Vernacular Rhetoric: Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16963133@N02/sets/72157625282129752/detail/

Speaking of Visualizations

Here's one keyed to tweeting candidates for the midterm election. Oddly, it seems to me, the red candidates have more tweets coming their way than the blue candidates. Anyone have a theory on this?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/politics/2010-twitter-candidates.html

Facebook Profile Pic as Genre with Conventions?

click to zoom in

JSTOR's "Data for Research" Beta Edition and TextArc

Just wanted to share what I learned in Digital Scholars today, because there's visual rhetoric written all over it. First, JSTOR is piloting a new project "Data for Research." Take a look here. In essence, this new project represents a new way to mine JSTOR data by utilizing visual tools--bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts. It seems like the humanities are appropriating (is that the right word?) these visual tools more and more. Try it out--and let JSTOR know what you think. By the way, a basic search for the term "visual" delivered the results you see here. There is clearly an increasing appearance of the term in the JSTOR database (although, when you reduce the scale to the past decade, you discover a sharp decline in the term in the past three years. Hmmm). Is this useful?

Next is a project called TextArc--check it out here . Try out the Hamlet or the Alice in Wonderland sample. This project attempts to visualize the connections between words in a text, scanning through the individual words to visualize how they connect.

My question about all this is: so what? Does this help us in our discipline? Are these useful tools that help us think about knowledge and produce useful new knowledge? Or are they merely pedagogical fireworks? And what could Visual Rhetoric's role be in all of this?

Visual Ethics: A List of References

Allen, Nancy (1996). Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing's Not Believing Anymore. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(1), 87-105.

Barton and Barton, Ideology and the Map

Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, White, Linda Feldmeier, Dunn, Patricia, Heifferon, Barbara A., & Cheu, Johnson (2001). Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability. CCC, 52(3), 368-398.

Caricato, Josephine A. (2000). Visuals for Speaking Presentations: An Analysis of the Presenter's Perspective of Audience as a Partner in Visual Design. Technical Communication, 47(4), 496-514.

Darley, Andrew. Simulating Natural History: Walking With Dinosaurs as Hyper-Real Edutainment

Dombrowski, Paul (2003). Ernst Haeckel's Controversial Visual Rhetoric. Technical Communication Quarterly, 12(3), 303-319.

Dragga, Sam (2003). Hiding humanity: Verbal and visual ethics in accident reports. Technical Communication, 50, 61-82.

Dragga, Sam, & Voss, Dan (2001). Cruel Pies: The Inhumanity of Technical Illustrations. Technical Communication, 48(3), 265-274.

Fahnestock, visual tropes/visual rhetoric

Gould, Stephen Critique of the "march of progress of mankind"

Kienzler, Donna "Visual Ethics" in the Journal of Business Communication (Vol. 34, 1997)

Kostelnick and Roberts, Designing Visual Language.

Manning, Alan, & Amare, Nicole (2006). Visual-rhetoric Ethics: Beyond Accuracy and Injury. Technical Communication, 53(2), 195-211.

McCandless, David The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia by

Richards, Anne R., & David, Carol (2005). Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web. Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 31-48.

Scott, J. Blake (2003). Extending Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis: Transformations of Home HIV Testing. College English, 65(4), 349-367.

Voss, Dan, & Flammia, Madelyn (2007). Ethical and Intercultural Challenges for Technical Communicators and Managers in a Shrinking Global Marketplace.Technical Communication, 54(1), 72-87.

Vernacular Visual Rhetoric

What Muslims wear: see http://muslimswearingthings.tumblr.com/

What Does the Display of Visual Information Add?: Your Choice

We’ve now considered various dimensions of visual rhetoric, including the more utilitarian located in yet another history. Choose one of these questions. What is the role of history in shaping visual rhetoric? What is required for an adequate theory of visual rhetoric?

Visualizing the Great Recession

Some of you may have already seen this, but I found this essay on NYTimes.com on photojournalism and the recession via a blog post by George Packer in The New Yorker. Seems more than relevant to our semester in general and this past week's class in particular.

American Gothic Redux

From the NYTimes today, a picture of pot farmers that reminded me of American Gothic. Anyone else?

My point is that not all visual quotations (eg, Ground Zero) have to be somber. Some of them are amusing, calling into question the icon as as well what the icon represents.

Catalog Living

I found this site a couple of weeks ago and with the Tange reading it seems like a perfect time to share.

The writer takes images from home decorating sites and mocks the uselessness and emptiness of most "middle class" decorating by creating a family that lives in the pages. It takes a couple of images and captions to get into her joke, but once you're in...it's hilarious.

Catalog Living

The syllabus asks, "We’ve had competing theories as to the epistemology of the visual. Qua Berger, it’s narrative; qua some authors in HH, it’s argument. What does seeing visuals as rhetorical add to the mix?" Now it might be that you see narrative and argument as overlapping. It might be that you'd like to add another epistemological paradigm into the mix. It might be that you'd like to focus on the role of emotion in knowing. At the end of the day, what does all this have to do with visual rhetoric?

And why might I choose this image for this SRR?

Visual Rhetoric: Definition by Community

Visual Rhetoric is a perspective on interpreting objects or an artifact. Additionally, Helmer states that rhetoricians are engaged with the ways vis. images are carriers of meaning. She also considers image making as a semiotic practice, and meaning making is a transaction (Helmers) among the image maker, the audience, and the context. Goggin defines context as spatial, temporal, and material. In other words, it's so ambiguous that it escapes a concrete definition.from Kendra and Sonny :)

Visual Rhetoric :• That which is visual (including the visual nature of alphabetic texts)• Rhetorical o Act of human construction o Involves intent or purpose (on the part of the rhetor and/or the audience) o Involves a transactional making of meaning (between artifact, creator, audience, and context) o Contains the potential for an argument (created by either the artist or audience); it acts as a vehicle (maybe a vessel) for argumentation Natalie and Larkin (the most awesomest)

Jessica and Katie


Visual Rhetoric:
- Continuum of aesthetic to vernacular
- Ambiguity
- Longevity
- Object, artifact, image
- Based on personal experience and the viewer along with the audience
o Transactional relationship between creator and viewer
o Transactional relationship between creator and visual
o Transaction relationship between visual viewer
- Narrative
- Context
- Circulation

- Increased circulation à increased rhetoricity

- As the viewer experiences images that personal experience is transactional both in terms of creator and viewer as well as viewer and image.

From Jenn and Rory:"We approached visual rhetoric in one of two ways: the composing of a visual artifact and the analysis of a visual artifact. Here, the two are dependent on one another (that is, one cannot analyze an artifact that isn’t created) but the two acts can be mutually exclusive. In terms of analysis, one must decide first what falls under the category of visual artifact and then what frame one wants to use to conduct that analysis."

visual rhetoric is the practices and the artifacts of graphic representation (Goggin) that performs work (possibly persuasive or cultural) on an audience.Leigh and Elizabeth

Aesthetics/Vernacular

I think it is difficult to draw a bright line between the vernacular and the aesthetic. Helmers divides the two in terms of naïve vs. knowledgeable viewers. Helmers seems to be talking about the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A,” meaning a specifically defined museum or Artworld (also with a capital “A”) conceptualization of aesthetic experience, context/frame of reference, and evaluation criteria, which together comprise what Helmers calls “appropriate socially coded levels of seeing” (82). Although Helmers clearly has issues with this idea of the Aesthetic, in terms of how it operates as what Goggin would call a class-bound threshold separating Artworld insiders and outsiders, Helmers’ division of naïve and knowledgeable viewers fails to recognize the conscious aesthetic frameworks that define so-called vernacular visual expressions. Goggin’s history of samplers, especially their early history in which samplers were used and circulated as inventive sources for creating images, demonstrates their aesthetic framework – their media, techniques, contexts, and criteria for judging quality.

Perhaps what makes needlework, as opposed to oil painting, vernacular is its grassroots, non-Artworld origin. So, is vernacular imagery defined as non-Artworld imagery? But don’t many non-Artworld image-making contexts have their own aesthetic thresholds that divide insiders from outsiders? Josh talked about graffiti as a vernacular artform. In one sense, I can agree – it is grassroots, urban, and outside formal systems of Artworld support. However, graffiti writers (yeah, they’re called writers, since much of their imagery includes words – talk about your semasiographic vs. glottographic systems!) operate within highly coded contexts that function aesthetically and territorially – i.e., tagging. As an outsider to the graffiti scene, I might be able to construct my own narratives to make meaning from graffiti I see and admire, but I lack the graffiti-specific aesthetic knowledge to “fully” understand it.

(re)Location, Narrative, and Meaning

I’ll start by clarifying that I see the vernacular as a flexible classification of art and the aesthetic as an element of art is general, and thus an element of the vernacular. The “everyday,” in my opinion, has a distinct aesthetic that functions in specific ways that engender its “everydayness.”
As I thought about the relationship between the vernacular and how we see, Marguerite Helmers came to mind. She discusses the importance of narrative in understanding/making meaning in the visual. In displaying an image, a curator will seek to (re)construct a narrative that frames our understanding of the art. This builds on the narrative that the viewer shapes and relies on as a way of making/finding meaning in the piece. The fodder of this narrative, however, is not only what is visible before the viewer. Helmers observes that although a spectator may be naïve about “painterly symbolism, the spectator may be quite sophisticated with narrative options, learned from the realm of the visual an verbal cultural imaginary.” I think that it is the nature of this narrative that contributes to the characterizes the vernacular as well as how and what we see in "the everyday."

As we construct narratives around the vernacular, these narratives are more immediate than the narratives that we construct around, say, “high art.” Let’s take, for example, the silhouettes in the iPod’s popular ad campaign. The vernacular function of these images is emblematic of the vernacular in general. In these silhouettes, strategically placed in various contexts as they are, we can literally fill ourselves – or some fantasy of ourselves -- into the image. There is a rather literal space for us in these images as they simultaneously reflect and materialize a piece of our lived experience.
Another example is the several mosaics found in Pompeii of dogs lying on the floor. Often found in the entryway of homes, we are able to locate ourselves within these images in an immediate and material way. The narrative that we construct, as did contemporaries of these images, is one in which we are active participants and respondents. These images are in active dialogue with the material circumstances that surround us.

Although non-vernacular art enters and shapes our experience, it is not, I think in active and material dialogue with the materialities that we most immediately embody. We cannot, as with high art, embody the narratives that we construct as a way of making meaning and seeing ourselves on a local level. This material seeing of ourselves is an indication of the more narrow aesthetic functioning in the vernacular. As “the aesthetic” varies in both degree and kind, the aesthetic of the vernacular is shaped by circulation and context. The vernacular can be read through its circulation in the everyday (here, an acknowledgment of the different “vernaculars” that exist in our society).


For example, I think that the Mona Lisa has become vernacular. This reflects the changing aesthetic of the image. Here, I am suggesting that this is largely attributable to the increased circulation and the subsequent presence of this image in our daily lives. The Mona Lisa has become an image where thenarrative constructed as a way of making meaning is significantly different from the narrative constructed by viewers who only saw the image displayed in the Louvre. Here again, we are seeing broader circulation and increased circulation (ie we see it more frequently and in more forms – coffee cup, etc.).
As for the relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric: Helmers articulates a critical component of the relationship between the above and visual rhetoric when she writes that visual rhetoricians “consider the temporal and spatial implications of context: the ways in which the meaning of a single image can alter dramatically due to placement, context, cropping and captioning.” To this, I would add circulation. However, when we are considering the rhetoricity of an image both the vernacular and the aesthetic are contingent upon and often relative to individual contexts from which narratives emerge that encase our understandings of images as well as the overlapping and divergent flows of images through and around these contexts – flows that locate meaning on a soda bottle, in a museum, or on the sidewalk.

Josh and Katie in the Kitchen: On the Vernacular and the Aesthetic

Katie and I were standing in the kitchen on Sunday evening discussing this question while we were trying to make popcorn balls. During our discussion, we were both alternating between stirring the hot sugar syrup and trying not to burn the popcorn in the pot. The dark red syrup was bubbling and our talk was punctuated by the sound of popcorn kernels exploding inside the pot (a lame attempt at pictorialism). I think we both agreed that we appreciated Goggins' emphasis on the material and I think we’re both interested in the relationship between circulation and the meaning of images. I mentioned that in one of my SRRs I wrote:

“. . .the fact that images are so pervasive makes me wonder if an essential component of the field of visual rhetoric should also include an investigation of delivery systems. . . These delivery systems may be an important part of my definition of “image” since they seem to define the terms in which we think about and encounter images. . .”

First, I see these “delivery systems” as the location of meaning in images. Helmers states that “[m]eaning is not located in the object itself” (65). Similarly, I would argue that the images themselves don’t contain any meaning but rather the meaning is determined via its delivery system(s). In other words, the delivery system determines the context in which the image is delivered; this context then determines how the image is interpreted. The delivery system operates much like a caption, although less explicitly—it encourages how an image should be read. The reach of the particular delivery systems determines how much meaning can be derived from the image—the greater the reach, the more multiple its meanings (I’m thinking especially of Ground Zero Spirit as a good example). The extent of this reach (and thus the extension of meaning) is based upon material factors that both produce and reproduce the image. Ground Zero Spirit was reproduced extensively (as were many September 11th images) and innumerable meanings were, as a result, generated. In particular, I see the material through which an image is delivered as fundamental to a reading of an image. Goggins argues that “[a]ll discursive practices may be best understood as material practices” and I agree since delivery systems are material constructs (89).
In any case, there seem to be two factors that potentially determine whether an artifact is deemed vernacular or not. First, like Ground Zero Spirit, an artifact has such a broad, wide reach that its audience is extensive; second, the artifact appears in a context deemed to be “vernacular.” In the first case, because an image is so ubiquitous, there are opportunities for others to re-interpret and, more commonly, remix the image. What could be more ubiquitous than the Starbuck’s logo?

In the second case, whether an artifact is deemed “vernacular” depends on the context in which it is placed. Goggins writes that “the materiality of semiotic practices and artifacts is socially, culturally and politically constructed” (89). These constructions have determined at us what contexts/spaces are vernacular or formal/official. These constructions influence our “reading” of the image (and this is why I think an understanding of architecture is so important—it’s appropriate that Hefland starts out with a quote from Tschumi). So, for example, we have street art in which the context is vernacular:
In addition, I tend to think that a context is deemed “vernacular” based upon access; the more broad-based the access, the more likely it will be labelled “vernacular.” The tighter the access (and that includes access to the allocative/authoritative resources), the greater the likelihood that the context would be deemed official or formal (and this is why a discussion of delivery systems should always involve class issues). On the other hand, we have the street artist Banksy who, due to his wide appeal, is crossing over from vernacular spaces to official gallery spaces. I find this cross-over particularly interesting—it would seem like an instance in which official space is attempting to appropriate something from vernacular space. How Banksy’s work is “read” on the street, I think most would agree, is read quite differently from the way it is “read” in the gallery. This brings me to the “aesthetic.”
The term “aesthetic” is the trickier of the two. Whereas I am connecting “vernacular” to a material context in opposition to a “high” context, the “aesthetic” stretches across all contexts. In the case of the Starbuck’s logo or the street art there is an aim towards some type of aesthetic response (either positive or negative) in vernacular contexts. In a formal space, such as a traditional art gallery, the context encourages a specific aesthetic response whereas a vernacular space seems to be self-consciously responding to the “official” aesthetic expectations. Sontag writes that, when photographs are viewed in museum or gallery space, “photographs cease to be ‘about’ their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they become studies in the possibilities of photography” (133). A museum space creates a structure in which we have come to understand that the contents within must be understood as “aesthetic” artifacts in a specific way. I agree with Helmers that “exhibitors are powerful mediators in the reception of texts” (78). Again, it comes down to delivery systems—how an artifact is delivered determines a specific reading, and that is based upon the material that constructs those systems.
What I’ve just suggested seems emphasize the third aspect of visual rhetoric that distinguishes it from the “Sister Arts” tradition—a consideration of “the temporal and spatial implications of context: the ways in which the meaning of a single image can alter dramatically due to placement, context, cropping, and captioning” (64). On top of temporal and spatial I would add material; I think the interrelation of these three factors in context determine the meaning of the image based upon the context and this context influences a particular aesthetic response. What do you all think?

Current Exhibit at the MOMA

Considering our readings and writings this week and our recent shenanigans with Sontag, this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC caught my eye:

"The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other."

Check out the exhibition page here.