viz.

Image source: Dissolve.com

Branding and corporate marketing can be bizarre. Sure, there are the big brands, the Disney’s or Budweisers or Coca-Colas, whose very names evoke our day-to-day experience of the products they market. For those of us who like to think about how visual rhetoric interacts with pop culture, these iconic multinationals can provide endless streams of data. Watching how such companies endlessly race to reflect or mold global and American cultures so as to increase visibility may sometimes be a depressing project, but it is always fascinating. But what about the guys who we don’t interact with on a daily basis?

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film.  In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester.  Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

                   Image source: Dinosaur Comics

The bulk of my last posting was spent singing the praises of Mr. David McCandless; as anyone who has checked out any of his work before or since then can attest to, such accolades are/were more than justified.

Specifically, I loved his “rhetological” fallacies project, where he vizualized a colorful list of about 50 different rhetorical or logical fallacies, and created an unadorned yet arresting image to accompany each of them.  Pretty cool stuff.

Image Credit: Rhetological Fallacies

As an instructor teaching an introductory rhetoric course, I sympathize with my students, I truly do.  I don’t mean this in some sort of self-effacing “so sad for them, they lost the instructor lottery, I suck.”  To the contrary, when one considers the fact that I have to engage 18-year-olds at 9:30 in the morning on matters as dry as the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic notions concerning rhetoric, and/or the finer points of JSTOR navigation, I’d say that I do a halfway decent job.

“Do not cede your desire" – Jacques Lacan

"Desire is a gift in life” – Chris Corner (IAMX)

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, is a brilliant study in desire as well as an implicit deconstruction of the opposition between pornography and art. My recent visit there thus not only provided me with much food for thought and aesethetic enjoyment, but certainly tickled my loins. The WEAM (yes, even the acronym for the joint sounds suspiciously erotic) has captured the hearts not only of Floridians, but art-lovers from all around the world as well, so I'd love to have the pleasure of sharing my experience of the museum with you.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Screenshot from student project Evolution, Not Revolution by Lacey Teer

Last semester, I wrote my final blog post about using iMovie in the classroom. This semester, I attempted to correct some of the issues that arose when I asked all my students to use multimodal argumentation for their final papers. What follows is an outline of the final project I assigned and information about the changes I made to address various problems. This information will also appear on our "Teaching" page, along with sample student projects.

Image Credit:  Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre.  In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

The New York Times has an article on architects Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo of Graft, who have designed a new condo tower in Manhattan, the W Downtown, with glass walls. According to Fletcher and Lillo, the purpose of the see-through design is to “[work] out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism”:

Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”