Category Archives: Arts & Entertainment

Typophile = Delicious

Posted on by
1

One of our beloved editors, Kaitlin, has helped open my eyes to how typefaces gives us signals and shown me the beauty (and rhetorical effectiveness) of kinetic typography.  Thanks, Kaitlin, for reminding me that the most persuasive rhetoric is that which hides itself, most often through normalization.

To repay the favor I’m posting this exquisite video by a group of students at Brigham Young University promoting the 5th annual Typophile Film Fest:

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

Body Typed

Posted on by
1

Jesse Epstein has a series of documentaries called Body Typed, which explored the idea of body image and how these various representations of the body impact us.

The first, Wet Dreams and False Images. . .

The Second, The Guarantee. . .

And the third, 34x25x36. . .

These are all high quality films that effectively explores beyond the cliche “too much perfection is bad for us” criticism and questions this kind of perfectionism as a form of worship. It’s interesting. You should watch it.

In fact, you can see 34x25x36 in its entirety at PBS Video as well as an interview with Jesse Epstein herself.

What is the vernacular avant garde?

Posted on by
2

There was a great piece in the NY Times this weekend, “Uploading the Avant Garde,” in which Virginia Heffernan considers the presence, among YouTube’s many microgenres, of what she calls “the vernacular avant-garde.” I’ve never heard this phrase before, and I dig it. What does it mean to put those words in tandem? According to the OED (of course):

Vernacular (adj)

1. That writes, uses, or speaks the native or indigenous language of a country or district.

2. a. Of a language or dialect: That is naturally spoken by the people of a particular country or district; native, indigenous.

6. Of arts, or features of these: Native or peculiar to a particular country or locality. spec. in vernacular architecture, architecture concerned with ordinary domestic and functional buildings rather than the essentially monumental.

Avant garde

1. The foremost part of an army; the vanguard or van.

2. The pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period. Also attrib. or as adj. Hence avant-{sm}gardism, the characteristic quality of such pioneering; avant-{sm}gardist(e) (-{shti}st), such a person; also attrib.

And so this seems clear enough: we have the home-grown innovator, the local pioneer. But in our current use of vernacular, we usually mean folksy, populist, “normal” ways of communicating, whereas avant garde is all about pushing those norms to provoke and even alienate mainstream popular audiences… So, yeah, I’m still not sure I get how those work together. How can we define such a concept? ( I heart semantics.) Like porn, do we just know it when we see it? Anyone?

So of course I googled the phrase and found few results beyond a couple of uses in reference to avant garde jazz and vernacular architecture… Except, that is, for a couple of  blogs and a SNS who’d posted the same link and video:

Networked Performance

Since the latter part of the twentieth century, and especially in new media artistic practice, we have witnessed a shift from the representational idiom — where art is viewed mainly as a means to represent the world — to the performative idiom — where the practice of art is considered an active negotiation with the world it seeks to address.*

Networked Performance is real-time, embodied practice within digital environments and networks; it is, embodied transmission.

Performance involves the moment of action, its continuity, inherent temporality and relationship to the present.

DocumentTech

DocumentaryTech is a collaborative effort to talk about what makes for the best in the art of the documentary. As a joint project by The Rhode Island Film Festival and several sponsoring universities, we’ll talk about technique, technology, distribution and funding.

Dance-tech.net

Using the most advanced social software platforms and internet rich multimedia applications, dance-tech.net provides movement and new media artists, theorist, thinkers and technologists the possibility of sharing work, ideas and research, generating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative projects.

I don’t have much profound to say about all this. I think the phrase is fascinating and worthy of play. And I think it’s cool that there are such fascinated/ing people out there instigating such play.

Yay interwebs.

Free Music Archive

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another site if you’re looking for incidental music for your multimedia Harlot compositions. I’ve already brought up Musopen and Funky Remixes, which are at different ends of the spectrum, I’d say, but the Free Music Archive contains a much broader sampling of genres. Of course, not everything on there is what I would label quality, but they seemed to have a great selection of classical, old time/historical, and electronica, while other genres are merely solid. It’s still worth an earful gander, though.

Oh, and the site labels every individual track with the particular copyright. Everything on there is either creative commons licensed or in the public domain and available for download. Lucky you, huh?

I’ll even give you something to start you off with. Hmm, let’s go with a little middle-eastern psych rock (love that combination, by the way): Hayvanlar Ami’s “Gökte Güller Açryor,” which has a creative commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

Haughty Taughty Meets A Tweaker

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve always wanted to walk through a fridge. You know, Chronicles of Narnia wardrobe style. And if I wanted to travel to New York, then I could do that with the Black Acid Co-op exhibition by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman. This walk-through art display takes you through scenes of meth labs and others. There’s a slideshow from The New York Times I recommend checking out. The exhibition site says this:

Black Acid Co-Op is the moniker for a counter-culture enclave embedded in the metropolis. In this incarnation, the artists shift the focus from the production of illegal drugs to sites of sub-cultural groups and how they are situated in the larger urban environment. The installation will expand on the notions relating to the connection between counter-culture and industrial society resulting in a spatial collage that extends itself into a vast architectural setting.

Despite the strong contrast of scenes, the entire installation will feel as if it is a unified system of spaces, interconnected and functioning together. Ducts, wires and tubes traverse rooms creating a semblance of an organism: architecture as body, electricity as capillaries, and volumes as organs. And the intended use of many of the sites will feel transformed or hybridized: factories have become homes, kitchens are used as drug labs, the radical chic living room is frozen in a museum, the high-rise is carved into makeshift maze to evade the law.

I love art work like this–Art work that immerses the spectator and brings him or her into a completely different world only to realize that this is a real world too. Ah, the duplicitous meanings formed are fantastic. Non?

Via Vitia. Thanks!

Rhetoric in the News

Posted on by
Reply

rhet_3

The BBC published an article this morning on rhetoric, even though they frame it as “speech-writing.”  It’s a super-quick primer on persuasive basics, which won’t reveal too much to the amateur rhetorician, but is intriguing nevertheless, if only to see how rhetoric gets represented.

I find it interesting that the article revolves mostly around the rhetorical situation of speeches, pulling examples almost exclusively from powerful politicians, but has pictures sprinkled throughout that nod to rhetoric’s everyday usefulness.  I’m not so sure that you’d want to perform a “speech” (in the way the genre demands) in these situations (parking meter attendant, finger-pointing boss, depressed friend, or screaming-match with the significant other).  Each rhetorical situation calls for different tactics and adaptation; a crucial first step in beginning to explore persuasion is knowing that rhetoric–the art, study, and practice of human communication–is contingent and conditional.

The article lists a few general techniques, however, that have proved effective over time:

  • Contrasts
  • Three-part lists
  • Imagery and anecdotes
  • Break the rules

It’s encouraging to see “break the rules” as the last section, though stated a little bluntly.  We might consider it as something like “genre-bending.”  Messing with the audience’s expectations is an excellent way to generate and maintain engagement and, at times, increase your credibility.  This is often done by bringing one genre format into a situation that doesn’t quite call for it.  Having been primed for certain communication patterns over time, we’re surprised when the pattern gets jostled.

Oh, and in the comments someone correctly identifies one of the examples given in the “Contrasts” section as antimetabole (a specific form of chiasmus . . . but you already knew that).

Writing and weeding

Posted on by
1

I’m working on an academic article about Harlot, and the irony does not make it a smoother process… so I was out in the backyard weeding.

I enjoy the excuse to sit around outside, but I always have qualms about weeding–in part, because I’m never quite sure I’m pulling the right ones. But even more so, because I get uncomfortable about messing with nature. (Or rather, “nature,” since this is my urban and bricked backyard, after all.) I have these funny guilty feelings about killing something that’s growing, like its an environmental sin (cue Catholic upbringing) to in any way interfere with the natural course of, well, nature. I know that this isn’t logical, that there are immense and innumerable complicating factors… but still.

Side note: My students were so put off by Gore’s rhetorical choices in An Inconvenient Truth that they seem to have found the movie less than persuasive. It sure as hell worked on me. I’ve always considered myself an environmentalist. But now, all the time, I think about these things, the tiny details of our relationship with the earth. Negotiations and love songs.

Anyway, back in the garden, I’ve found that I can pretty comfortably pull the weeds that grow up in between the bricks of the patio, or where they might adversely affect our vegetable plants. I don’t want to analyze this, but I also tend to be more lenient with the ones I like, like clover. So delicate and pretty, no harm there. Today I didn’t yank a big ugly dandelion because there was a ladybug on it. Not logical, but a system is developing.

I weed the human areas and try to let the plant areas mostly alone. Which brings me to the borders, the lines that can be drawn and redrawn, the liminal spaces, the messy areas. I thought maybe I’d take a hard line and just declare a point past which the weeds are not welcome. But that line is hard to draw–and more importantly, I thought, they place the weeds within the surrounding areas in an interesting and precarious position. They’re in contested space (in my head, at least) between human and natural environments–and again, I wonder, who am I to decide? Plus, I’ve read Anzaldua and believe in the dynamic, disruptive potential of the borderlands. Again, not necessarily the most logical thought process… But for now, I’m going to let those spaces be, just to see what happens there.

Which brings me back to that paper about Harlot, into which I now think I should work some of these ideas about the messiness and growth potential of such border spaces. That’s some good gardening.

Old Yeller . . . The Dog Food

Posted on by
Reply

I wouldn’t believe unless I saw it with my own eyes:

yeller

In conjunction with Disney, Kroger has begun selling Old Yeller Dog Food based off the movie depicting a young boy’s emotional journey with his dog, set in the 1860s.  Old Yeller (named for his color, yellow/yella) and the boy become very close and engage in numerous frontier adventures.  Then the dog gets into a fight with wolf, gets bit, becomes rabid, and the boy shoots him in the head with a rifle.

The movie sometimes goes by its alternative title: SADDEST MOVIE EVER.

Or, in the words of the geniuses over at Kroger and Disney: “The movie is a timeless classic that transcends generations, and we believe this brand will appeal not only to original fans, but to the millions of Americans who share the same kind of special bond with their beloved dogs,” says Barry Vance, Kroger senior corporate category manager.

“Bringing Disney’s Old Yeller brand to a trusted retailer like Kroger was a natural fit,” says Christopher King, category director, Disney Consumer Products FMCG. “Disney’s Old Yeller dog food is for those dogs that are part of the family.”

Did these people watch the same movie?  What are they trying to convey with this branding?  What’s next, Titanic bottled water?

Remarkable.