Sirc,
Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, Utah: Utah
State University Press, 2002.
Tag: art
Wysocki, “Impossibly Distinct”
Wysocki, Anne.
"Impossibly Distinct: On Form/Content and Word/Image in Two Pieces
of Computer-based Interactive Media." Computers and Composition
18 (2001) 137-162.
Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want?
Mitchell, W.J.T..
What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005.
Elkins, Visual Studies
Elkins,
James. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge,
2003.
Kaufer and Butler, Rhetoric and the Arts of Design
Kaufer,
David and Brian Butler. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design. Mahwah,
N.J.: Earlbaum, 1996.
George, “From Analysis to Design”
George, Diana. “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing.” CCC 54.1 (2002): 11-39.
Fuller, Media Ecologies
Fuller,
Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Sirc, “Box-Logic”
Sirc,
Geoffrey. "Box-Logic."Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding
the Teaching of Composition. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004.
Adventures in Illegal Art
We caught up with a friend last night for dinner followed by Mark Hosler’s
presentation, "Adventures in Illegal Art: Creative Media Resistance and
Negativeland" in SU’s Shemin Auditorium. Hosler’s been involved with
Negativeland for 25 years. The group
self-identifies with media hoaxes; provocative audio-mixed new media films and
shorts; and radical fair use
politics (i.e., it’s all public domain). They’re well-known for
lifting material from U2, mixing
it into a two-sided vinyl single including profanity and stolen U2 cuts, then
repackaging the album in a jacket with U2 featured prominently so as to dupe
unsuspecting consumers. Lawsuits followed, as you might expect, and Hosler
alluded to a dicey four years, fraught with legal uncertainty. Here’s that album cover:
Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
Then came film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the
tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris,
we calmly and adventurously go traveling (236).
The possibility of multiple copies–an indistinguishable hoard of
duplicates–is central among concerns covered in Benjamin’s time-worn essay on
art and mechanical reproduction. The essay reads almost episodically; it
is broken into a preface, fifteen chunks and an epilogue. I first read
this essay ten or twelve years ago, again (if skimmingly)
sixteen months
ago, and most recently, today. As explicitly concerned as Benjamin is
with shift in mass consciousness with the advent of the camera (for photography
or for film), he’s also tacitly concerned with the propaganda-subjected mass
consciousness that would foment under the conditions of so easily produced and
circulated materials. In this sense, reproducibility qua image/art and
photo/film is but one symptom of more general massification (234), spectacle
(232), the blend and fade of author/public distinctions (232), changing "modes
of participation" (239), the degradation of human aura (presence-force) (229),
and distraction’s weakening of concentration on the art object (240).