2) The inherent ambiguity of audio leaves much room for interpretation. Is this an impediment to the conveyance of ideas? [via Michael]

I feel like it is only an impediment to the extent that any limitations of a medium are an impediment to its ability to convey ideas. It is just as reliant on our experiences in terms of how that colors our interpretation; we all have varying associations with certain sounds as much as we have different associations with certain images. McKee even talks about sound poems, and I doubt that the interpretation of these is any more open than that of a traditional poem.

Photoshop Project: Option 1

I initially attempted to avoid the political (read: anti-Bush) route because that seemed to be the go-to for this project, but I ended up with that kind of commentary anyways. Perhaps our tendency to go towards political commentary with these types of assignments shows what kind of media and images we are inundated with on a regular basis. If these are our default images to manipulate, it would make sense that this is because these are the images we identify as most important or influential within our own lives.
For my photo manipulation, I eventually settled on the Washington Monument reflecting back an image of an oil drill in the pool on the National Mall. I chose this image because of its central and iconic status, and I mean central quite literally - everything in DC is centered around this structure, and the city sprawls out from the National Mall. By placing an oil drill as the reflection of such a central edifice, I hoped to suggest that oil is as central to our government policies right now as the monument is to the capital. I tried to reflect (no pun intended) the points made by Berger about the way in which we view images as both self-evident and creations. They are immediately present, and in that virtue lies photo manipulations' ability to be an effective mode of social commentary.
I am admittedly not the greatest photoshopper in the world (as shown by the fact that I couldn't get the gradient on the reflected skies to match no matter how hard I tried), but I hope that the interaction of the two images within one composite piece speaks louder than my photoshop skills. I think the success of a composite image isn't even necessarily reliant on 'good photoshopping,' so much as its ability to get the point across. The appropriateness of the way in which the two or more images are combined, I think, are more important than the skill with which they are combined. A monkey face crudely stuck on George W Bush's body can be more effective than some obscure but adroit photo manipulation. Furthermore, the effectiveness of such an image requires the image to be contextually situated; oftentimes, this involves taking a well known image and manipulating it in an unexpected way in order to make the viewer look twice. (E.g. All the takes on Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper'.) As Berger suggests, with new media, images become iconic not only by their own existence but through their interaction with other images and the different incarnations thereof. However, what /can/ be said for a good photo manipulation is the discussion it may bring about regarding the veracity of the image. A poor version of the Sarah Palin manipulation we saw in class may have generated a few laughs, but the fact that people may have even thought it was real brings up issues about how we view Palin herself.
My photoshop project certainly isn't going to make anyone thing that the Washington Monument is truly reflecting an offshore drill site, but perhaps it will bring to mind exactly what is the structure at the center of the Bush administration's consideration, and the implications of that.

manipulated media

The things we've been talking about in class brought to mind some of the artwork my friend's brother has done.
It's social commentary without words, and I must say is pretty awesome.


The first is "The Consultation," which he says can be perceived either as a faceoff or a collaboration. (This actually hung in a gallery that George W. Bush toured.)






He also did a series called "Coke Was There". They pretty much speak for themselves.

23 september answer

3). Is Drucker stating that since Instructive language is to protect us and prevent us from making a mistake that maybe someone created before, but is holding us back from exploring or making our own decisions? [Kai]

I think perhaps she suggests that we need to at times take a step back from the language and images that instruct our everyday lives and look at them more critically. However, our acceptance of these image/word combinations and their symbolic meanings is essential to the cohesiveness of our current society. This is why images such as this one are so effective; they draw us out of the given meaning we assume of the image. Drucker perhaps wants us to question the medium if not the meaning.
I also think this might be the reason it's so common to steal instructional signs. In countless dorm rooms, apartments, and garages I have seen NO _________ signs (or, among my obviously classier acquaintances, SPEED HUMP). The transgression is not only disobeying the signs, but taking the sign themselves- and therefore eliminating the message and its context. Eliminating the context begins to wear away at the legitimacy of the meaning, making it funny instead of law; it eliminates that location indexing that Drucker references.

reading questions

1) What has been your reaction to the readings' varying takes on the way in which language and imagery interact? Believable? Complete BS? Mixture of the two?

2) According to the readings, why do we overlook things that are everpresent, and why is this significant to the way in which we conceive our own experience of the world?

3) What is there to say of the trivialization of stamps? They, apparently, used to be symbols of what the nation was trying to say - now, at least in our country, they seem to be considered tributes (even Jimmy Stewart had one). Is this a trivialization, or simply an evolution of the stamp as medium?

Sept. 16th answer

3. Why are the visual differences between Charlie Brown and Batman important?
via Andrew

Both are iconic figures that to us are as representative as much of the concepts they evoke as much as the characters themselves. Charlie Brown is the downtrodden everyman, while Batman is the modern Byronic hero (we're talking comics, here, not the TV show Jon linked). Both are comedic at times but, as "The Vocabulary of Comics" notes, it is their merging of art and text that allows them to also combine the comedic with an exploration of deeper human issues, and allows us to see ourselves in both characters.
Each comic-book artist's style somewhat reflects this. 'Peanuts' tends to be more simplistic and almost feels slower in style, while 'Batman' has flair for the dramatic. So while Charlie Brown can be all of us in an everyday sense, Batman is evocative of deeper human issues through its dramatic and in-your-face imagery.

Reading Questions: Sept. 15th

1) "The Vocabulary of Comics" addresses the way in which comics merge visual media and become more accessible for that ability. It seems to assume that both their artistic and verbal simplicity are what makes the comic an appealing medium. What then, are we to do with graphic novels? Can they be considered comics with their wordiness and their tendency towards detailed art?

2) From the details garnered from the readings, what makes pictographic media more appealing to the viewer (ie over just plain text)? What does this say about the way we engage with a medium/piece of information?

3) Berger discusses the immediate nature and permanency of the image; what "ways of seeing" show how this is helpful in convincing the viewer of any variety of ideas? For what reasons has this medium become so ingrained within our society?

'late post' OR 'my computer hates Bar Guiliani's wireless'

My stencil ended up pretty far from the social commentary we've been seeing in class. In fact, it's mostly a very nerdy joke. The project is also wordless, to make it so it wasn't 'too easy'. Looking back, incorporating text may have actually been a good idea - the final result turned out much less recognizable than I had first thought. It will probably be lost on most people, and I'm pretty sure that would be considered a failure in the street art world.


I started out with this picture, with the idea of doing something to the tip jar at work in the vein of a sign that was there a few years ago: "Support Counter Intelligence". However, I am not that clever and quickly abandoned that. Sticking with the same picture, I decided to make a contextual joke - Jack Kerouac's face! On the road! Haha, get it?! Yeah, my roommates gave me the same blank stare. Ah well, va bene.

In some way I guess I wanted to not only make a joke but maybe get people to wonder about this person on the pavement - another reason that excluding text was probably a poor choice after all. The social movement he inspired seems to have died out in all but a few circles; it was never too widespread, but so much great art came out of it, so much discussion of alternate viewpoints (Ginsberg and his young men made quite a splash, I must say). The liberalization of published media comes out of the efforts of this man and his friends, so why are they so rarely recognized outside of literary circles?
Granted, beat has always been an undercurrent rather than part of the society - indeed, it is a rejection of the mainstream - but maybe we should take their advice and seek out and question the things we take for granted in everyday structures and lifestyles. Finding the symbolic in the everyday was a large part of their philosophy, and Kerouac's image on the blacktop becomes self-referencing in that cheeky post-modern way and hopefully leads to a consideration of the ideas behind that road. Why do we obey the signs that tell us that only buses are allowed on that section of road? What does that imply? What authority do these signs have over other types?
I also saw several people actually stepping out into the middle of the road on the terminal after I was finished, and that made me consider why we are so intrigued by images and text being present in an unusual space. That is, of course, part of graffiti in the first place. A graffito draws attention to itself by virtue of being an invasive signifier. Whereas we walk past road signs we've seen a billion times assuming we know their message, street art attempts to jolt us out of that passive observation. Very beat in nature, no?

After a series of what would be euphemistically called 'technical difficulties' but what most people would call 'rain and sidewalk chalk don't mix,' I was finally able to both post my stencil and acquire halfway decent pictures of it. I did several around the quad area, including near the Wright St. bus terminal, which made me a little nervous if I'm honest. I'm not quite prepared to die for the sake of a visual pun. It did give me more appreciation for what street artists do, though; I never realized how time consuming it is, or how much one has to take both the picture and environment into consideration in order to get the message across.

you probably shouldn't click any of the links in this post at work. fair warning.

I) I just need to post this. What better illustration of the ridiculousness of authorship and legitimacy than the business card scene from American Psycho?

It even has a watermark.


II) To follow the trend of everyone posting found graffiti, perhaps some may find this local project somewhat interesting. I believe this was actually someone's class project at some point. Luckily it has recorded for posterity the fabulous graffiti of the first floor ladies' room in the English building, which has been mostly scrubbed off in the past few months (though I managed to grab the gem to the left last semester). I swear, that bathroom is better than PostSecret.

welcome to the hypermediacy house

Hypermediacy, even at its best, promises no small amount of sensory overload and possibly confusion. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is perhaps the pinnacle of this. Written as a mockery of literary theory and its self-referential nature, the story itself is insanely multilayered and reliant on various technologies. Johnny Truant tells his story, mostly in footnotes (some of which span several pages) of finding the manuscript of the recently deceased Zampano. Zampano's manuscript is a critical analysis of an apparently non-existent film which in turn is a documentary of a photojournalist's family and their exploration of their house which they discover to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. Confused yet? Trust me, you'd be this confused even after your third attempt at the thing.
And then we have the physical presence of the book:

That collage (oh hey- collages!) sticking out is the start of the pages... the book is bigger on the inside than the outside. Among other sundry idiosyncrasies, there are numerous appendices that link back into the pages of the story, an entirely nonsensical index, and the pages that physically mimic the story they tell. So you eventually end up trying to read something that looks like this:

(This means that there are characters trapped in a labyrinth, in case you were wondering.)

Oh, and those colors? The word house is always in blue, and minotaur and passages in strike-thru are in red... the LOC page at the beginning of the book explains this all, but then again it also references editions that do not exist.

To make things even more hypermediated, Danielewski's sister is the musician Poe (you know, one of those 90s chick rockers that Julia Stiles liked in 10 Things I Hate About You¹). She released a companion work, 'Haunted,' which is actually considered to be part of the book itself.
Hey Pretty [note: not entirely family-friendly]


It also might be interesting to note that the first copy of the book - while Danielewski was searching for a publisher who would not refuse to publish it in this complicated form - was online, and read through hyperlinks.

What does this say for current mediacy and our view of it? There have been arguments about whether House of Leaves can be properly called a novel or even a book. Is this an evolution of text that will eventually be absorbed into our idea of the written artistic word or is it a new kind of media altogether?

¹I would like to take an informal poll of how many people watched Heath Ledger singing Frankie Valli on the bleachers after reading this aside.

Bolter Readings: Q&A

3) How, in 20th century art, can a viewer look at or see through the piece (for example Bolter uses the example of collages)? [Nicole]

20th Century art appears, in some way, to be self aware and self-mediating (in the traditional sense, not in the made-up-theory-word sense). Collages, in the given example, are representative of relationships between physical space as well as of more abstract ideas, and furthermore the physical suggests the abstract. Collages, too, necessitate a creator; nothing is naturally 'collaged'.
The idea of transparency leads to the idea that anything perceived must not only been seen but seen through. This in turn goes back the idea of mediacy and transmitting information across different media. As with collages, 20th century art when read as media can be both a transmitter and a transmission. There is a duality at hand that becomes increasingly inherent within art as it becomes more (post-)modern. It is self-aware of the creator as it attempts to hide him/her and become an entity unto itself.

Bolter Readings: Response Questions

Before I go into anything else, I think I posted my first post wrong. So I'd like to apologize for that. Well, that and posting these so late as I am still without any personal internet access.

Anyways, on to the questions.

1) All of Bolter's talk of different kinds of '-mediacy' seems to mirror Baudrillard's ideas of the Real, especially of the hyperreal/simulacrum. To what extent is media a neccessity of something being seen as 'real'? Alternately, in what ways does hypermediacy contribute to the hyperreal?

2) Is media a reflection of the way in which we perceive the world, or a mode of perception in and of itself? Or both?

3) What evidence of remediation have you seen in your own experiences? Were you at all aware of remediation (or hypermediacy, etc) before being forced to confront them, or has remediation succeeded to this extent by fading into the background?