English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=1847&pageid=1

The Getty has published a site designed to make people more aware of the presence of the visual in our lives. Here's the link:

http://www.interacttenways.com/usa/home.asp

Also, the Webby nominations came out today for best websites in a variety of areas. Very cool:

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php

I found this fun animation created to accompany an excerpt from Pulp Fiction. I really enjoyed the way that it makes use of text to accompany the dialogue. The visuals are entirely textual but very evocative. However, if you are offended by profanity or violence, then this is not the site for you. (Just to give fair warning) Here's the link.

Convergence Culture? Well here's a website that reads your iTunes play counts (and you can install a plug-in that tracks your ipod) and creates "neighborhoods" of people who like similar stuff. Plus, of course, you can add friends, recommend and they (a la Epic 2015) generate not only recommendations, but have full-length and short clips of songs for you to sample. If that weren't enough (ipod-net-music industry-networking) there's also quilts of band images that you can post to your myspace profile (oh you gorgeous nugget of visual rhetoric) and a reccomended band live show search engine that recommends live performances. It's crazy.

Clicking around on The Daily Prophet website, I found an announcement that the site had been reviewed in MIT's Technology Review (a fabulous magazine that I highly recommend).  Clicking on the link led me to an error page, but a quick site search for "daily prophet" revealed the aforementioned article and lo and behold, who authored it?  That's right, our very own Henry Jenkins.  Even better, the title of the piece is "Why Heather Can Write."  Sound familiar?

http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/

Miranda July is the mind behind the film Me, You and Everyone We Know. There is a quote in that film where an art gallery manager, while examining a digitally altered photograph of an AIDS patient covered in sores decalres to her assistant something to the effect that e-mail would not exist without AIDS. That approach to technology, as a response to our world rather than a tool to manippulate it, has always interested me.

The International Business Times has an article today about surveillance cameras and face recognition. I thought this would be of interest given the ethical questions that it raises. (For folks in Public Rhetoric, this relates to the surveillance article we read) I think it's interesting that they are modeling these devices using the human eye-brain connection, which we've determined to be flawed in its ability to interpret and remember, to create the face recognition programming. Will (Do) the cameras "see" better than we do? Are they more reliable? What about cameras that snap shots of people running red lights, etc.? A photograph lacks a context without your memory (or another's memory) of the event

Watch this video, put the cheesy synth pop out of your head and consider it, not as a cute gimmic, but as a prophesy of the future and past of our educational techniques.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvaHZIrt0o

It reminds me of old PBS programing I watched as a child, the sort of thing where we'd go behind the scenes of a factory and they'd show us how cheese was made or how books were published. I loved those shows. Indeed, I think they may have had a great influence on the curiousity I enjoy today.

(I posted this as a comment on a post made many weeks ago, so I'm making it available here as well)
If anyone wants to borrow it to copy an essay, just let me know.

Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots, by Eduardo Kac.

This guy actually genetically engineered a bunny to glow in the dark.

From the back cover:
"For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, first inventing early online artworks for the web and continuously developing new art forms that involve telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Interest in telepresence, also known as telerobotics, exploded in the 1990s, and remains an important development in media art. Since that time, Kac has increasingly moved into the fields of biology and biotechnology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkzr0naZnZ0

Honda commercial. They used all and only the parts of a car. No computer manipulation. It's brilliant.

It also creates a sense of precision and engineering competence that is sorely lacking in the automotive industry's public image. I think this was a coup for the ad department.