In 1958, NASA implemented the Technology Utilization Program, a program intended to inform the scientific community about the technologies being developed at NASA so they might use them to advance technology in other scientific areas. As part of this program, NASA has been publishing Spinoff, a book that details private spinoff of NASA’s developments. Spinoff has been published each year since 1976, and includes almost 1800 different spinoff technologies.

This visualization shows the spinoffs from the years 2009—2011. Each different category is color-coded across the years to show the different focuses of each year. And, each branch represents a different spinoff technology. NASA’s spinoff site publishes the PDFs of each of these articles.

For future development of this project, I would like to continue with this visualization to eventually include every years since 1976. In addition, it would be interesting to provide links to the articles within each of the branches, so that people could read about any of the spinoffs that they may be interested in.
NASA Spinoff Visualization

All completed entries (blue placemarks) contain and image and links to news coverage, Facebook, Twitter, Meet Up, and an official website. Due to limited time, less than half of the cities contain completed balloons; all cities with a red placemark use a minimal template that contains only a link to the Facebook page.

I began with Indiana and then tried to fill in as many of the neighboring states as possible. From there, I included a handful of large cities in every state. All but five cities have a Facebook site, while many have Twitter accounts and even fewer have an actual website.

My purpose for collecting the Digital Footprint for each Occupy demonstration was to begin what I hope will be a long-term digital archiving project centered on the Occupy movement. I am fascinated by Occupy because it is firmly rooted in digital social media, yet through extensive use of sites like Twitter and Meet Up, the line between the physical and digital spaces of each Occupy demonstration is becoming blurred. Though Occupy is certainly not the first political or social movement to place an emphasis on communication and organization through public/digital means, the extent to which these methods have caught on across the nation and turned into a new standard model for grassroots political organizing is noteworthy.

This is not a small project. From the very beginning I knew that the data set I was working with would not be simple. I found my initial dataset on OccupyResearch, which is described as a “page is for sharing datasets, as well as for sharing information about how Occupy Researchers might collaborate to gather, share, analyze, and visualize data about the movement.” This was a very simpy spreadsheet containing basic information for almost 500 Occupy sites around the world. For my purposes, I decided to limit the scope of my visualization to cities in the U.S. Eventually, I would like to expand this visualization to create a more comprehensive view of Occupy as a global movement.

Using the spreadsheet from OccupyResearch as a starting point, I proceeded to collect additional information that I thought would be critical for demonstrating my point. After searching for several large Occupy sites, like OWS or Occupy Indy, I determined that the majority of public writing took place on Facebook, Twitter, and official websites. In addition, Twitter and other websites like Meet Up were used primarily for organizing and planning events. Other common communication methods I noticed included YouTube, Live Stream, Flickr, and Google+; again, for the sake of simplicity I chose to ignore these for now.

When you click on a placemark in my visualization, the first thing that happens (hopefully) is a connection is made between the geographical point on the map and the picture, which is the most distinctive visual component of the balloon. The picture was crucial because it is, I believe, the point where the digital and physical presence begins to blur; to someone outside of that community this is just a picture of people on a street, but from within I’m guessing these pictures mean a lot more, particularly for group cohesion and identity.

My initial research question was quite simple: “How can we visualize Occupy?” There is a lot of really great work being done, both inside and outside of the movement, with more traditional methods of visualization. I deliberately chose to avoid this, though a second part of my long-term project will involve collecting and sharing these. Instead, I wanted to create something that presented Occupy visually without defining it. During my research I have been very aware of my self-imposed outsider status, so I wanted to use the methods of visualization and data collection we’ve discussed in this class to observe, but not define.

This led me in a very different direction than I would ultimately take. For a few weeks I collected information on special interest groups within the broader Occupy movement—organizations like Occupy Design, OccuPrint, and Occupy Libraries—which I found to be far more fascinating than my original question. But it also proved to be far more complicated in terms of how I could turn it into a useable data set, let alone a visualization. At first I gave up on this research entirely and returned to my original spreadsheet; but the more I worked on creating this visualization with Google Earth, the more I realized that this brief diversion into what I have dubbed the “deep structures” of the Occupy Movement has given me a lot of direction and purpose for the larger project.

Based on my research, there is a significant informational infrastructure within the Occupy movement, though interestingly the movement has been criticized for a lack of organization and dismissed by many as a passing fad. But when you look at the passion and purpose of the discourse taking place in the deep structures you see something very different. Though I’ve been referring to them as if they are separate entities, I believe these deep structures begin to show at the local/geographical level, but what makes them so fascinating and worthy of study is that they transcend the limitations placed on the Occupy movement when it is viewed only as isolated demonstrations within separate cities.

My visualization only just begins to articulate this broader network of information and communication that each localized Occupy site exists within. By following the placemarks to the Facebook and Twitter sites you see the ways in which these are used as more efficient and effective systems of organization and planning; however, if you spend more time, particularly with Twitter, you begin to notice a pattern of interconnection between the demonstrations. The official websites, too, show a level of connection based on geographic proximity, with demonstrations within the same states coordinating, collaborating, and sharing ideas.

One thing this visualization succeeds at is establishing the very surface of this network. I see this visualization as a means of archiving this data for future use, but also as a way to use visual communication and design to argue that the digital footprint is a limited model. Yes, I realize in a way I’m contradicting myself here, but it’s deliberate. Again, I wanted the map to be messy and overwhelming because that shows just how large this movement really is. Though Occupy Wall Street receives most of the attention from the press, Occupy has really become a vast network of separate political and social “movements” that are connected by an underlying ideology and worldview, but also by a more complex system of interests and values that have been manifested as a diverse and deep online community.

In a lot of ways this Google Earth map is both a success and a failure because of what it doesn’t—and, I would argue, cannot—show: that deeper and more complex system or structure of information and communication. But if it is a failure, it’s a deliberate and calculated one. Visualizing the deeper structure is the long-term goal of this project; for now, I hope simply to illustrate the interwoven nature of the digital and physical spaces of Occupy and to illustrate how the digital footprint tells us a lot more about the movement than simply where it has been already.

On the campus side, what I term “gown,” I tagged our Visual Rhetoric classroom, where I was taking a highly theoretical approach to the visual. On the other side of the bridge, I tagged a bar (meeting place) and warehouse (art gallery and workspace), places where I conversed with artists my age, artists that were part of the vibrant (and somewhat) underground art scene. Large-scale sculptures and punk bands filled their warehouses. They worked with their hands, they worked as a community. If someone had an idea, everyone helped. Their space differed than that of my classroom. Instead of rows of computers, artists rented out space in a once mattress warehouse to play music, make movies, paint, etc.

These two groups I conversed with rarely make contact, yet there is so much we can learn about where creativity happens and can happen. By mapping my life, I saw that mapping the community with your research interests lens gives you a more diverse and complex picture of where art and research happens. We know we can learn outside the classroom, but how often do we?

I say you map your community now, thus mapping your opportunities for expanding your field of knowledge-making. We shouldn’t go out into the community to simply do field research or “service,” but to expand our own notions of visual rhetoric. To get our hands dirty. To see art in practice.

Also: I got my hands dirty with scissors, markers, and crayons. 

Christine Masters Jach
Purdue University
CCCC 2012

Gateways of Perception: Zooming Visual Rhetoric and Composition

My talk is about zooming as a gateway of perception. I’m focusing on zooms in the context of information technologies, specifically Prezi and Google Earth. So first, I will talk a little bit about the origins of the zoom before asking what zooming accomplishes for us. Finally, I will theorize ways of zooming beyond the context of visual compositions. Appropriately, my visuals for this talk are on a Prezi.

Let me first say that when I talk about zooming, that is, the movement from macro to micro or micro to macro scales of vision, I realize that this motion is almost always connected with a panning motion, or a more lateral navigational movement. However, I think that the zoom lends itself to producing a greater affect in viewers than panning or other navigational movements do. And I don’t think that the zoom is merely a visual novelty, like the “fade in” feature on Power Point presentations. These have become a sort of visual cliché. Even if the Prezi application goes out of vogue, the zoom trope is here to stay, and there will always be software applications that feature it.

The Evolution of Zoom

So first off, let’s start with the etymology of zoom. It is a relatively new term. The Oxford English Dictionary records the word “zoom” as first appearing in 1892. Back then, it was associated more with sound and movement than with vision. It first was used to describe humming machinery. Later, the word zoom was used to indicate the movement of aircraft. Finally, zoom gained common usage because of the zoom lenses that were used in photography and cinema (“Zoom”).

Because of zooms in new media, visual culture has become increasingly familiar with both intricately small and panoramically vast scales of vision. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin describes how close ups cause space to expand, revealing what he calls “entirely new structural formations of the subject” (236). Technology has fundamentally changed the way we perceive the world; the camera makes the optical unconscious possible, a perceptual experience wherein, as Benjamin describes, “an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man” (236-37). Some 40 years after Benjamin wrote this piece, Charles and Ray Eames produced the film “Powers of Ten.” In a minute, I will play this video, muted, as a visual accompaniment to part of my talk. Later, in 2002, Lev Manovich describes the word, “zoom,” as a common cinematic term, along with “pan,” “tilt,” and “track,” and he discusses how we now use these operations to interact with spaces and objects in new media. Another mention of the zoom is in TvTropes.com, which calls the zoom a trope. They label it as the “Astronomic Zoom,” and write that it has appeared in dozens of instances, including film, television, cartoons, literature, graphic novels, real life, and video games. Author Stephen Johnson even hailed the zoom as “the defining view of our time” in a 2006 New York Times article titled “The Long Zoom.”

What do zooms accomplish in visual compositions?

a. Zooms afford a sense of vastness beyond finite representations.

Zooms produce a feeling of expansiveness, and they also can leave us a bit disoriented. For example, in the Powers of Ten video, we feel grounded until we zoom out away into space. The sight of the Earth and infinite space around it produces a profound sense of the sublime, but when we zoom back in and see something familiar, we feel grounded again. Then the micro zoom-in happens, and we get disoriented again as we try to comprehend that these little molecules are inside our bodies. Even here, though, we have a sense of expansiveness when viewing cells, DNA, and atoms. At these scales of vision, the interior of our bodies even become expansive as space.

Zooms produce a type of sublime affect. In his book on the sublime, Philip Shaw overviews how the concept has had various iterations from Longinus to Burke, Blair, Kant, Lyotard, and Zizek. In most cases, it has been associated with a sense of grandeur or vastness, and sometimes with terror. Shaw captures the sublime’s historical meanings, stating that

the sublime has stood, variously, for the effect of grandeur in speech and poetry; for a sense of the divine; for the contrast between the limitations of human perception and the overwhelming majesty of nature; as proof of the triumph of reason over nature and imagination; and, most recently, as a signifier for that which exceeds the grasp of reason (4).

In a volume about the sublime in art and science, Ian Boyd Whyte explains that it had been “Dismissed in the heroic years of high modernism as a passe and febrile embrace of Kantian philosophy by the romantic imagination” (3). So rather than dismissing the concept of the sublime for its romantic, subjective connotations, I find a definite value in framing the sublime rhetorically. In fact, I find it interesting to look at how Longinus identified a rhetorical sublime. He writes, “For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard” (80). And also,

Images, moreover, contribute greatly, my young friend, to dignity, elevation, and power as a pleader. In this sense some call them mental representations. In a general way the name image or imagination is applied to every idea of the mind, in whatever form it presents itself, which gives birth to speech. But at the present day the word is predominantly used in cases where, carried away by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers. 2. Further, you will be aware of the fact that an image has one purpose with the orators and another with the poets, and that the design of the poetical image is enthrallment, of the rhetorical—vivid description. Both however, seek to stir the passions and the emotions. (86)

Longinus argues that language can produce sublime feelings in an audience. He instructs orators to use figures of speech that will conjure up powerful mental images, which in turn evoke lofty and elevated feelings. So if we were to look for equivalents of these figures of speech in visual rhetoric, the zoom becomes an excellent example. The zoom could be considered a visual figure or a visual trope that evokes a rhetorical sublimity. Zooming alludes to a vastness that lies beyond finite visual representations.

In apps like Prezi and GE, we zoom in because we see an array of things from high up and we want to focus our attention on certain points. We play with zooming by manipulating changes of scale. In this way, zooms can be interactive, but Prezi and Google Earth also allow users to create compositions in which they record a series of zoom movements for their viewers.

Here’s an explanation of how Prezi works. There’s a storyboard where we lay out our visuals. We then create a zooming pathway through those visuals. And here’s an example of how we zoom into Google Earth. I recorded my desktop as I start from a view of the Earth as a whole and zoom into Heavilon Hall on the Purdue campus.

When we compose in applications like Prezi or Google Earth, we should consider how zooming movements come across to our viewers. For example, we can try not to zoom and pan too often, too quickly. A common complaint that I’ve heard about Prezi is that people feel sick when they are shown too many zooms and pans in fast succession.

b. Zooms lend dynamism to fixed representations.

Zooms give us a sense of being present, of experiencing what we are looking at as live or dynamic, when in fact these static representations are merely manipulated through shifts in perspective, or changes of scale. For example, the underlying satellite photographs in Google Earth are by no means real time images; in fact, they are often several years old, and the Google Earth globe is pieced together from a patchwork of different photographs in order to remove cloud cover. However, our being able to navigate and zoom around in Google Earth produces a visceral sense of presence that we don’t get with conventional maps.

One question that I have posed for Google Earth is how it might do a better job of allowing for dynamic backdrops behind the zooms. I have wondered whether Google Earth could be a platform for representing real time data related to ecological processes. It is quite difficult to visually represent global processes that are invisible and pervasive, for example, climate change.

Even though Google Earth does not show real time data maps, several organizations have used it to compose visual arguments about climate change. These include entities such as the State of California, the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Tuvalu Visualization Project, which we will look at now.

The Tuvalu project zooms into the islands and floats pictures of their inhabitants with pop up descriptions about them, indicating to viewers that real people will face real consequences when the oceans rise because of climate change. Being able to zoom into a representation of Tuvalu in this way gives a sense of realness or urgency that wouldn’t come from looking at a conventional map. By changing visual scales from the global to the local, we get a sense of ecological connectedness here that unites global and local concerns.

Can we understand zooms beyond the visual?

Up until now, I have been discussing zooms in the context of visual compositions. To navigate through most software applications, like Prezi and Google Earth, we have no choice but to use our faculties of sight. Their interfaces are largely visual. I’m curious, though, about the possibility of zooming in other perceptual contexts. Would it make sense to zoom into certain sounds? What about zooming by touch—haptically?

In fact, scanning tunneling microscopes actually do use the sense of touch to zoom into matter. Karen Barad discusses these microscopes in Meeting the Universe Halfway: . To Barad, phenomena are specific intra-actions, not “objects-in-themselves” or “perceived objects (in the Kantian phenomenological sense)” (128). Her theory of agential realism considers seeing not as a passive faculty, which registers a representative mental image of an independently existing “reality”; instead, it explains seeing as an active intervention in materiality.

Scanning tunneling microscopes serve as an excellent example of how this intervention happens, and they add a haptic dimension to zooming. Barad argues that STMs do not merely portray extreme magnifications of what we see with our eyes—in fact, neither do optical microscopes because a high degree of diffraction is involved. Instead, STMs operate by sensing or “feeling” the surface of an object through a type of electron transfer that classic Newtonian physics had once considered impossible (51-53). Thus, this machine enables users to zoom in through a sense of touch. STM operators must learn how to filter out noise and know when an image is good enough by following a series of steps to isolate light, vibration and so forth within a scan range. As Barad states, “The separation of fact from artifact depends on the proper execution of each of these steps and requires skill and know-how achieved through experience” (53). Scientists theorized atoms long before we had the technology to document them, and this theorizing brought about the apparatus that enabled their discovery.

Another of Barad’s points involves an alternative to representationalism. She proposes a “performative” view of science (49); we never just stand back and neutrally represent a reality that is “out there,” but we materially engage with the world in all of our scientific and theoretical practices. Thus, I would suggest that we also can understand the zoom as an metaphoric enactment, or a specific type of performativity. I hope to eventually explore these ideas further.

I will end by emphasizing that a web of practices have allowed humans to see atoms. However, the desire to see them makes us point our attention to singular objects within a wide field of possibilities. This desire to pointedly focus attention is what motivates any kind of zooming. Regardless of what mediates the zoom, whether it be human sense perceptions or technological extensions of these faculties, zooming necessarily requires us to narrow our attention within a field of possibilities. It is the affect, desire, and attention behind the zoom that makes it a zoom.

Works Cited

“Astronomic Zoom.” Astronomic Zoom-Television Tropes & Idioms. TvTropes.com. Web. 11 Dec 2010.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke UP, 2007. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 217-252. Print.

Johnson, Stephen. “The Long Zoom.” The Long Zoom—New York Times. The New York Times Company. 8 Oct 2006. Web. 11 Dec 2010.

Longinus. “On the Sublime.” Trans. W.R. Roberts. Ed. Hazard Adams. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1971. 77-102.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. Print.

“Powers of Ten.” Powers of Ten. Based on the Film by Charles and Ray Eames. An Eames Office Website. Eames Office. 2010. Web. 19 March 2012.

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006.

“Tuvalu Visualization Project: The Art Project of Visualizing Information of Tuvalu on the Digital Globe.” Tuvalu Visualization Project. NPO Tuvalu Overview and Hidenori Watanave Laboratory, Tokyo Metropolitan University. September 2008. Web. 22 March 2012.

Whyte, Iain Boyd. “The Sublime: An Introduction.” Eds. Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte. Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science. Oxford UP, 2011. 3-20. Print.

“Zoom.” Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition, 1989. Nov 2010. Web. 17 March 2012.

When IKEA and and GAP changed their typeface, typophiles everywhere lost their serifs. IKEA and GAP’s change to Verdana and Helvetica angered many for the same reasons: their overuse. Having argued for well-designed typefaces my entire life, I have come to the realization that good design sometimes has to take a backseat to good accessibility. With that said, I think IKEA’s choice to choose a typeface that can be read in many languages, even if ugly, is honorable.

Oftentimes the only way to protect a brand’s identity in a global context is to  create what Linotype typographer, Nadine Chahine calls “Frankensteins.”  Chanine noticed this method in use when traveling in Dubai. To follow  the bilingual policy of the United Arab Emirates, companies made adjustments so that their brand looked the same when in Arabic. So in order to keep their branded image, the companies create Arabic logos by chopping up Latin characters and splicing together parts to create Arabic logos. Chahine noticed the Frankesteins failed to acknowledge the design conventions of Arabic calligraphy. Frankly, they chose design over cultural respect.

So what are writers to do? Choose the best typeface? Well I originally began this poster project with the intent to show what typefaces are best for multilingual documents. Well, I realized our access to typefaces that are both well-designed and multilingual is limited. The major reason is that these typefaces take a long time to develop. Our alphabet has 26 letters and the Chinese language, for example, has over 8,000 characters. Thus the typefaces are limited (and saved for the most overused universal typefaces) and expensive. Only software developers can purchase the fancy-schmancy typefaces, not the end-users.

For now, writers don’t have many options but there is hope. Multilingual typography is a growing field. And better multilingual typefaces are popping up everywhere. Chanine’s 2009 addition to the Helvetica suite, Neue Helvetica Arabic, is informed by her Lebanese background. So while fonts such as Verdana and Helvetica may be everywhere they acknowledge that people are everywhere. These typefaces seem more complex and unique when we think of it from a multilingual perspective.

-Ashley Watson

Genus: What Has Been Cannot be Unseen

Origin: Unknown

Host: Shock Websites, blogs, forums

Epidemiology

Geography: Worldwide Web

Associated Diseases: Visual Trauma

Transmission: Through the act of seeing and telling

Vaccine: Not seeing

Antiviral drugs: N/A

Best-known Cases: The arrow in the FedEx Logo

Malcolm Gladwell describes a meme as “an idea that behaves like a virus—that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” If this is truly the case, the meme “what has been seen cannot be unseen” shall be a deadly virus that is highly contagious and resisting to any cure. It is often associated with visual trauma: after visually experiencing displeasing photos or videos, one literally cannot forget or get rid of its memories. The film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes makes a much-quoted example, which depicts the process of forensic pathologists performing autopsies. The ostensibly detailed measurement and examination challenges the viewers’ ability to look. Personally, the experience of watching it has been one of the most uncomfortable and unforgettable one.

Though “what has been seen cannot be unseen” is mostly associated with such shock pictures and videos created with disturbing intent, the phrase is later extended to images with hidden designs. Once the hidden design is pointed out to a person, one continues to notice it. Well-known examples include the FedEx logo and the LG logo.

What is the fun of seeing what was unseen and cannot be unseen once it is pointed out?

As much as people complain about continuously seeing what was unseen, they seem to share a passion for sharing such visual discoveries. Part of the fun comes from being able to see things differently. Take the FedEx logo for example. The negative space may be easily ignored if one is used to interpret the letter logos as they spell out. The discovery occurs when one take a different perceptual pattern and look actively into the negative space. By finding the arrow between the letter E and X, the design becomes a mixture of both letters and symbol, more stylish and visually dynamic. The arrow will then be instantly recognizable when one perceives the logo with both positive and negative spaces.

The fun of participating in this “Cannot be unseen” meme is to mock the meaning of the original design—to be able to see what was not there and to find more than what is intended for. Rotating the LG logo for 45 degree and slightly moving the letter L, the icon changes from a solemn looking face into a cheerful pacman, an alternation that the LG Company has never expected. By rearrange the visual symbols and finding small details that bring out a bit of light laugh, the newly acquired visual understanding transforms and subverts the meaning of the original image.

It seems that most of the examples in “what cannot be unseen” meme consist of idiosyncratic details and by sharing “what has been seen” one derives an immense part of the amusement. In a sense, to participate in this meme, either to look at an image from a new way or to share the visual discovery, is an active act to remap and recreate the visual pattern.

Is it true that what has been seen cannot be unseen?

I reckon Arnheim would disagree with this meme. If seeing is truly an active behavior, one can learn to see and unsee in the way that we play with the optical illusions and visual phenomenon: when one look at two jumping dots in the “Stroboscopic alternative motion”, one can forces one’s perception of the movement by adding vertical and horizontal bar to the image. The “real perception” of motion is impossible, and it can be trained and forced. What happens when one participates in this meme—trying to single out idiosyncratic details and making fun of an existing visual convention is similar to the process of training and tuning up one’s visual perception. It is thus theoretically possible that one can forget what has been seen and return to the original perception pattern. However, in practice, one does become more visually alert to the new visual pattern and cannot return to the original state of visual unconscious—one will never see the image the same way as it is before. In the Book Beautiful Evidence, Tufte uses Erle Loran’s explanatory reconstruction of the multiple perspectives in Cezanne’s paintings to show the mapping of pictures. Loran illustrates with four pairs of eyes floating round the perimeter of a map, pointing out the cubist table, the skewed top of which is covered by a tactfully placed clothes. Tufte comments on the reconstruction diagram, “readers of Loran’s book will never see Cezanne quite the same way again, which is largely for the good.” Straying away from Tufte’s argument, I am trying to figure out whether to be irrevocably transformed in perception pattern is truly a good thing or not. It seems that “cannot be unseen” is not only an innocuous invention that bring about a light laugh, so what’s the rhetoric?

What is the rhetoric for “what cannot be unseen”?

The meme “what has been seen cannot be unseen” is later expanded into wider realms, such as “what has been heard cannot be unheard”, “what is known cannot be unknown”.  Now, it is not only the recreation of visual patterns, but also the thinking patterns—how do we understand and process certain information. A marvelous example would be the Chinese “Grass Mud Horse” and “River Crab” that thrive from the Internet and find popularity in both verbal and visual forms. It is a meme against the Internet censorship in China. The Chinese government advocates for a “harmonious society” and forbids demonic, pornographic and politically antagonistic language in the cyberspace. The unhappy netizens appropriate this expression by make “harmony” (He Xie) a verb, indicating to the action of deleting and filtering certain sensitive vocabulary on the Internet. Later, to avoid being harmonized, homophones are adopted in online posts. Curse words and sensitive phrases are transformed into a series of homophonic words, and with uncertain intention the alternative vocabulary has evolved into a list of imaginative animal names. The netizens further develop these new animals by giving them visual forms based on some unrelated species in real life. For example, The “Grass Mud Horse” (pronounced as “Cao Ni Ma”) is created to replace one of the most common swearing in Chinese. This Kuso interpretation is accompanied by images and videos of Alpaca, which is a kind of animal that lives on high lands. The “River Crab” (pronounced as “he xie”) is adopted to replace “harmonization”. The political struggle between the netizens against the internet censorship is translated into a grand fight between the “Grass Mud Horse” and the “River Crab”. It is exactly that Alpaca is obviously unrelated to the political struggle makes the meme more compelling. The subversive representation of the Internet Censorship changes the contemporary language irrevocably. Contemporary Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei acts this meme out with his outrageous self-portrait. In the picture, he is completely naked except for the stuffed animal he holds in front of his crotch. The gesture gains a double meaning: it can be understood literally as the stuffed “grass mud horse” is hiding the center of the body; or it can be read with the obviously rebellious message that he tries to convey, “Fuck your mother, the Communist party central committee” (“草泥马挡中央“). In this way, he makes use of homophony once more to refer back to the central government. Like a virus, the meme works against an organism by penetrating into its cells and subverts them against its original system. The meme in itself is a form of recreation and subversion to the mainstream culture.

“A common misconception holds that computer programming is applicable only to technical fields. While there is a strong connection between programming and technology, it’s not the only realm in which computers can make for interesting collaborators. Programming can be approached with an emphasis on language, making computers potentially interesting to a far broader audience” (Processing : A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists)

Yeah!

While Processing is geared toward a non-traditional audience, I wouldn’t really call it programming for dummies. It’s a Java-based language, and the Reas and Fry books about Processing I’ve read so far do a nice job of introducing a solid programming foundation without being overly arcane.

That said, I’ve been messing around with Processing in preparation for the creation of my information visualization. Reas and Fry advocate the modification of existing code to learn a language: find some code, change some lines, see what happens. Here is a string of sketches I made that embody that principle. I started with some code from the book referenced above, which I thought would look a lot cooler with the addition of color and movement.

I modified it to make it bigger, and to continually add patterns as the mouse moved. As you can see below, I had to first simplify the sketch to figure out what was going on and if my method for randomizing color would work.

Seizure Circles

(Click on link to see a moveable version and the source code.)

As you can see if you click on my first attempt, the effect is mildly seizure inducing. Because Processing runs at 60 frames per second, and the draw circle function draws once a frame, we’re seeing that many different colors zoom past, even if the mouse hasn’t moved. In the next sketch, I fixed that behavior by checking to see if the mouse position has changed, only changing the color if the mouse position has changed.

Non Seizure Circles

The final sketch shows the same principle but with multiple randomized circles; I realized that this would have worked sooner without my having to first simplify if I had just removed the noLoop() function in setup.

Many Circles

These are just some simple sketches I’ve made to start. As I learn more, I’d like to learn how to do things like make the circles drawn fade over time, or appear over time for a “firework” effect.

For this reason, I was intrigued by the photo titled “Abandoned House as Metaphor” This house is located in Detroit, and the author refers to it as a metaphor for the “collapsing American empire.” The photograph doesn’t include a credit because the author cannot remember where he found it originally. Like the author, I am often struck by the decay of  and sadness implied by abandoned houses.

While I agree with the author’s assessment of this photograph being a good example of a metaphor, I also feel it could be a good example of antithesis. I am often saddened when I see homes that once must have been beautiful reduced to barely standing shadows of their former shelves. Antithesis, as defined by Lupton, “juxtaposes two unlike ideas” (10).

This particular image demonstrates antithesis in several ways. First, as I mentioned above, the once beautiful house that is now unsightly. The cracking foundation and tilt of the building contrast with its brick building, which would have been solid. In addition, it was likely once a very attractive building, but now is looks uninviting and unsafe.

Ultimately, though, I decided the abandoned Six Flags in New Orleans best fit with my chosen Charles Dickens quote, “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” This photo of an the abandoned amusement park illustrates the juxtaposition between the intended “fun” of a Six Flags with its current abandoned, never-to-be-repaired state. This abandoned site is also still standing; the pictures were taken in 2011 (http://www.lovethesepics.com/2011/05/creepy-crusty-crumbling-illegal-tour-of-abandoned-six-flags-new-orleans-75-pics/).

Abandoned buildings and sites give us effective examples of antithesis. The juxtaposition of hope/despair can be seen in many of these different visuals.

In trying to imagine a post-alphabetic visual rhetoric it becomes strikingly clear how well trained our minds have become at reading textual arguments. So much that imagining non-textual arguments; that is, arguments that don’t require text to clarify meaning becomes perplexingly difficult. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that alphabetic text is unique in argumentation—that text can make arguments that non-text cannot. Or perhaps we are all squarely positioned in a noetic construction that creates a mental barrier to imagining non-textual arguments. To push beyond a rhetoric that is strictly interested in alphabetic arguments or visual arguments that require alphabetic support we must challenge ourselves to think beyond these mental barriers. There are many obstacles to this challenge: visual images are often considered more ambiguous, less precise, and more open for interpretation; visual images can’t provide the same amount of information about context as verbal arguments which can be compared to previous sentences and meanings (Birdsell and Groarke, Argumentation and Advocacy, Summer 1996). Many of these same arguments can be made about text, also. How often is text ambiguous? How often is context misinterpreted? As Birdsell and Groarke later address, these arguments draw more similarities between verbal and visual arguments than differences. Keith Kenney points out an additional barrier to conceptualizing purely visual arguments: “When rhetorical critics use the word argument they mean the presentation of premises followed by a conclusion, and they mean a debate in which disagreement is expressed” (Journal of Visual Literacy, Spring 2002). Can purely visual arguments have a premise and conclusion? This seems to be an important sticking point. Behind this mental barrier seems to be a misunderstanding about visual perception. Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time studying visual design understands that visual arrangements are perceived sequentially. That is—there is an order, and thus a potential for a premise and conclusion. The purpose of this post is to point out some of the barriers in moving toward an understanding of purely visual arguments, and to present some examples of non-textual arguments. As you view the images below (which I won’t describe for the fear of textual intervention), what do you think about the issues of ambiguity, context, premise, conclusion, and sequence? What are the arguments being made by these images? Is the field of rhetoric and communication theory ready to acknowledge these arguments as compositions with equivalent complextiy to textual arguments?