viz. - images

Journey and Non-Referential Iconography

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking images can literally provide worldviews—complex perspectives from which to view matters ranging from gender roles to cultural identities to ideal body types. Frozen’s visual aesthetic offers a triumphantalist account of traditional images put to new uses, while Lilo and Stitch offers a harder-edged criticism of our lazy, self-indulgent ways of looking at the world, for instance. Yet both deliberately and meaningfully comment upon the mediating power of their own iconography. Both films are, in short, particularly focused on understanding how images have worked in the past, and how they can be made to work differently in the future.

Journey is a video game whose cartoon-like visual aesthetic draws strongly from the same animated tradition as the first two films, yet its aims are quite different. In both its gameplay and its visual design, I will argue, Journey is not focused on what it means, but rather on the raw experiences it can provide. The game reminds us, in short, that while images have deep and rich rhetorical histories, they are also something more than mere arguments.

At first glance, Journey seems yet another participant in the iconographic tradition of Disney-style heroic adventure. The game's unnamed protagonist wears yet another variant of the cape worn by Sleeping Beauty's Prince Phillip or Frozen's Anna: a red, flowing cloak whose bold coloration differentiates him or her from the various backgrounds he will visit. Fittingly, this character will go on his own quest, making his or her way through dozens of different landscapes and ruins in order to reach a distant mountain peak. Not surprisingly, the primary figure this character finds among the ruins is dressed in a pure white gown that carries at least two markedly female associations: that of a helpful nun, and that of a bride on her wedding day. Her beak-like face, on the other hand, nearly literalizes the cultural ideal of a woman as a "mother hen."

Flowing, red clothing for adventurers: the one unchanging truth of the fashion world. Image source: Youtube.

Yet while one could perform a gender analysis (or, for that matter, a cultural analysis) of Journey's treatment of archetypes of a lone adventurer in an exotic foreign place, to do so would be to miss one of the most notable and immediately striking features of the game: its insistant attempt to minimize or obscure any ability of its images to refer to anything outside of themselves. This design aesthetic stretches from the game's costume design (just ornate enough to defamiliarize the reader and yet not ornate enough to betray any one particular origin) to its art style (frequently, the game presents such clean lines and well-defined spaces as to make the background seem neutral), to its narrative (a serious of wordless, simply-illustrated cut scenes hint at a deep religious subtext to the journey, but provide no clarity as to what the significance might be), to its very protagonist (all gender, race, and class markers are obscured beneath his or her robe, and any distinctive voice is replaced by a small variety of musical notes.) For the most part, the game goes out of its way to limit the degree to which it reflects the world outside itself.

The landscape, like the character is often a nearly blank canvas. Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Two things, however, receive much more focus than in a traditional video game. The first is light. Not only are all the game's various locations carefully differentiated by their color palate (as is common in video games), but the use of light and tonality is often taken to dramatic extremes. One segment of the game takes place in a harsh, snow-and-wind haunted mountain pass, where the screen is at times almost entirely white. On the other hand, an early visit to a sun-drenched temple demonstrates the game's lighting effects at their most impressive; the sun reflects vibrantly off the golden sand, an effect dazzling in itself yet made more impactful when suddenly encountered within a game otherwise willing to stick with relatively bland backgrounds.

Image source: Forbes

At such moments, the game becomes a meditation on the power and significance of light and vision; while architectural details may be visible, much more powerful is the play of light and shadow, gold and brown. The relatively desaturated and low-contrast images before this climactic relevation of light, for instance, only serve to de-sensitize the mind of gamers, so that what could be a merely standout moment in another game is transformed into a revelation.

Yet the game's most powerful use of constraints involves not images themselves, but rather PS3's multiplayer functionality. Amid the loneliness of the game's single-player campaign, the game randomly brings two human-controlled players together in a single universe. As with the game's visual presentation, this interaction takes place within strictly-enforced limits. Communication comes from watching what the other person does, or pressing a single button that (depending on how hard or quickly you press it) triggers one of a small number of musical notes. Cooperation is limited to the ability to assist each other in making higher than normal jumps.

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

As with the visuals, the game's careful limitations provide an intense focus. These interactions obviously lack many of the hallmarks of day-to-day encounters: human voice, facial expressions, language, posture, distinctive clothing, and so forth. Yet the knowledge of that the character accompanying you is played by a fellow human being makes all the difference in the world. Indeed, the very difficulty of communication only increases the wonder when communication does emerge, as when two players spontaneously develop a quick two-note call-and-response to check in, or when a new player is greeted with a sudden shower of notes that serve as an unmisible signifier of welcome. In these multiplayer sections, the game became less about the designed narrative than about the experiences it enabled: experiences of recognizing, working with, and above all communicating with a fellow human.

Both the game's presentation of light and its treatment of human interactions signal that the game is not being "about" something so much as it is interested in creating something. The glorious sunset walk is not "about" the power of beauty in the way that Lilo and Stitch is about the danger of mis-read stories; nor is it (like Frozen) "about" the revision of the Disney adventurer narrative in order to include women (and sisters) as protagonists. Instead, the most significant thing that Journey does is to provide us with carefully cultivated experiences, where a simple iconography allows players to focus on certain aspects of life while ignoring others. The final effect is very different from that of other forms of visual narrative, and arguably significantly less rhetorical. Yet it is no less real for all of that, and no less worthy of consideration and analysis.

The Artist's Speech

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:11:13 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute. He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles: “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!!!” So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk? David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles. Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues. However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin. We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits. These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist. But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary. As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films. Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait. When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself. He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop. His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama. It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture. The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them. Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain. Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number. Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer. The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism. Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics. Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen. Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech. Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama. The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts. In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance. The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies. By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.” I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation. Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole. While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations. In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium. The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this. By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech. By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.

Using Creative Commons Images

noelradley — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:20:49 +0000

Image Credit: "Hospitality II" by Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

For this entry, I want to point out two online texts that model best practices in the use of images. Both texts also make powerful arguments. The first is Clinamen, an academic blog by James J. Brown, formerly of UT-Austin and the Digital Writing and Research Lab, who now teaches in Detroit at Wayne State. The image above is from Brown's March 16 post. Indeed, all of Brown's entries are organized by a compelling, and beautiful, image (see screenshot after the break).

Image Credit: Screenshot of Clinamen Blog by James J. Brown

Many of the images Brown uses have a Creative Commons license, published via Flickr by various users. "Hospitality II" is published by a user called Arriving at the Horizon with an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. The caption tells about "desert hospitality" the photographer experienced. Arriving at the Horizon (on a fellowship to document nomadic cultures) describes how the Malian woman was putting up the nicest tent for her guests.

Arriving at the Horizon documents traditional, person-to-person, place-based hospitality, and this kind of hospitality becomes the foil for Brown's blog entry. Brown wants to think about hospitality and software. Yes, software is concerned about the other (the visitor, the user), but also, as Brown says, hospitality can be used to talk about the "predicament" of networked environments (the hacker, the unknown, unpredictable visitor, etc). Brown 'borrows' the documentary photograph, not solely to do rhetorical analysis, not to uncover the original context of the photo, but instead to illuminate his own theories of ethics and rhetoric in digital environments. At the same time, Brown does quote and discuss Arriving at the Horizon's text, and he hyperlinks to the Flickr stream. I think having students use Creative Commons images for their blog writing as a jumping off point, but also referring to the initial context of the photo would be great. Certainly,Brown's publication of these networked, free-use images on his blog underscores the positions he is working out about networked information and how it gets found, used, remixed, and repurposed by the other in ways that violate the expectations of the original creator.

"Writing Technologies" by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo

Another really nice use of Creative Commons licensed photos, and the second text I want to highlight, is the video above by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo. The video compares different writing media: from pens, to typewriters, to software, to video. The thing I liked so much was the way Reid proactively and elegantly cited the images. The piece is basically a narrated slideshow, created using a software called Voicethread. Reid uses the caption feature to attribute the photos (This is hard to see on the embed). Reid also verbally narrates the context of the image with the audio feature. Reid tells us where he got the image, the time period of the image, and, as well, he describes what we can see in the picture. I especially like that we are reminded when the media (photo...screenshot) changes. If part of visual literacy is drawing attention to the very processes of cultural production, then this video is on point. This would be a great text to model for students with a narrated slideshow assignment. On a side note, check out how the Voicethread platform allows you to skip through the different images and to post your own comments with audio.

To conclude, I'd like to invite you to check out some of the resources we have been building on the Viz. page under the main link 'Practice.' We're hoping the upcoming 2010-2011 year will flesh out these pages to provide more samples and information about how to produce with images. Please feel comment on this post with any other uses of Creative Commons images you find exciting, or "Contact Us," and we will continue building these resources for everyone.

How to write code for images

noelradley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:45:29 +0000

This page is meant to provide the basics of how to code images for the web. This link is a starting point for learning to code images.

Quickguide to Creating web images

noelradley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:31:56 +0000

Quickguides for Creating Web Images

Size—sizes vary, but here are some typical sizes (in pixels) for common types of images. You may need to add or subtract or tweak the ratios slightly depending on where you are placing the images (e.g. different themes in Drupal may use different banner sizes).

Banner/Header: 760 Width x 132 Height (about a 5:1 ration)

Logo: 200 x 200

Thumbnail: 90 x 90

Feature Image: 400 x 400

Resolution—depending on whether your image is for the web or for print, you might need to give your image a different resolution. Screens use the ppi measurement (pixels per inch). If you see dpi, this is referring to resolutions used by printers (dots per inch).

72 ppi (pixels per inch) is lowest resolution. This should be fine for most images that will be appearing on most screens.

150 ppi is medium

300 is highest. Higher resolutions mean bigger files, so unless you really need super-high resolution, 72 or 150 is usually fine.

Color—when setting up a new document in some Adobe programs, you may be asked to choose between color modes.

RBG: Red, blue green. This mode is for images that are meant to be displayed on a screen.

CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key Black. This mode is used for images meant to be printed on a page.

File Type—some file types work better in print and some, again, on screen.

GIF: best if you need to maintain transparency in an image.

PNG: similar to GIF but supports more colors.

JPG: a compression mode better for print than screen.

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/files/InDesignInstructions_0.pdf

Images

noelradley — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:47:58 +0000

The following is a list of notable image databases and archives.

Click the 'Review' link to access a viz. review of the database.

General Image Databases

American Memory, hosted by the Library of Congress

British Library Images Online

Calisphere, hosted by the University of California

New York Public Library Digital Archives

Tineye, a reverse search engine through which users can learn more about images they already have

UNESCO Photobank, hosted by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization

US Government Photos and Images

Databases by topic in alphabetical order:

(*) denotes requires subscription or login and (W) denotes has institutional Watermark on images.

Advertising

AdAccess, hosted by Duke

Emergence of Advertising in America, hosted by Duke [viz. review]

African-American History

(W) Calvin Littlejohn Archive, hosted by Center for American History, UT-Austin [viz. review]

John H. White Portrait of Black Chicago, hosted by the National Archives [viz. review]

Art and Photography

(*) ARTstor Digital Library, hosted by ARTstor, Inc. Link for UT login.

(*) CAMIO (Catalogue of Art Museum Images Online), hosted by OCLC. Link for UT login.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs

National Veterans Art Museum

Body and Medicine

Historical Anatomies on the Web, hosted by The National Library of Medicine [viz. review]

Dream Anatomies, hosted by The National Library of Medicine [viz. review]

(W) Wellcome Images, hosted by The Wellcome Library, London [viz. Review]

World Health Organization Photo Library [warning: contains images that may be disturbing to non-medical audiences]

Commons & Public Domain Image Databases

Flickr, Creative Commons

Creative Commons Search

Library of Congress Flickr Stream

Search Flickr US Government Works License

Historic Prints

Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection, hosted by Yale [viz. review]

Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North America, hosted by Lewis and Clark [viz. review]

Labor

Red Scare Archive, hosted by CUNY [viz. review]

Labor Rights Archive, hosted by LaborArts.org [viz. review]

Tamiment Labor Archives Highlights on Flickr

Literature

(*) DASe (Digital Archive Services), hosted by Utexas Liberal Arts ITS

Maps

American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection

David Rumsey Map Collection [viz. review]

Municipal Archives

(W) London Metropolitan Archives COLLAGE Image Database

New York City Municipal Archives Images Gallery [viz. review]

Seattle Municipal Archives

Music

(W) Texas Poster Art, hosted by the Briscoe Center at UT-Austin

National Archives

Images Canada

National Archives (UK) Image Library

National Archives (US) Galleries

Nature

NASA images

European Space Agency Images

NOAA Photo Library [viz. review]

Photography

Life Photo Archive, hosted by Google

William Gedney, hosted by Duke

(W) (*) Magnum Photos, hosted by Magnum [Viz. Review]

(W) (*) Associated Press, hosted by AP [Review]

Symbols & Iconography

The Noun Project

Technology/Electronic Media

Radical Software, hosted by Radical Software [Viz. Review]

Texas

Portal to Texas History, hosted by the University of North Texas

Photosynth Can Show You the World (or, Maybe Not)

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:30:06 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Photosynth

I was delighted this week to have Noel Radley introduce me to an interesting TED talk about Photosynth, a new imaging software created by Microsoft that not only incorporates the ability to get incredible close-ups on images, but also stitches photos together to create larger images. As they claim on their website, Photosynth “allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.” The results, as you can see above, are fairly impressive.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Photosynth

In a Photosynth image, each of the points represents a photograph. This point cloud of the Santa Barbara Courthouse Fountain Sculpture is built from 315 separate photos of the fountain. In the video of the talk, Blaise Aguera y Arcas describes the early research into this done at the University of Washington, and explains the social implications of incorporating photographs of major tourist attractions from a number of people: these photos themselves create social environments as they allow for shared meta-data, tagging all of the characters painted on the Sistine Chapel’s roof:

However, what also struck me about this is not only the possibility of enhanced images, but also how the nature of the software also shows its gaps: the move from one image to another is not seamless, but points out the fragmentary nature of its construction. Each individual piece is still visible. Photosynth attempts to create a 3D viewing experience, but cannot replace the trip to Italy to see Michelangelo’s work itself. Instead, it points out the limits of technology to capture that experience, and even the cognitive limits of humans to comprehend such panoramic vistas—in other words, the sublime. I of course am charmed by the idea of shared data, and look forward to some of the tagging work we’ll be doing at the Blanton next semester, but what Photosynth’s greatest charm for me is demonstrating so beautifully the value of the fragment as much as the power of the whole.

Image Meltdown

dsmith — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:04:38 +0000

A compelling essay on the current money mess by Charles Eisenstein at the eclectic and ambitious web magazine, Reality Sandwich, offers the following perspective on the larger meaning of “meltdown”:

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

What I found most insightful here is the claim about the looting of “[o]ur cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons.” German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said much the same thing in an interview. The director of such stunning features as Aguirre the Wrath of God, a narrative of conquistadors suffering their fates on the Orinoco, Fitzcarraldo, in which a barge famously is carried over a mountain in the Amazon, and Stroszek, the bleakly tender portrait of German outcasts adrift on the intercontinental loam of Wisconsin, claims that contemporary culture’s knowledge of the image is impoverished. In this 1979 interview, Herzog speaks with Roger Ebert, saying:

At the present time, I think that we do not know very much about the process of vision itself. This kind of knowledge is precisely what we need. We need it very urgently because we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It’s as simple as that! We have already recognized that problems like the energy shortage or the overpopulation of the world or the environmental crisis are great dangers for our society and for our kind of civilization, but I think it has not yet been understood widely enough that we also need new images.

While it’s terribly unfashionable to bring the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung into polite academic conversation, his arguments about the collective archetypes of the imagination remain provocative for my thinking about how we often identify with certain public images. Jung’s notion of a reservoir of images circulating within a collective unconscious is, if nothing else, stimulating and useful for understanding what Eisenstein and Herzog are getting at in their perspectives. In a period when images are frequently manipulated to persuade consumers to make purchases or for voters to make decisions on election day, it’s important to think about what else images are capable of provoking in us—or what knowledge they can perhaps lead us—or mislead us—into. The weight of Herzog and Eisenstein’s claims is apparent in our current geopolitical context of sinking fortunes—whether or not we believe in the existence of shared imagery and icons of a collective imagination. We inhabit a cultural milieu where the proliferation of images via print and digital technologies both preserve and confuse the historical record of our visual codes of perception and intelligence. In recovering the image by placing it in meaningful contexts we can begin to see the possibilities inherent in a world. A visual rhetoric might take as its first mission the contextualization of imagery more generally absorbed into the copia of contemporary cultural viewing habits.

Obama's Design

LaurenMitchell — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:31:15 +0000

As far as design goes, Obama has already won the presidency according to this New York Times article.

Apparently continuity in design is crucial to a campaign in the same way that a consistent message is, and Obama has been out-doing McCain and Clinton at least in this arena. Branding expert Brian Collins says that “From the bold ‘change’ signs to their engaging Web site to their recognizable lapel pins, [the Obama campaign has] used a single-minded visual strategy to deliver their campaign’s message with greater consistency and, as a result, greater collective impact.” Obama is also able to send a coherent message via the multitude of different media sources that we’re using today. It doesn’t stop there though--even Obama’s font is hip.

He’s using Gotham, which is modeled after the font used on signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. According to Collins, it has a “blunt, geometric simplicity” but also manages to be “warm.” I don’t know about all that, but it looks good to me.

I also found it interesting that he’s been able to personalize his brand through the use of state-specific buttons that fuse a state’s abbreviation letters with his familiar “O” symbol.

I agree with Collins in that it’s appropriate for a man who is clearly in tune with the power of rhetoric to also understand the power of visual rhetoric and design.