A/V Short

   This video was filmed for the MSU Writing Center, geared towards a set of prospective donors. The music credits were included in the Notes on the Youtube video page it was posted on.

Enjoy!

Oh, Photography.

   The entire time I read Chapters 7-9 (mostly Chapter 8) in McCloud's book, I kept thinking, "Well, yeah -- the same goes for photos!" Lucky for me, Doug had my back on this one. Wolf's article articulated some of my thoughts on photography, including the fact that it is fucking awesome. Seriously. I know we are all in this weird hipster phase of Instagram (I have one too -- no shame,) and that there is an entire culture of people (including myself -- apparently, I am a bandwagon-er) who have resorted to tintypes, daguerrotypes, color film and old dark room processes. I think it's fantastic. Mostly, because of the lost art of dark room photography. And, more specifically, alternative and experimental processing. If you don't know what those are, I advise you to take a look at this. Chris Anderson, a photography professor at MSU (who is currently on sabbatical, unfortunately) is the goddess of alternative processes.

   I digress. I knew that would happen as soon as I got the chance to talk about photo. Stick with me.

   Alright -- so, we know this trend is going on. Kind of like McCloud was talking about how people become so consumed with the idea of what color can do in comics, that they forget about the importance of black lines. People are all INSTAGRAM, and the hard cores are all SAVE THE PROCESS. And I'm like, "Save it all, dude."

   Point being, there is some really fucking cool stuff happening with technology right now. Like Wolf was discussing about the capabilities of cameras in photographing particles for physics (Ahem, my Science News Brief on the God Particle. So cool!) we are constantly pushing the limits of what we can capture on a monitor screen. Cameras are already smarter than we are -- our eyes instinctively tint colors for us based on lighting temperature. Cameras don't do this, unless you tell them to (this is why pictures under fluorescents look blue, etc.) and have the ability to pick up color and details that our eyes can't. 

   Technology is exploding, and with it, the amount of imagery a camera can produce is getting absolutely insane. Check out these videos below, and see where photography has been heading the last seven years or so. These are called Building Projection Mappings. They are created by a series of extremely high-definition images of the building itself, stitched together to create a life-size replica of the building, which is projected on the building itself. Over these images play a video, or series of images that, with enough projectors, and trust me, you need a lot of projectors, will enable your audience to think that the video is being played directly on the building itself, molding around its edges and corners, when in actuality, it is a video of the building being projected on the building. I know... Inception. I think it's pretty kick ass, too.

Let's talk about Art. (In Understanding Comics... and other things...)

   

   Alright, so, I'm going to start spewing. Prepare yourselves. After reading the first four chapters of McCloud's Understanding Comics, I began to think about the implications of what he was discussing in my own work. Being a Writing/Photo/Don't-Know-What-I'm-Gonna-Do/Oh-Shit-I-Don't-Know-What-I'm-Gonna-Do Major, I am constantly thinking about words and images. When do words speak louder? When can an image stand alone? When do we need both? When does a still image stop being relevant? What role does technology have in all of this? 

   

   Art. No one knows how the hell to define it. Sure, they'll give you some bullshit answer, but no one really knows how to explain it, because it is constantly changing. Here, we have a bunch of moss growing on a brick wall in what would typically be described as graffiti, but, because it's moss, and because it's a classic typography, it's all of a sudden "Art." Now, I'm not skeptical of calling this art, but I'm skeptical as all HELL of the people who say this is, but spray-painted words (with the exception of dicks and foul-words, unless tastefully done) are not.  Someone explain that double-standard bullshit to me. But, I think it's important to see how words play a role in art. Comics make that obvious, but in less textual driven art (such as the September piece above) when does it add to the art, instead of distract from the visual aesthetics? 

   Alright, so let's take a moment to talk about GIFs, because I think they are relevant to where digital art is going. Comics, too, but I think these examples are key. In one, text plays a role. It's a rather cliche' way of going about it, I know, but it forces you to think about how not only an image and text are working together to create a composition, but the fact that the composition is in motion is also important. In the piece below, someone took a classical painting and made the water move. How does this change your experience with the piece? If writing, or rhetoric, is an interaction, how does this change that? Who is now the artist that deserves credit? Ohh....shit. Things just got complicated.

   Lastly, I want to talk about abstractual manipulation. I think that additions of text and movement have a great deal to do with the future of art, but I think there is also room in this conversation for subtraction. How does the composition of a photograph change when someone takes a marker and some chalk and blurs out the space between two people's faces? What happens when someone takes what looks to be an intricate painting portrait of a woman and rips off her face, exposing the paper beneath? We could get into the dehumanization, or de-authorization (better yet, the de-artistization) of these pieces, but I'm not going to go there. We can do this in photoshop with a few buttons. We can rip other people's art off the internet and turn it into our own. Plagiarism at its best, right? But, I think this is an important idea to think about. Maybe I'm just the crazy Photo major kid in the class, but I really do think this is relevant to our Digital Rhetorics studies. McCloud opened my eyes to comics, but it made me open my eyes even more elsewhere. Where does rhetoric begin, and where does it end? This digital shit makes it a sticky situation.

Get LOST, dude! Sosnoski, Hayles and Jakobs

In case you forgot what the incredible sound of dial-up internet sounded like.

   Sosnoski's article Hyper-readers and their Reading Engines was written in 1999. If you didn't notice, the technology was a little out-of-date. What the fuck is Zyindex? Wait, I'll google it... Google just basically says its an old ass program for organizing information. Got it. Point being, the technology may have been out-of-date in Sosnoski's article, but his points were still valid. Eva-Maria Jakobs in The Evolution of Web-Site Genres made the same sort of connection (ha. connection) for me when she said, "Do we require new analytic models or can we modify and adapt existing ones?" (362). Just because the technology in Sosnoski's article was old, we didn't need to adapt our analytic models to read it. However, I got real fucking tired of his names for characterizations of hyper-reading. Pecking. Filming. Trespassing. OH MY GOD. Not that I don't think his ideas in these sections weren't great ones -- because I think they all held validity, but dude... pick some different names.

   On page 165, Sosnoski wrote, "The effort to chart viable routes through the wilderness of information that surrounds us will surely be worth our time and energy." Two things. First of all, our theme at the Writing Center this year is "Get Lost (in writing)." This worked for that. Sometimes, it's okay to get lost in the massive amounts on information we are presented with, no matter the mode the writing is presented in. Whether it be a dense academic article, a blog post, a video, whatever -- It's alright to be confused as shit. Because, it's the charting of the route out  of the wilderness that teaches us most. Second of all -- Maps. I keep coming back to this. Last semester, I was able to be a facilitator for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Writing Group. Maps are rhetorical. Luckily, I made that connection early and was able to get them to format and organize their papers in the same way they did maps. I won't bore you with the details of this, though I find it fascinating. The theme of maps came up again in the other two articles as well.

   Jakobs described the "F" pattern in which readers encounter and retain information from websites. This makes me think of other modes of writing. Is this the same way that readers encounter maps? How do they encounter photos? What about infographics? I'm curious now. Same goes for Hayles's article How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. How are we reading maps? What about other modes of writing? These articles all discussed the concept of "New Media," though that definition was different for all in terms of their publication dates and the technology available at the time. However, they didn't take into account many other modes of writing that I consider New Media. Now I'm pondering. And rambling. And I'm going to stop. 

But, I'll leave you with this:

Introductory Video.

3 seconds short. 

Holla.

Grant-Davie, Porter -- 9.2.14

   Throughout the Grant-Davie article, all I could think about is this image ^. Of course the "rhetors are as much a part of a rhetorical situation as the audience is," (266). Of course "rhetors may invite audiences to accept new identities for themselves," (271). Then, I stopped and thought, "Kelsey -- where is your sign?" I read these statements and think of them as common knowledge, but don't question how they fit into my work as a writer. I often find myself returning to this idea of "collaboricity" that was introduced to me by Dr. Downs and Dr. Miley. As writers, we are in this constant state of give-and-take between ourselves as rhetors, our reader, our discourse community and our sense of identity. Here, you may say, "Well, DUH!" but how are we applying this to our writing?

   Porter discusses the framework that makes up our discourse community and questions whether educators are introducing this framework to writers at an early enough stage. As a creative writer, my instinct is to scream, "Let them be INDIVIDUALS!" But, then I question myself again. Is it more effective to allow writers to establish their originality first, or to see where their writing fits into a discourse community before finding a way to let their freak flag fly? I keep going back to my tutoring sessions in the Writing Center, wondering how these may have gone differently if I had introduced this idea to these writers from the get-go. Then, I find myself questioning how this fits into my own writing. Am I understanding the framework of my discourse community and seeing how the collaboricity between myself and all these other factors are affecting what I write? Or, am I stubbornly sticking my writing out there, saying, "I'm an individual. I am unique. And that is why you should read this." Have I passed this "phase"?

   So, here is my sign. My sign to understand that what I write is a product of textual precursors (Porter 34). To see where I fit into my discourse community. Shit, to understand who and what my discourse community is. Am I taking my reader into account as much as I am thinking of myself?

   How many more questions can I ask myself? (I'm sure Doug will say, "Many, many more.")