viz. - visual culture

Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 21:37:54 +0000

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

More importantly, it also meant the end of the show’s most-hated character, Joffrey, whose poisoning ended the episode. What intrigues me today, however, is the fan reaction to his death, recorded in GIFs, fan art, and videos. What does it mean to celebrate Joffrey’s death? What value does the reaction video have for audiences? and how does visual communication change the idea of reader-response?

Readers have long found ways to record their reactions to texts, whether in letters to friends or in the books themselves. Marginalia, as described by H. J. Jackson in her book Marginalia, reflects the visual structures of the book itself: “A tour of the annotated book from front to back, whether we consider conventional use or idiosyncratic variations, reveals that our customs and expectations, constant over time, are based on the conventional format of the book itself. In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement" (41). Thus, as footnotes go at the page's bottom, so does supplemental marginalia. For example, a recent reader found the following marginalia in a 1528 manuscript:

Image Credit: Superlinguo, via io9

Whether or not the reader was commenting on the abbot’s sexual practices or expressing disgust at the text, the reader leaving the marginalia communicates his reaction to others long after his death. During my own dissertation research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I found some interesting marginalia in this copy of the 1765 edition of the satirical poet Charles Churchill’s Works:

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider / Houghton Library

As one reader responds indignantly to Churchill’s “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” another mocks and subverts that reaction. We readers following them can not only enjoy the text but their mutual exchange. Readers today need not limit their reactions to the page’s margin, however, but can spread them over places like Twitter and YouTube, where websites like Buzzfeed and io9 curate them for other fans to read and enjoy:

Image Credit: Screenshot from io9

These responders use humor to comment on the show, responding not just to the details of one scene but the whole episode and series at large. Also, their writing participates and relies on other internet memes to be intelligible, as when Ol’ Qwerty Bastard adapt the Kanye West meme to apply to Game of Thrones. Just as book-readers use marginal comments in a similar fashion to print commentary, these reaction tweets are written for an Internet-literate audience and partake of its themes.

Image Credit: brienneoftarth

H/T: Brianna Hyslop

Likewise, GIFs and LOLCAT-like images are created to comment on the character and react to him based on the popular perception. For example, if one Tweeter compares the spoiled King Joffrey to the popstar Justin Bieber, one fan makes a Tumblr remixing images of both to write the comparison visually. Another fan comments on Joffrey’s cruelty by presenting Out-of-Context Joffrey, taking a line used to mock his uncle Tyrion and presenting it as a self-affirming bromide. These visuals don’t create new readings, but instead rely on an understood reading of Joffrey as terrible to make a joke. We can imagine Joffrey’s biological father Jaime running thus towards his dying son, but towards the wedding pie. Other fans will reblog GIFs of Joffrey dying alongside celebratory GIFs to represent their reactions.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Still others record their reactions on video rather than through remediated pictures or text. The reaction video is a genre which shows people watching some sort of media event (from Auburn’s surprising kick return against Alabama or the 2 Girls 1 Cup video) and responding to it. Fans of Game of Thrones have recorded their reactions to major events like the Red Wedding, in which several members of the Stark family are killed by Lannister agents, and this week’s Purple Wedding. Some of the reactions are NSFW, so at least put on your headphones first:

The viewers’ visible excitement contrasts oddly with the Joffrey’s audible choking and his mother’s raging grief, but these videos provide solidarity between the audience within and without the screen. There is a tension in some of the videos about how aware the person in the video is of being filmed: sometimes the video’s subject acknowledges the camera, sometimes they just react. We as an audience can also be cognizant of the person doing the filming, who understands what’s coming and wants to record it. Whereas marginalia is a semi-private act—one person reading alone and recording that reading—these reactions are performed for their viewing companions and the room and the wider YouTube audience. A whole bar breaking into applause at the critical moment shares solidarity in their reaction, and the viewer joins them in their joy. Yet the viewers’ enthusiasm—like the man who responds to Oleanna Tyrell saying “Help the poor boy!” with “No!”—seems not to be in doubt, as he stares at the TV and not the camera filming him. There’s a sense in which we are engaging with individuals in an unguarded moment, framed so by the knowing person holding the camera. The emotional exposure creates intimacy, even if it is highly mediated.

Image Credit: The Independent

I’d like to consider here how these videos also replicate the common film technique of the reaction shot, where within a movie the camera will scan other characters within the scene to see what they make of what’s happening. The Purple Wedding itself features many reactions, like Joffrey and the actors responding to Tyrion’s speech, or the people reacting to Joffrey’s death itself. The goal of a reaction shot is to reveal or obscure something about the character, depending whether or not their reaction appears onscreen. In a show where subterfuge and outright scheming are required—“when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”—no characters are allowed to react visibly with strong emotion. Only Cersei does so. That very tension may be why the reaction videos are so popular—they supply the place of what must be hidden, what cannot be expressed in Westeros. The film medium thus produces both reactions, and the means for viewers to react.

Children, Monsters and the Anticipation of Mayhem: Analyzing the Horror Photography of Joshua Hoffine (NSFW)

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:09:58 +0000

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

With Halloween on the horizon, I thought I'd take a break from the horror show of the campaign to consider some more visceral scares, and photographer Joshua Hoffine provides viscera aplenty in his works. The image above is one of Hoffine's tamer outings, though it is still disturbing. A small child stands outside before a clothes line hung with drying laundry. The sun shines behind a large white sheet, casting the shadow of a clown holding a bunch of balloons in one hand and displaying a set of menacing claws on the other. Hoffine uses children in many of his photos, contrasting the innocence and helplessness of childhood with the savage agency of monsters human and supernatural. Before we look at other photos, I suggest readers consider the images below the fold not safe for work or for those who prefer to avoid depictions of bodily violence and mutilation, death and decomposition, children in life threatening scenes, or children posed near their dead, violently murdered, parent's corpses.

Unlike many horror books and films where tension is built over time by hinting at or showing fleeting glimpses of the monster, the still photograph lacks a diachronic dimension. The image must choose one of three options: it can hint at some undepicted horror, depict some partial glimpse, or show it straight on. Hoffine's latest work, a dyptych of Jack The Ripper just before and after he kills and disembowels a woman, gestures toward a sense of elapsed time, but I don't find this work as affective as some of his other images. Readers can click through the links to see the pair, but I'm not including them here because I see such Ripper imagery as more exploitative than imaginative. I find the violence of the real world tragic and depressing and prefer the thrills and chills of zombies and ghouls. There is something about the bluntness of the evisceration that makes me read the image differently than other Hoffine works, akin to my distaste for the torture horror films of recent years contrasted with the still-horrific yet more pscyhologically-engaging-if-disturbing body horror in the style of Cronenberg, though this line of argument goes beyond the still images I want to consider in this post.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The first time you see Hoffine's more explicit images, the shock may be greater than his non-explicit works, but I find that they are not the works that stay most prominently in my memory. Sure, seeing a humanoid murderer wearing the stretched out skinned face of a mother, while her corpse lays on a table with her daughter coming around a corner in the background is shocking, but it lacks the anticipation offered in other works. And that anticipation, the waiting for the monster to act, helps embed the image in my mind, as if I'm continually expecting the action to complete itself, such as with the clown monster or the basement monster photo below.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The monster itself is quite explicit, lurking under the basement stairs, but it awaits the unsuspecting, pig-tailed little girl making her way toward its grasp, not yet confronting the terror that awaits her.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Hoffine also builds tension in some images of killers, though again, for me, with less effect. Above, we stand beyond a doorway looking into a kitchen. A young babysitter carries an infant, investigating a strange noise she heard just beyond the corner where we can see a maniacal killer waits with knife poised to strike. Below, we look through the keyhole of a door to discover the beheaded corpse of an ax murder victim, as the killer turns, ax in hand, to look back at us. For all three photos, the viewer's mind fills in what events next occur (or resists doing so), supplying a sense of impending doom that an explicit depiction of the moment of physical trauma alone (monster attack, knife attack, ax attack) would lack.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Un-imaged (and perhaps unimaginable) horror plays a central role in Hoffine's Pickman's Masterpice sequence. Hoffine explains the sequence in his behind-the-scenes blog (where he details the considerable work he, his crew and models go through). The sequence depicts a story by H.P. Lovecraft about an artist that paints realistic horrific images. In the sequence, we see the protagonist react to Pickman's masterpiece, but we do not see the painting itself, and again the viewer is left to fill in the blank.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

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!

Hey Girl, I Made This Meme For You

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark. Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image Credit: Poli Sci Ryan Gosling

In case you don’t know what a meme is, Richard Dawkins first defined it in The Selfish Gene (1976) as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Internet has lead to the proliferation of memes, from "all your base are belong to us,” to Xzibit Yo Dawg, to the most prolific of them all, the LOLcat. What many memes share is a consistent form: a picture with humorous text superimposed over it. Frequently the memes—like the LOLcat—even use the same fonts to create a visually consistent appearance. What these memes do is to create communities through the shared humor and enjoyment of the same structure. Thus, the LOLcat meme developed certainly consistent cat characters like Ceiling Cat, and further iterations would feature new references to Ceiling Cat.

Image Credit: Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling

The earliest Ryan Gosling meme started with a humble blog named Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling, which gained notoriety when Ryan Gosling read several posts from it during two separate MTV interviews. What followed were numerous other Tumblr blogs, including Feminist Ryan Gosling, Typography Ryan Gosling, Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling, Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling, and of course Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling. The Goslimania culminated in protests against Bradley Cooper when People declared him the Sexiest Man Alive over Ryan. While People will go on to find more sexy men and Gosling more work, I’m left wondering what this decidedly symbolic protest represents.

Image Credit: Feminist Ryan Gosling

Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent post on the topic argues that the Gosling meme only works as long as the pictures support what he says. When it came to versions like Feminist Ryan Gosling, “you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.” However, she argues that versions like Biostatistics Ryan Gosling go too far because they don’t fit the meme. She reads the meme’s appeal in the juxtaposition of star and text, creating connections between Gosling and his fans:

Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.

I agree with Peterson that the attraction lies in projecting shared values onto Gosling, particularly feminist ones. We female academics would like to think (and perhaps have reason to suspect) that Gosling shares our values, and that we could talk Laura Mulvey with him—or Susan Jarrett, or any other topic we enjoy. However, I also suspect that the Gosling meme works best on women of this type: political liberal, feminist, and educated. These viewers appreciates how Gosling’s mild, non-threatening appearance can be endlessly appropriated to fit their desires—which is why the meme’s life has extended so far beyond its original appearance. The Ryan Gosling meme's core lies not in Ryan Gosling, but in his audience.

Image Credit: Hey girl. I like the library too.

Thus, Steve Kolowich’s suggestion that “it is unclear whether the blogs are intended as pure irony or as a genuine experiment to test whether the following gambits stand a chance of working even under optimal conditions” is a complete misreading. None of these women are suggesting that the pickup lines attributed to Gosling in the images would work. Rather, Gosling is a space in which women can vocalize desire. I think this is why the meme has been adapted to include variants like Gael García-Bernal Feminista, Academic Coach Taylor and Fuck No Rick Santorum. If Gael García-Bernal Feminista adds social justice overtones and sensitive floppy hair, Academic Coach Taylor embodies a more authoritative—though equally feminist—intellectual male. Fuck No Rick Santorum explicitly flips Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling to protest Santorum's sexist political policies. When so much Internet culture is explicitly sexist, the Ryan Gosling Tumblr memes constitute a safe space for feminist—and female heterosexual—discourse.

From Sea to Shining McDonald's, and Other Americas: Critical Cartography II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image by Stephen von Worley

Last week, I wrote about the power of cold-war era maps when it comes to visualizing Western attitudes towards the Soviet bloc, and, in the work of William Bunge, visualizing themselves. This week I want to continue my trip down critical cartography's rabbit-hole with an overview of maps that attempt to locate forms of the "American experience." How can aspects of daily life in America be represented visually? The following maps try to answer that question, in playful, political, and subversive ways.

The image above, Stephen von Worley recounts on his website, is one attempt to answer the question, "How far away can you get from the world of generic convenience?" Transforming each McDonald's in the contiguous 48 states into one dot, von Worley redraws the US as an enormous network of lights. (The answer to the question, by the way, is 145 miles, by car, in southwestern South Dakota.) The map makes a compelling, if simple, statement about the prevalence of corporate experience throughout America.

Image: New York Times

Jumping from the corporate to the political, this 2008 map from the New York Times charts a single voter's relative political influence in the US. States have been resized based on a comparison of state population with the number of electoral votes allotted (it should be noted that the state population does not accurately reflect the number of acutal voters). The larger the state, the larger the influence. The size of Wyoming and the Dakotas should come as no surprise to anyone, but one thing the map handily reveals is the relative power of voters in Washington, D.C., Vermont, and Rhode Island. As the commentary that accompanies the map suggests, visuals like these help reveal the "one-person one-vote" myth that's prevalently held on both sides of the ideological divide; the truth, as always, is much more complicated.

Image: The Big Picture

The map above comes from Frank Jacobs's Strange Maps blog, an excellent web resource for all maps non-traditional (you'll note several maps from this post there). It breaks down the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into the GDPs of each individual state, and then renames each state with the name of a country with a similar GDP. The result is a fascinating international picture. This map is rough, of course, and doesn't take into account a per capita GDP, but, as Jacobs explains it, "this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states' economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico's and Russia's economies are about equal size, Ireland's is twice as big as New Zealand's)." What emerges is a truly unique view of the American economy (check his website for a more detailed account of the map).

Image by Matthew Zook

By contrast, the maps above and below, created by the folks over at FloatingSheep, reveal a very different American experience. According to their website, the cartographers at Floating Sheep are "dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks." While this can sound drily academic, the maps they generate are often anything but. As they note, Google Maps documents users "memories, feelings, biases, and reactions to places," and though the site is powered by serious analytic and academic work, the maps capture the "collective intelligence"--or maybe better yet the collective unconscious--of internet users. Above, the group has mapped Google Map references to bars versus Google Map references to grocery stores. More references to bars generates a red dot. More grocery stores, a yellow. Who knew that Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota would be bar central? (Actually, as someone who grew up smack dab in one patch of red and went to college in another, I did...) In the map below, data from the PriceofWeed website (sorry, it's an academic post, no link; I imagine you can find it if you want) is mapped onto the US, creating an interesting picture of high-productivity growing and import areas.

Image: FloatingSheep

Image: Strange Maps

To conclude, two maps that zoom in geographically, taking a closer look at America. The first map, above, was produced by Paramount in the late 1930's (several different dates are floating around on the internet) by a seemingly unknown cartographer. It's a map of studio locations and where they've stood in for--a geography of fantasy, or good ol' Hollywood wish fulfillment. It's sort of boggling to see Spain next to San Diego, or Sherwood Forest just north of the Red Sea. I find it a charming representation of global geography, and perhaps more proof that--as my Northern Californian friends would say--SoCal residents think they're at the center of the world.

I've saved my favorite map for last, a particularly evocative image from Denis Wood's ongoing Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights. Long a kind of mythic cartographic project, Wood has been making creative, non-traditional maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, NC for over four decades. Parts of that project were recently published as Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which is well worth looking into if maps interest you in the slightest. Wood, whose work has been featured on This American Life, makes maps of jack-o-lanterns, locations referenced in local papers, graffiti, and other non-standard ways of visualizing space. At their best, his maps challenge you to reconceptualize the world around you. The map below, simply entitled "Stars Map", is an attempt to situate Boylan Heights "in everything, that is, in the universe" according to Wood. I think there's something simple and evocative captured in the image, something I won't spoil with continued analysis. You can get a taste of some of Wood's other work here, and (as mentioned above) many of these maps have now been published.

Image by Denis Wood

A Modern Take on Still Life

fc — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:55:50 +0000

Image Credit: David Halliday on samuseum.org

Photographer David Halliday's current exhibition of still lifes at the San Antonio Museum of Art contains some stunningly beautiful and surreal photographs of food. It also lends itself to use in the rhetoric classroom and could be used for teaching lessons about visual literacy, changing contexts and visual rhetoric within communities. More about Halliday, still life and possible classroom uses after the break.

David Halliday is a New Orleans based photographer-turned-chef-turned-photographer. The photograph above is one of a series of still lifes produced in Italy using local ingredients and an old tin box. Halliday describes his "box" series, his own relationships to photography and food, and his current San Antonio exhibition in this interview on Zester Daily. In that interview, Halliday tells Liz Pearson that one direct inspiration for the series came from the Italian painter Caravaggio's still life paintings that were circulating on Italian currency when he was in the country. Halliday's subject matter (fish, vegetables, etc.) fall directly into the great tradition of European still life painting, and his use of lighting and his sepia-toned silver prints do a better job than most photographs of capturing the visual appeal of great Dutch or Italian still lifes. Many of the images make local ingredients appear like alien life-forms, like this de-familiarizing shot of a magnificent Italian cauliflower.

Image Credit: David Halliday on ZesterDaily.com

While these photographs are visually interesting devoid of context, they might provide a great way for rhetoric instructors to bring discussions of context and visual literacy into the classroom. Traditional still life paintings use fruits, vegetables, fish, pheasants and other types of produce as a doubled system of signs. The natural bounty arranged on tables or in baskets stood as signs of wealth and bounty but also as memento mori. Life is good, they tell us and their original burgher viewers, but it doesn't last. The arrangements are attractive and the subjects usually appetizing, but the produce, unlike the painting, has a very short shelf-life. Having been caught, picked or plucked, they will soon be rotting. Some still life painters, including Caravaggio, even include signs of decay (wilting leaves, shriveling grapes, flies, etc.) to drive home the point.

While they obviously look back to those Early Modern paintings, Halliday's photographs show no signs of rotting, but they do evoke the freshness and thereby the transience of their subjects. Rather than evoking a 17th century sense of mortality, Halliday's focus lingers on the food itself, and in an era of refrigerators, chemical preservatives and grocery stores that stock the same products year round, really conceiving of our food as part of a natural, seasonal cycle may be just as shocking as coming to terms with our own mortality. The change in context--the difference between pre- and post-industrial worlds--accounts for the shifting target of the images. Caravaggio's viewers could use seasonal produce as a familiar object with which to contemplate the less familiar concept of their transient lives. For Halliday's viewers, the produce itself is unfamiliar and worthy of contemplation.

This type of contemplation is encouraged by several contemporary movements away from processed preserved packaged foods and towards fresh, seasonal and even local ingredients. The Halliday exhibition was put together in part because the curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art wanted to connect the museum's mission with several changes in the local community including the opening of several new farmer's markets and a San Antonio campus of the Culinary Institute of America. Halliday's photographs dovetail with his personal interest in his own vegetable garden and the curator's interest in local farmer's markets: each moves food out of the system of global distribution and economies of scale and back into the cycle of seasons and cultivation where food is produce and not an industrial product.

Halliday's photographs might not operate in the same registers as his early-modern predecessors, but they do ultimately use images of food to make us reflect on our own lives. Rather than reminding us that life is short and we're going to die, his still life photographs remind us that our lives are part of a larger system and that the food that sustains our lives comes from the same ground to which we will eventually return.

A Politics of Plating

fc — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:46:10 +0000

Image Credit: Evan Sung for the New York Times

A recent article in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times led me to rethink the importance of visual culture in the current round of debates about food in America. In a shift from the usual conversation about how food is deceitfully misrepresented in branding or advertising, the article at hand got me thinking about the role played by the visual presentations of actual meals. Thinking about plating allows us to revisit the relationship between food and visual culture and reimagine sight as a creative component of foodways—instead of a predatory marketing ploy—with the potential to positively impact the ways we eat.

The role of visual culture and rhetoric in marketing, branding and otherwise selling food has received a fair share of attention lately. The opening sequence of Food Inc. (read Tim’s review here), for instance, tells us how the agrarian ideal depicted on our grocery store products masks the lurid industrialization of agribusiness. The seemingly omnipresent Michael Pollan (whose In Defense of Food is currently playing a central role in the rhetoric curriculum at UT Austin) often portrays sight as a villain, warning us never to eat anything we’ve SEEN advertised. Visual critiques of the fast food industry have even shown up in different ways on this blog (see here and here ) . For the moment, I want to ignore all of that and think about tweezers.

Oliver Strand’s Times article on the culinary uses of surgical tweezers is unlikely to draw the attention of any but a niche audience of foodies and kitchen enthusiasts, but the descriptions of plating offered by the chefs he interviewed should catch the eye of anyone familiar with theories about photography, poetry or any number of aesthetic and cultural productions:

“It’s harder to make it look like you didn’t try,” said the chef David Chang, whose kitchen crew at Momofuku Ko tweezes extensively. “It’s more difficult to make it seem it’s plated as it falls. That’s what we call it, ‘as it falls.’ It’s not rustic. It’s naturalistic. It sounds stupid, but you’re using tweezers to make it seem natural.”

There are a number of points here, but the first thing to notice is the difference between natural and naturalistic. “Rustic,” for those who don’t keep up on gastronomical lingo, is another term for “country” or “home-style” presentations of food. Rustic dishes can be accomplished with much less precision than what is typical of haute cuisine. Chef Chang wants to draw a distinction between “rustic” plating—food that actually falls where it will—and a “naturalistic” presentation that is painstakingly made to appear plated “as it falls.” Strand sees this as part of a larger trend:

Increasingly, this kind of naturalism is the look of fine dining. Symmetry and geometry are giving way to artful jumbles and cascading forms. Microgreens, for instance, seem to have drifted in on a gentle breeze. It all might look tossed together, but it’s about as accidental as a $200 bed-head haircut.

The plating should LOOK accidental, but the presentation isn’t any more natural than the dialogue in a Wordsworth lyric or the musculature in a Gericault.

So, as with the grocery store in the into to Food Inc. or the photoshopped breakfast sandwich in Tim’s post above, we find that plating presents food as something it is not. Even the industrial concerns of uniformity and homogenization seem to be at work behind the scenes: Strand reports that “Chefs say tweezers let them assemble meticulous compositions quickly, and with such consistency they look the same every time.” And we can't forget that chefs share with agribusiness and fast food the same goal of selling you food (though, of course, they have very different business models).

Despite these similarities, plating—the visual presentation of individual meals—provides us with a potential counterbalance to the visual exploitation of consumers by glossy prints of food and farms that have little to do with the product they purchase. The goal of marketing images is moving the consumer to the point of sale, and they often accomplish this goal by obscuring either the product or its origins. The grocery story is full of bucolic images of ideal farms meant to keep us from thinking about the factory our milk came from or the exploited migrant worker picking our winter tomatoes. The fast food menu board is not there as a point of reference—“your bacon cheeseburger will look like this”—but as an incitement to forget what the order looked like last time and order it again. In this system, food is a commodity, and companies want consumers thinking about the consumption, not the production, of that commodity.

Plating, on the other hand—even semi-deceptive naturalistic tweezing—draws attention to the food itself and invites us to contemplate the ingredients and the craft that went into its production. Chefs spend time plating in fine dining kitchens because they want their customers to appreciate the skill that went into planning, prepping, cooking and serving the meal, especially since those efforts can’t generally be seen from the dining room. A well arranged plate invites contemplation. While it might not force us to ask if our tuna was sustainably fished or whether our busboy is paid a living wage, it does move food out of the realm of interchangeable commodities, and, in doing so, it asks for more from us than thoughtless consumption.

Plating might be most important at home. Most of us don’t eat the majority of our meals at Corton or Momofuku Ko, so tweezer-positioned microgreens are unlikely to have much impact on our consciousness or our behavior. On the other hand, those of us who cook at home (and cooking more at home is one of the best things you can do for your health, your budget and your carbon footprint) might benefit from being more intentional with our plating. An attractive plate invites us, even as home diners, to pause momentarily and consider the food we are eating. By drawing attention to the craft of cooking, it can earn home cooks some well-earned respect (even from ourselves) and help open a space for us to be conscious diners instead of mindless consumers.

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

Being Seen: Photographing the Blind

mvalentine — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:52:38 +0000

This semester, while teaching a course called "Photographic Narratives" for the Plan II Honors Program at UT Austin, I organized a panel of four top local photographers. One of the panelists, Sarah Wilson, brought work from her BLIND PROM series, which precipitated a discussion of ethics and the history of photography.

Image Credit: Paul Strand

This 1916 image by Paul Strand is one of the earliest notable photos of a blind subject.

In an effort to create candid street photos, Strand had been using a trick camera with a false lens that misdirected attention (like a magician waving his wand—look over there!), allowing the photographer to get close to his subjects without their knowledge. That subterfuge was unnecessary in this case. The blind woman is the perfect subject for a photographer like Strand—“the objective corollary of the photographer’s longed-for invisibility” as described by critic Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment.

Portraitist Richard Avedon had different motivations for photographing a blind subject. As he explained in the introduction to his 2002 book Richard Avedon Portraits, “I photograph what I’m most afraid of, and Borges was blind.”

Blindness represents an obvious existential terror for photographers, for whom eyesight is requisite for personal expression as well as livelihood. Which is probably why the blind are so often represented in photographs as miserable or isolated. How else would you portray a subject who is living your own nightmare?

Image Credit: Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus photographed blind subjects (including Borges) among the transvestites, dwarfs, twins and bodybuilders that populate her portfolios. In observing Arbus’s photos of the blind, we are more consciously aware of the same voyeuristic exhilaration and guilt we perceive when viewing photographs of any peculiar human subjects: we can see them, study them, scrutinize them, pity them, envy them—but those eyes are just dark grains on white paper. Those eyes can’t see us. They’re not even eyes.

In her series BLIND PROM, Sarah Wilson introduces a new dynamic to the exercise of photographing the blind. In documenting prom night at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Wilson has assumed a ceremonial role in the most sacred of adolescent rituals. The photographer is as essential to the complete experience as the DJ or the chaperone.

As demanded by tradition, the young men and women of TSBVI wear tuxedoes, corsages, evening gowns and neckties. Sighted sorority sisters from the University of Texas volunteer their expertise with hair and makeup. The blind girls cough in clouds of hairspray and hold out their fingers so their nails can be polished.

And if you find yourself wondering why blind teenagers should engage in the same image-conscious primping over which sighted students (controversially) obsess, Sarah Wilson’s photos may invite you to wonder instead, why shouldn’t they? The blind shouldn’t be excluded from the profound and superficial experience of presenting oneself to be seen by others.

"[The blind students] understand that when a professional photographer comes and takes their picture, it's important," Wilson said. Dressing up and posing for the camera is not about seeing oneself, it’s about revealing oneself—either as an act of vanity or as an act of self-expression.

Sarah Wilson’s BLIND PROM is featured this month at the PhotoNOLA exhibition in New Orleans.

"Trick or Treat, Smell my Feet..."

Andi — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:28:36 +0000

H/T: The New York Times

I found that I just couldn't resist finding some possible posting that connects to Halloween and it didn't take me long to stumble across an article in the New York Times that focuses on grade school guidelines for appropriate costumes. Apparently several elementary and secondary schools across the county are urging (or requiring) students to limit their choice of costume to selections that are not scary, not offensive, not violent. While it seems completely understandable to restrict students from wearing costumes that rely on offensive stereotypes, I wonder where these schools draw the line on what exactly is appropriate. Restricting children's costumes raises several provocative questions: is Halloween a tradition that does/should celebrate horror? Are children already exposed to too many violent images (in other words, is a zombie scarier than Grand Theft Auto)? What should be the role of the parent in policing appropriate costumes? the role of the school in policing appropriate dress?

The article includes the details of a memo circulated by Riverside Elementary School in Southern California elaborating on the parameters for costumes including "no costume should depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary" "no weapons, even fake ones" and "no fake fingernails." This memo also suggested that no costume should be demeaning with respect to race, nationality, gender, or ability. Now prohibiting fake fingernails seems less obvious to me, and I can't begin to know how exactly "scary" will be defined, but restricting costumes that are demeaning seems a no-brainer. A quick scan of the collection of children's costumes online yields many ridiculous choices.

Screen capture: HalloweenCostumes4Kids.com

The first website I looked at has an "Indian Running Bull" costume for young boys and Princess Jasmine from Disney's Aladdin for girls. These costumes certainly have the Disney-esque about them but many scholars and critics have slammed Disney for its demeaning depictions of race, ethnicity, gender. These costumes are not "scary" but I wonder whether we would really categorize them as "positive" (a costume characteristic called for by several Texas schools). Are young children remaking themselves in the image of their favorite television character any less "scary" than ghosts, goblins, or ghouls?

Call for Papers – ULI: Journal of Visual Arts and Culture

John Jones — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:34:32 +0000

ULI: Journal of Visual Arts and Culture has issued a CFP for its inaugural issue. Here’s a description of the journal:

The publication aims to critique and document contemporary developments in the visual arts and culture of Nigeria, Africa and the world. It shall open up and sustain debate on issues in Nigerian and international art as a way of contributing to art scholarship and professionalism in the so-called Third World.

The journal will be published by the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The submission deadline for the first issue is November 31, 2008. More details, including contact info, can be found here.

via Bagfactory