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

One of the first discussions we had in our film theory class was, predictably, how film is different than previous art forms. One criteria that came up over and over was whether film should be seen as an art of time or an art of space. Music, for example is an art of play in time and paintings/sculptures are arts of play in space. Dance is an art of both. Television is an art of time in ways that DVD movies are not but screen movies are. Cyberspace can be a temporal art, but it is more often a spacial art. CNN, when it attempts to adapt internet genre conventions, needs to recognize the different temporal access limitations of the two media.

So we were reading a book in my Caribbean Lit class about anthropoligists doing field work and how impossible it is to transcribe the conversations and storytelling into a coherent, logical narrative. It got me thinking about how the "book" is not the best model by which to understand how visual rhetoric will work in a technological age (aren't all ages technological?)

So here's some characteristics of oral traditions that I thought were relevant to our developing modes of communication: