wrong.

Great action narrative recognizes the frailty and ineffectuality of human beings. What realism will do to make for arresting visuals is to scale them, an indispensable technique for the eliciting of an emotional response.

Image Credit: The Walking Dead (2010)

It is the vulnerability of the man on the horse in this screen shot from the popular AMC series The Walking Dead that scales for the viewer the magnitude of the cataclysm. Psychological realism is the reason for arresting visual effect.

Tune in next week for: An Objection is Entertained

The Decorah Eagles as Anthropomorphized Nuclear Family

ladysquires — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:39:02 +0000

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

(Video Credit: Raptor Resource Project, UStream)

Over the past few months, the Raptor Resource Project has been hosting this live "nest cam" feed of a pair of eagles in Decorah, IA. As of last week, the pair became the proud parents of three babies, and the drama of their incubating and hatching eggs has become a bit of an internet sensation. The project is part of a conservation effort directed toward monitoring and understanding the nesting habits of avian raptors (eagles, falcons, owls, etc.), maintaining nesting sites, and educating the public.

As you can imagine, the behavior of the human beings observing the birds on the interenet is, in many ways, almost as interesting as the behavior of the birds themselves. The Ustream site features a social media feed, and certain conventions have sprung up among people who discuss the birds on Facebook and Twitter. Inevitably, viewers refer to the male and female eagle as "Dad" and "Mom," and as Twisty Faster of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy has noted, viewers seem to be pretty quick to ascribe gendered behavior to them:

It is remarkable that human people can look at eagles — creatures that inhabit Volkswagen-sized piles of twigs 80′ up in trees, that lay eggs, that have no hair and no boobs, that eat raw squirrels, that can fly, for crying out loud, and that in pretty much every other respect that is germane to discourse on human social structure are the very antithesis of H. sapiens — and see themselves. And by “themselves” I mean the patriarchal paradigm. In a nest of eagles.

Twisty notes that several personal acquaintances who are obsessed with the feed sometimes critique the eagles' parenting skills, as if they were watching episodes of "Kate Plus 8" (sans Jon) or "Super Nanny" rather than the behavior of creatures who are different from us in almost every perceivable way.

Then again, info-tainment television shows about animals have, in a very real way, primed us to think about animal behavior and social organization in the terms in which we understand our own. The highly popular Animal Planet show Meerkat Manor is a prime example:

So my question is, does this help or hurt? Do visual representations of animals that allow us anthropomorphize them encourage us to support conservation or do they simply lead to misunderstanding? Is our tendency to anthropomorphize inevitable or could these representations discourage it in some way?

Create, Skate, and Destroy: Architecture in Motion

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Rodney Torres, 50-50 through Love Sculpture, image from Quartersnacks

Street skaters love architecture. Few people other than architects notice or appreciate the designs in concrete, marble, metal, and brick that comprise a city, but seen through a skater's eyes, lines of movement appear everywhere. Ledges, stairs, hand rails, and even (or especially) smooth concrete and marble elicit a joyful recognition of possibilities. Rather than an agglomeration of static structures, the city becomes an invitation to motion; the skater desires contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment. Assemblage of body, board, and buildings: a intimate becoming, in love with (the) concrete.

Fred Gall, bluntslide, image from chrome ball incident

Gall slides across a wax-blackened stair rather than stepping up or down the set, reflecting a dramatic shift in perspective:

Streetskaters are the other great horde of architectural fetishists. The fetish is slightly different in aspect but not in intensity. Perspectivally, architects are generally schooled to gaze upward, and cultivate an awe of form. Skateboarders remain at eye-level, street-level, on the plane of human actions. Architects strive to behold totalities; skaters fixate, on smaller parts— they look closer, at details and textures and otherwise unremarkable typologies. Skaters are the sensualists, the kinesthetic lovers of space and form. (Skateboarding, Action, and Architecture)

Eric Koston (Skater of the Year 2006), 50-50, image from chrome ball incident

A very long, round handrail with multiple kinks requires precise balance that can distinguish and respond to every nuance of the metal:

Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate, you are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation, looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building, and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do the living body that we all possess. (Skateboarding vs Architecture)

Image from chrome ball incident

[Skateboarding] addresses the physical architecture of the modern city, yet responds not with another object but with a dynamic presence.... It produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires.... It requires a tool (the skateboard), but absorbs that tool into the body. It involves great effort, but produces no commodity ready for exchange. It is highly visual, but refutes the reduction of activity solely to the spectacle of the image. (Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the Body, p. 1.)

The time-lapse image above is from a chrome ball incident post focused not on a single skater, but on a single spot. Skaters constantly seek out new spots or attempt new tricks at old spots. The ever-changing urban landscape offers opportunity one week, only to take it away the next. Some spots become legendary:

The History of Hubba Hideout

But these legends will eventually be destroyed. Skating highlights not only the possibilities of motion through space, but also the transitory nature of the most seemingly permanent of fixtures. The city is a localized phoenix; spots are constantly destroyed and created.

Supra team riders at Lego Land, Austin DIY skate spot, image from Lunchbox Party

Something as simple as concrete slabs leaning against one another can become a hidden pleasure garden. Not content to skate only what the governments and corporations build, skaters also take it upon themselves to rework their spaces with DIY projects (Portland's Burnside skate park is the grandfather of them all) like Austin's Lego Land (above) or the now destroyed Alien Pod (below). Skaters become architects of the local, the temporary. The knowledge that the landscape always changes demands an urgency. Tomorrow might be too late:

Alien Pod (RIP), Austin DIY skate spot, image from Concrete Disciples

War Games - Isao Hashimoto

Michael Widner — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Originally created in 2003 by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, "1945-1998" maps all 2053 nuclear explosions during that period.

A Wired article from the time quotes Hashimoto as saying he wanted to show "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." The increasing pace of tests culminates in a global frenzy of explosions. Each nation's tests have a different color and sound associated with them. The effect is oddly beautiful and reminiscent of an early video game. Even the counters for each nation look like scores.

Hashimoto states that he chose lights and sounds to provide "equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier," yet the clear association with video games also invokes a chilling disconnect between form and content. While appreciating the abstract beauty of the map, we also consider the horror of mass destruction displayed in such a seemingly trivial form. It reminds me of another cautionary work in the war-as-video-game genre:

Super Bowl Car Commercials and the Uses of the Past

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:21:03 +0000

Now that our national gladiatorial spectacle has ended, we turn to the obligatory analysis of the major media event. How many Packers can get injured in a single season? Why, exactly, are the Black Eyed Peas popular? And, most importantly, what about the commercials? Rather than discuss which ones are the funniest, depict the most animal cruelty, or objectify women the worst, I'd like to discuss what seems like an odd coincidence: many of the car commercials use different visions of the past to sell their product.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=47cff490-1225-4e91-97b3-579cdcccdc98" target="_new" title="">Mercedes: Diddy</a>

Mercedes: Diddy

In the Mercedes commercial, we see new car models joining the family. The commercial starts in a barn with an older model car. Its radio turns on and we hear Janis Joplin sing "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz". The setting, the scratchiness of the sound, and the song's throwback country style all make the song sound older than it really is, establishing a past in the country. Near the middle, around the 33 second mark, we see a futuristic car drive past something akin to a Model T prototype. Presumably both are Mercedes. These and several hundred other cars from many eras converge to welcome the 4 new models. Mercedes thus constructs a continuous history, an unbroken line of Diddy-endorsed quality and luxury, that continues with these new cars.

Hyundai Sonata: Don't Settle

The Hyundai Sonata commercial takes a slightly different approach. Rather than just cars, the emphasis is on technology of many sorts: bicycles, cell phones, portable music players, and video games, among others. A voice-over asks what the world would be like if we settled for the first thing that came along. Here the technological past intrudes upon the present to build a teleological narrative that places the Sonata as the ultimate goal. The visual contrast between the modern car and ancient technologies also implies a similar distance between the Sonata and other vehicles.

Chevy Volt: Make History

In this Chevy Volt ad, on the other hand, we have a history of technology defined by moments of brilliance. Rather than an antiquated past or a proud history, we see a series of great discoveries and inventions: electricity, the lightbulb, television, space flight, electric guitar amplifiers, and others. Chevy places their new electric car in the pantheon of technological inventions, giving us both a progress narrative and a muted teleology like the Hyundai and Mercedes commercials. Moreover, the Chevy spot seems to combine the sense of historical greatness of the Mercedes ad with the technological fetishism of the Hyundai one. History, Chevy tells us, is told through the great moments in technology.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=1fa2d8a2-2ed0-419a-b60c-d2c39014d912" target="_new" title="">BMW: Changes</a>

BMW: Changes

BMW, however, tells us that the past was dirty, inefficient, slow, and noisy. Their new diesel-powered vehicle represents cleanliness, speed, efficiency, and power. The noise is not a clanking, but a baritone engine hum. The dirty cars struggling along the streets and spewing thick, black smoke make the blue, immaculately polished sports car even more appealing. The car represents not continuous progress, but a clear break with the bad ol' days.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=f2db3bd3-0a4c-4681-ae0e-5d8897d5519e" target="_new" title="">Carmax.com: Gas Station</a>

Carmax.com: Gas Station

Unlike BMW, Carmax caricatures the Leave it to Beaver 1950s of unbearable cheerfulness and unrealistic levels of service. A modern driver pulls into a gas station and is suddenly barraged by attendants cleaning his windows, checking his oil, filling his tank. He assumes he's being attacked and runs off screaming. But, as the closing tag tells us, CarMax provides this type of service, informed by a nostalgic creation of the past. The clean-cut, uniformed, and smiling workers contrast with the paranoid, stressed, and unkempt modern driver. CarMax, the ad argues, returns us to a more wholesome time.

While these were certainly not always the best or most interesting of the Super Bowl commercials, the ties among them struck me. They almost all rely upon cliched visions of imagined pasts that fetishize technology. Is it the revolving door of automotive invention--a new model every year--that demands we abandon the obsolete while retaining what progress has been made? Are other products are so insistently linked to the past?

Accessorizing Surveillance - Barbie Video Girl

Cate Blouke — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

H/T: Noel

From coloring books to glitter to unicorns, my viz. posts seem to be revolving around adult repurposing of the trappings of youth. Naturally, we'll have to throw Barbie into the mix. While she has certainly seen her share of fashion updates over her 50-year reign as fantasy icon extraordinaire, this creepy 21st-century update to Barbie's accessory collection reverses the gaze and turns Barbie’s body into a tool for surveillance.

The doll is marketed and designed for video sharing. The website encourages girls to take video, upload it on the computer, and share it with their friends. The chord plugs right into Barbie’s spine, and for just $49.99, you too can have a cyborg girl gadget!

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

With a video camera “hidden” in her necklace, Video Barbie ostensibly allows young girls to “record movies from Barbie’s point of view.” However, masking technology in the doll’s bosom opens the door for less appropriate kinds of video-taping and raises questions about children and technology.

Aside from my instinctual reaction – that this is the perfect new toy for pedophiles (the jacket looks like it could easily be replaced with one that would conceal the video interface) – I’m dismayed by the message this sends. For one thing, the placement of the camera reinforces fetishization of the female chest. Though the location may have been strictly due to technological constraint, to make eye-contact with the camera, little girls have to gaze directly at a biologically impossible female form.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

The language used to sell the doll blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Barbie explains to us, “I am a real working video camera.” In a weird way, she ends up objectifying herself – selling both herself and her camera within. For all Barbie’s associations with female objectification, this doll flips that, and you become the filmed object.

And why are we teaching little girls to tape themselves in the first place? Let alone with a hidden camera? The recent internet incidents with 11-year-old “Jessi Slaughter” should be enough to have parents kicking their kids off computers, let alone buying them toys to broadcast with.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

Glitter re-visited (deadly and disembodied)

Cate Blouke — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:43:55 +0000

Image Credit: Norton

H / T to my mom for sending me the video in response to last week's post

Last week on Viz I posted about glitter as an undermining agent in images of solemnity. In this commercial for Norton security software, the glitter use results in deadly (and delightful) consequences.

The commercial functions through analogy. "Your on-line bank account" is like an adorable little cartoon unicorn - friendly, harmless, and essentially insubstantial. Depicting on-line information as a mythical creature, the commercial highlights the "unreality" of computer-based data. Whereas we can (and should) shred our sensitive information when it comes in physical documents, our on-line information is much more vulnerable through its illusive, unicorn-like existence floating in the ether.

Dolf Lundgren, however, is a very "real" representation (so to speak) of all the nasty bad guys out there waiting to do horrible things to our unicorns. "Real" criminals can seriously harm our ephemeral information, as demonstrated in the alternate version of the commercial below. Criminal activity is embodied in the looming stature of Lundgren, whereas our own points of vulnerability are disembodied (cartoon) and unwittingly dreaming of rainbows.

Similarly, Lundgren's weapons are also very physically menacing (a knife, a pistol, and a flame thrower), whereas the unicorn's defenses (when bolstered with the Norton software) are just as fantastical as the unicorn itself - he/she/it defeats Lundgren with a cloud of poisonous, sparkling fairy dust.

While I still hold that the comparison between security software and fairy dust might not actually be that reassuring on closer examination, in this instance the incongruity seems intentional. The fact that the unicorn fights off an automatic weapon with a cloud of smoke shot out of its horn (complete with tinkly fairy noise), causing Lundgren's head to explode into a cloud of glitter, is hilarious. The seemingly innocuous dust has deadly effects which are made festive and amusing through sparkle.

Overall, I find the embodied/disembodied personifications the most rhetorically interesting aspects of the commercial, but who doesn't love some unicorns and glitter? Or flame-throwers and bad jokes (below)?

Image Credit: Norton

H / T to my mom for sending me the video in response to last week's post

A Drop of Golden Sun

ladysquires — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:12:33 +0000

Let's get this semester started with some happy, shall we? This is a 2009 video of a flash mob in Antwerp performing a choreographed dance to "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music. This stunt was apparently orchestrated to promote a Belgian television show. Though common sense tells you that this performance was meticulously organized and rehearsed, it's hard to deny the arrestingly joyous quality of the video. As with most well-done flash mob videos, both the filming techniques and the performance itself promote the illusion that this was a spontaneous event. The camera pans to individuals who appear to be regular by-standers, individuals who later join in the performance just for the sheer fun of it. It's initially unclear whether the crowd of dancers rushing down the stairs is part of the performance or simply spectators trying to get a look at what's going on.

The rhetorical brilliance of this performance is that it really invites us to take part in the alternate reality evoked by musicals, a reality in which people spontaneously break out into perfectly choreographed song and dance numbers at the slightest provocation. The ethos of the flash mob, like the ethos of the musical, is in carefully walking that line between joyous spontaneity and contrivance in order to encourage the audience to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride.

Indeed, flash mobs, which can be deployed as performance art, political protest, or publicity stunt embody that line as examples of populist art that frequently get appropriated by corporate and media entities. A flash mob was organized for Oprah's Kickoff Party in 2009, an act that garnered a tremendous amount of free publicity for Harpo:

So, does it ruin it for you to know that these acts are so heavily orchestrated? Is the use of flash mobs as marketing tools obnoxious or refreshing in a media culture so saturated with hard, shiny artifice?

Finally, would anyone be brave enough to organize a flash mob as a class project? Anyone? Bueller?

New Media, Old-school Agriculture

fc — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:31:42 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from CookingUpAStory.com

I sat down in front of the television this Tuesday to watch the PBS premier of Dirt! The Movie on Independent Lens. I had been looking forward to seeing this documentary about the soil cylce and its importance on agriculture, health and geopolitics, and I had even planned to write about it for this week's post. As you can see, that plan fell through: I went in expecting a dirt-y movie, but mostly what I got was a mess. While there was plenty of titular soil in Dirt!, the film came across as a random collection of dirt-related vignettes that were either purely repetitive or entirely unrelated. In all fairness, cutting the film down to fit a one-hour running time may be responsible for the disjointed presentation, but most reviews of its Sundance screening agree that it is an unnecessarily rambling documentary. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I had spent that morning talking to David Parry about the effects of internet technology and networked space on the established institutions of democracy, and as POV took over my television screen with its adapted running of Food, Inc., I began to think about documentary films-- and, in particular, films that intend to effect social and democratic change-- in the online time and space of the internet. Thinking about documentary film within a networked social space reminded me, fortuitously, of Cooking Up A Story, an internet hybrid that bills itself rather oddly as "an online television show and blog about people, food, and sustainable living." More about soil, sardines and the web-lives of food-docs (including video) after the break.

While the creators of Cooking Up A Story ("CUpS" for short) consistently refer to their site as a "television show," CUpS is much more sophisticated and interesting than television on the internet. Thanks to Hulu, most of us are by now familiar with what television looks like on the internet: it plays on demand and works with a different advertising model, but otherwise it remains remarkably faithful to its broadcast incarnation. By contrast, CUpS is a multi-format, multi-media collection of documentaries, lectures, interviews, opinion journalism and more; they offer, by their own account, "Doc Shorts," "Video Interviews," "Essays," "How-to Cooking Videos," "Family Recipes," "Video Shorts," and "News Around the Web."

Clearly, this is something other than a television show. The content and even format of CUpS have a lot in common with websites like Zester Daily, Civil Eats and even Chow, but the emphasis on micro-documentary films sets CUpS apart from those sites as well (and is, I am guessing, why they call it a "show"). Most of the other food-issue sites online follow more of a "print" model and use video primarily as supplementary material. Along with an emphasis on food, all of the videos and articles on CUpS comes pre-packaged for online networking: everything is eminently bloggable, embeddable and, in a word, share-able. As online space becomes as much about connection as it is about communication, CUpS model might have some substantial advantages over web-based mirrors of magazine and television formats.

A brief, somewhat representative sample of their video content might include 1) a conference presentation from the Senior Science Manager of the Monterey Bay Acquarium's Sustainable Seafood Initiative (the publishers of the Seafood Watch guide to sustainable seafood):

2) a continuing-ed style video from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education funded by USDA) discussing the benefits of no-till commercial farming:

3) a short-form documentary about an organic dariy farmer:

4) and an interesting interview with Mark Bittman about his new book Food Matters:

The collection is ecclectic, but the format is of, by and for the internet and won't run into cross-media problems like the re-editing of Dirt! for television. In fact, the episodic, semi-related, often interchangeable segments of Dirt! would probably have worked better broken down and dispersed as smaller docs, and a web-friendly sharable format would almost certainly work better for community building than the "screening toolkits" posted on Dirt! The Movie's website. Rather than generating community activity and espirit d'corp from scratch, socially concerned docs ought to consider utilizing the communities people already inhabit online by generating material that is web-friendly from its inception.

Satire Sandwiches: Stephen Colbert's Thought for Food

fc — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:50:12 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from ColbertNation.com

Food policy can be pretty disheartening stuff: anything that combines environmentalism, worker's rights and public health in a single topic is likely to include bad-to-terrible news pretty much every day. With the Senate underfunding the Child Nutrition Act, bluefin tuna set to go extinct and Dirt! The Movie preparing to air on PBS, even my fairly-high tolerance for crisis fatigue was wearing thin this week. Thankfully, Stephen Colbert was there to talk me off the ledge. As is often the case, Colbert managed to make life livable with his pringle-and-whipped-cream-like blend of irony and humor-- two remarkable human capacities that are often undervalued because they elude satisfactory explanation by rhetorical, literary or philosophical models. While even Jon Stewart's comedic analysis of politicians and pundits can often be as depressing as it is amusing, Colbert's satiric send-ups consistently manage to wink their way through all kinds of maddening news stories and leave me with a crisp, clean finish. His new "Thought for Food" segment lives up to those expectations. Rather than attempting (and almost certainly failing) to explain the jokes, I thought I'd share a few videos and comment as needed. More on Colbert, corn-surpluses, advertising and unholy sandwiches after the break.

Colbert began his "Thought for Food" segment in mid-March. His second installment covers a lot of the ground that I have written about recently on this blog. He begins, appropriately enough, with some novel uses for corn-- when subsidies artificially supress the price of corn while simultaneously creating massive surplusses, you get... well, you'll see. He ends with his own take on Oliver's Food Revolution.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Corn Diapers, Fatty Foods & Jamie Oliver

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

The third and latest installment of "Thought for Food" focuses on marketing processed foods. The centerpiece of the segment takes aim at KFC's new "Double Down" "sandwich". If you thought Colbert's Pringle-RediWhip creation was a bad idea, then you'll love this bacon sandwich with fried-chicken buns. Oddly enough, the fist time I logged on to ColberNation.com and watched the video of Stephen roundly panning the fried mass of animal protein, the banner ad at the top of the page was selling-- wait for it-- KFC's new Double Down sandwich (I guess that when your food is a publicity stunt, any attention is good attention). It reminds me of Michael Pollan's "rule" about not eating anything you've ever seen advertised.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Mentally Ill Advertisers & German Cupcakes

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

One important effect of satire like the Colbert Report comes from creating a space in which we can release the engery, frustration, angst, etc. that are stirred up by serious social problems. They can be refreshing without being escapist. As Kierkegaard puts it in his "Concept of Irony," works like this can disarm us, and being taken off-guard can be a valuable experience for people locked in an entrenched debate. Humor can give us critical distance from even deeply held values (an effect Bakhtin notes when writing about parody and the sacreligious), and even when it doesn't bridge differences and open new lines of dialogue, that temporary distance lets us catch our breath and rest our passions. Ok, that's all the speculation I have in me today. I'll leave you with a video of Colbert interviewing Jonathan Safran Foer in which Stephen gives the world's greatest description of free range chicken eggs.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jonathan Safran Foer

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Alternative Archives: Radical Software

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:47:26 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Radical Software

H/T: Chris Micklethwait

As Noel prepares to lead a Best Practices for Digital Images workshop here at UT, the rest of us in the Visual Rhetoric group hope to make some of this work public here on viz. for others to use. One website that presents some interesting work done in the 1970s that theorizes the use and creation of digital/video media is Radical Software.

Radical Software was created, according to its website, out of the work of a group called the Raindance Foundation which hoped to be “an alternative media think tank; a source of ideas, publications, videotapes and energy providing a theoretical basis for implementing communication tools in the project of social change.” A part of this work involved publishing a magazine called Radical Software that discussed in various ways the power of technology (principally video) to transmit diverse and alternative messages. What the creators of this website have done is to scan all of the issues of Radical Software (published between 1970 and 1974) as PDFs and make them available to the public for searching and browsing.

Image Credit: Radical Software

What really struck me in looking over the website is the relevance that some of their theorizing might have for individuals working in education and digital humanities today. Their last issue on “Video and Kids” features a number of individuals reflecting on the ways in which they’ve used video in the classroom not only to teach students material but also to show children ways of producing their own work. This is something that the Internet itself has further democratized as the tools required now for digital interaction have become cheaper and the knowledge to use them is ready to hand. What also intrigued me is that Radical Software from the first viewed their work as open-source and encouraged readers to copy freely from it. This more open attitude seems to mirror the kind of work done today by publications like Kairos, which not only offer space for more creative kinds of scholarship but also lower the wall preventing the public from accessing it.

I found it fairly easy to navigate the site and browse between issues, although having each article be its own separate PDF on themakes it harder to read through an entire issue. (Luckily, they do have full issues in PDF, but they're available only by clicking on the cover of the issue and not visible under the contents section, which makes this feature harder to find.) The search itself is also easy to use, although it appears that the articles haven’t been associated with likely keywords: while a search on “education” yields 155 results, “pedagogy” finds none. If there were any improvement that could be made to this site, this would be helpful, but the website appears to be designed—like the magazine itself once was—for easy access by others. I hope anyone interested in the evolution of digital literacy and the use of technology will find this a useful resource.

Food History, Family History

fc — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:13:03 +0000

Image Credit: Screen shot from whatscookinggrandma.humanbeans.net

I first noticed the phenomenon of grandmothers cooking online when I came across Chow's "Cooking with Grandma" series. The first episode featured "Grandma Alvina" who shows her granddaughter how to cook prawn curry and coconut rice while telling the story of her 1972 move to the US from Burma. Chow has since added several more episodes in the series, and matriarchal kitchens seem to be sprouting up all over the internet and all around the world, offering their grandchildren and Youtube fans lessons in cooking and living history. More about culinary octogenarians, including video, after the jump.

A quick search of the internets will turn up, along with Chow's occasional series, a suprising variety of grandmothers holding court in their kitchens. The image above is a screen shot from "What's Cooking Grandma" a British effort at collecting international culinary wisdom and one my favorite efforts in this emerging genre (this video features Brazillian Grandma Sulzy). There are also several sites and video streams dedicated to individual women including a Youtube channel on Depression-era cooking with Clara (who is billed as a "94 year old cook author and great grandmother") and the always entertaining Feed Me Bubbe where Bayla Sher (possibly the most charismatic grandmother on the web) prepares kosher meals and teaches the Yiddish word of the day.

While all of these venues make use of different formats in different languages and on different continents, they have several characteristics in common: as with Alvina's Burmesse curry and Bubbe's latkes, these online grandmothers tend to prepare traditional recipes and narrate some amount of family or cultural history. Grandma Martha on Chow cooks candied yams for Kwanzaa with her grandson; Nana Ruth in Lancaster makes scones and blackcurrent jam (even if her canning technique isn't up to modern saftey standards); Ana Fadul shows her Brazillian grandchildren her Turkish mother's traditional recipe for kibe; and Welsh Grandma Betty, for your viewing pleasure, bakes traditional welsh cakes on her grandmother's cast iron baking stone:

I can see at least three realated impulses behind this trend in webcasting kitchen matrons. First, the contemporary wave of interest in cooking (and particularly in traditional, non-industrial foodways) helps drive interest in recipes and techniques that were perfected before the post-war rise of mass-produced convenience foods. If foodies get tired of taking advice from Alice Waters, they can turn to their own grandmothers or borrow someone else's online. Second, with the rise of restaraunts and convenience foods, many home cooking techiniques are being lost. It only takes a single generation for skills like home baking, canning, etc. to disapear from a culture's collective skill set, and webisodes of grandmothers in the kitchen are attempting to some degree to curate the knowledge of past generations. Third, since foodways are deeply personal components of human cultures, these efforts bear some resemblence to nineteenth century efforts in collecting folklore (practices that early anthropologists assumed would be destroyed by advances in science and technology). Unlike the efforts by nineteenth century folklorists, contemporary recipe collectors aren't interested in preserving a museum record of past culture. They are attempting to keep family traditions alive by passing traditional foodways on to new generations, and they are using technological advances to keep those traditions from becoming history.

Blogging Pedagogy: Or, How to Make Students Read Musicals as Rhetorical Texts?

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:10:53 +0000

Andi, I enjoyed reading your post from Saturday, as I'm struggling myself to think about how to teach visual rhetoric in my classroom-although, the concerns I'm undergoing are much different from yours. There may be ethical concerns about using podcasts to teach a variety of songs united around a different theme, but most of what I do will involve looking at pretty pictures.

Credit: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

As I'm moving from unit one (where we've focused on introducing the basic terms of rhetorical study and mastering discussions of musical lyrics and songs) into unit two (where we'll begin watching full musicals and stage performances), I had the students watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog as an example of a short musical (link to the musical in full here), and discuss how it relates to American values. On Friday we'll move into a discussion of visual rhetoric by looking back visually at Dr. Horrible (to save time), but I'm struggling to think about how to discuss the visual elements not just of the static photo, which can be easily captured, but also the moving image.

What kind of language is necessary to talk about how running a hand through one's hair builds ethos? Some of the static imagery should be easy: as with the pictures below, where the shift in Dr. Horrible's color-coordinated costume signifies a move from innocence to experience/evil:

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps

However, while delivery is one of the five classical canons of rhetoric, it doesn't get much play in modern textbooks. If anybody can recommend any sources to me, I'd be happy to test them out on my students. I imagine we might end up adapting a vocabulary from performance studies to serve rhetorical purposes, which should work. I'd appreciate having something more to say than just pointing out Evil Thomas Jefferson to them, though.

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps

Promotion: CWRL on Vimeo

timturner — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:35:25 +0000

Hardworking Assistant Directors in the CWRL have posted videos of this year's lecture and workshop series to Vimeo.com, including this presentation on using Google Maps in the classroom. You can subscribe to the "CWRL Lecture Series" channel and the "CWRL Workshops" channel to see future updates.

Using Google Maps as a Writing Tool from CWRL on Vimeo

For your Valentine Viewing Pleasure

timturner — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:09:34 +0000

(Disclaimer: there is some blood and guts in this video.)

Slate V has posted a video celebrating the collision of the lovey-dovey Valentine holiday with the seemingly incongruous tradition of releasing gory movies with Valentine's day themes. The video was inspired by the upcoming release of the remake of Friday the 13th--on, appropriately, the upcoming Friday the 13th, the day before Valentine's Day. Surely the collision of these two elements says something deep about our culture? Maybe love really *is* the devil. Or is it just that machete-wielding maniacs are as good an excuse as any to get a little close to that special someone? Surely this is a very old idea: while I was writing this I thought of the motto engraved on the Wife of Bath's amulet in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: AMOR VINCIT OMNIA [Love conquers all]: an ominous pronouncement then and now...

The Story of Stuff

Sarah Wagner — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:54:36 +0000

So I showed the video “The Story of Stuff” to my rhetoric and writing class this past week. We’re doing the basics in this class—learning how to argue by learning how to analyze others’ arguments. Made by a woman named Annie Leonard, the 20-minute half-animated video details the history of our post-World War II consumer economy.

She describes the linear system of production and consumption, from extraction to disposal and argues that this system can not work in a finite environment. It’s a pithy, funny, engaging piece that seems to be getting a lot of attention. And for my class’ sake, it’s a fantastic example of an argument that shows pathos, ethos and logos in spades.

However, the main reason I was willing to show such a pointedly political video (if I can argue that a strongly environmentalist viewpoint is political) is because the piece also has some problems. There is nowhere on the site that I can find any information about who this woman is, where she’s from, or why she did this piece. I could look up the foundation that supports and holds the copyright, but the point is that it’s not readily accessible. I also don’t know when the piece was made, nor who it was made for. Finally, her facts and figures are not referenced anywhere on the site. Sure, it’s like any writer, if you want to know, look it up. But the technology of the internet allows for citing pretty easily, why not do it?

These points allow for a rich discussion in class—who do you think it was made for? Why? What about the graphics, were they engaging? Are you the audience? The Story of Stuff also allows me to push these young students (most fresh out of high school) to think more about how they think—to use the knowledge they have to inform their reading of the text. What do you trust or distrust in this video? Why? What do you know about the internet and about graphics that can tell you about the audience? Their engagement with this video provides fertile ground for making their analyses meaningful and deeper than they have been so far.

“The Girl Effect” typographic video

John Jones — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:55:37 +0000

Here’s another hybrid proposal argument / introductory video, the likes of which I think are perfect for rhetoric classrooms. It was produced by girleffect.org:

While it is certainly possible to disagree with parts of the argument here, I think this format is fascinating. This emerging genre of public discourse is something that rhetoric instructors should be teaching their students to create.

via Information Aesthetics

“Selectable Output Control”: The video proposal

John Jones — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:23:24 +0000

I saw this video on BoingBoing last week:

I think this is a perfect example of a video proposal argument, the kind that students should be making to connect their work in the classroom with the outside world.

America’s design future

John Jones — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:02:28 +0000

Some people still think design matters. (link is NSFW)

I think this video should be able to spark a great discussion as to whether or not digital tools help to improve visual culture.

via Boing Boing

Amazing 3D visualization of Picasso’s “Guernica”

John Jones — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:52:18 +0000

Artist Lena Gieseke has modeled Picasso’s “Guernica” in 3D.

Here’s how Gieseke describes her work:

“The idea of creating a 3D version of an influential artwork came out of doing jigsaw puzzles of famous paintings. When you assemble a jigsaw, you study a painting in great detail and you become aware of the very lines, shapes and colors that the painting is composed of and how these elements merge to create a unified expression. Through the puzzle, you explore the artwork, examining details your eye might not have caught otherwise.”

Link (via SuperTouch)

Illustrating magnetic fields

John Jones — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:51:52 +0000

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I’m not sure how this video was made, but it is really amazing to look at.

As rhetoric instructors spend more and more time teaching new media like video, I think this genre—the instructional video—will become an important skill for students in their own fields.

Here’s a description of the video:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

via Make

Collection of surveillance videos

John Jones — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:47:44 +0000

Media Nipple has posted a collection of video clips from news, television shows, and other media on the theme of surveillance.

The post should be a good reference for anyone teaching surveillance and the ways in which it is depicted in popular culture.

Link (Warning: mildly NSFW.)

“When people talk, General Hayden listens”

John Jones — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:52:19 +0000

Mark Fiore has posted a satirical cartoon on the role of telecoms in the warrant-less wiretapping controversy. The cartoon stars Snuggly the Security Bear and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

via Boing Boing

MIT project documents videos removed from YouTube

John Jones — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:38:01 +0000

CNET reports MIT has a new project that provides information about videos that have been removed from YouTube. From the article:

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

This site should be a helpful resource for online video researchers, particularly those interested in copyright issues.

Ordering pizza is not so simple

LaurenMitchell — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:54:03 +0000

The ACLU is using this video to promote their campaign to collect signatures for a petition to stop a national ID and database program. The Real ID Act, passed by congress in 2005, would connect all state DMV databases into one interlinked database, “facilitating government tracking of Americans.”

Although the ACLU admits that we haven’t gotten to this point yet, they say that “we are fast approaching a surveillance society where every move, transaction and communication is recorded, compiled, and stored away to be examined and used by the authorities -- and even private corporations --whenever they want.” That last part--that companies will have access to this database--is very disturbing to me. The video plays upon that concern perfectly in giving a simple pizza restaurant access to all sorts of personal information about the customer.

There’s also a hint of a nanny state in that the customer’s health records can restrict what he’s able to buy. Considering how much of our lives happen electronically, it seems that “the system” depicted in the video is a real possibility. I think the bottom line here is that I just don’t want everyone knowing what size pants I’m buying.

Website documents lascivious Fox News content

John Jones — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:57:25 +0000

Fox News Porn collects racy images and videos culled from Fox News and dresses them up on a pseudo-porn site with Girls-Gone-Wild-type disclaimers. (Be advised: the link above and parts of this post are probably not okay for work.)

Essentially, the site documents the hypocrisy of condemning the explicitly sexual while simultaneously displaying it. As the site’s facts page puts it:

[Bill] O’Reilly has recently addressed such important topics as PETA using nude female images in ads promoting a healthy vegetarian diet, “Girls Gone Wild” participants suing the producer after the fact, and dating websites that only allow “hot” people to sign up—all so he could show related videos of scantily clad young women to the dirty old men who watch. Under the guise of reporting on Internet porn sites who publish pictures of the youngest girls allowed (18), the moral decadence exhibited at beaches during Spring break, and American Idol stars who take it all off for magazines, O’Reilly played videos and showed screenshots in the interest of letting his audience see what he's talking about, raising their, um, outrage.

According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing “the site is the creation of filmmaker Robert Greenwald,” who made the documentary Outfoxed. Cleary, the site’s creators have a bone to pick with Fox News—I’m sure something similar could be done with CNN—but the site is still an fascinating example of how the context and presentation of material can influence the reception of a text.

via: Boing Boing

Making type taste good: Typographics

John Jones — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:39:15 +0000

This short film by Boca and Ryan Uhrich provides an introduction to typography while illustrating some of the possibilities of typographic videos.

via information aesthetics

‘Robot Chicken’ deconstructs ‘Law & Order’

John Jones — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:50:09 +0000

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.

Filet a fish, or: Why do people hate some advertisments?

John Jones — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:58:35 +0000

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:

The ad, which is called “hideous” by its nominator and a “Filet-O-Failure” by Stevenson seems to me to be quite good at selling the product. This is not an artsy ad where it is impossible to tell what is for sale, as in this Simpsons parody:

Instead, the ad reaffirms the product constantly by repeating its name over and over. At the end of the ad, you know what’s for sale, and the repetition has drilled the product into your brain. If you pull up the Filet-O-Fish ad in YouTube, the second item in the list of related videos is this ad, which is titled “Worst Commercial Ever”; however, I would argue that it too is effective. When the ad is over, you know what Flea Market Montgomery is just like—a mini mall! Further, the bizarreness of both the Flea Market and Filet-O-Fish spots is likely to get people to watch them (and share them with their friends on YouTube), an increasingly difficult proposition in the age of TiVo. Shouldn’t the title “worst commercial ever” be reserved for an ad that doesn’t do these things?

So, what is it about these ads—ads which I feel are quite effective at selling their products—that irritates people so much? I think this question might be a good entry into a discussion with students of the rhetorical effects of ads; to get the ball rolling, here are two answers I came up with.

First, I believe that sometime around Bud Bowl I—possibly earlier—consumers began to expect that advertisements should entertain them. (This is a development that might be unique to television; I don’t think radio advertisements are made by people who are worried about entertaining listeners.) If an ad is weird or unfunny, then that somehow violates the unspoken agreement we have with advertisers that they must entertain us. The existence of such a contract would explain why the two commercials discussed above are considered so awful: it’s not because they are bad advertisements, it’s becuase they are bad entertainment.

Secondly, I think commercials like the Filet-O-Fish one irritate people because they offend our culture’s logo-centrism. Consider this quote from Stevenson on the McDonald’s spot:

I will admit I occasionally grinned the first time I saw it. But in terms of selling the product? Filet-O-Failure. One should not film fast-food items in their sad cardboard boxes, exposed to the audience's close inspection in a series of long, tight close-ups. Those greasy fish-bricks look decidedly unappetizing.

Here he is attacking the ad on logical grounds. Fast food is gross, he says, so it isn’t logical to show it in closeup in advertisements because then people won’t want to eat it. But everybody knows that Fast Food is gross (particularly the Filet-O-Fish), but even post-Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me people still flock to McDonald’s: the company’s recent resurgence has been built on the back of their greasy staples, not their salads. Clearly, logic isn’t the only thing driving our food-purchasing behavior. Acknowledging this, I think, is cognitively difficult for many people, so when they see ads that defy logic, they ask why a person would make such an ad. The answer—they made it “that way” because that way is effective—is troubling, and the seeming disconnection between the purpose of the ad and its logical effect makes them upset. In other words, hating an advertisement is often an expression of a person’s own dissatisfaction with their emotional decision-making processes.