visual+grammar

the assignment
Your first assignment is to write a proposal (1-2 pages) for your first installation about __the visual grammar of images or videos__. This installation can use any images and videos you find or "capture" yourself as long they are not yet designated as "official art," i.e. already being shown in a museum or gallery. The installation should use at least ten images or videos as its sample set and feature an analysis of at least three items from that set. toc

You can use the following sources to find already existing images or videos:
 * Google images
 * Google video
 * Moving Image Archive
 * Fanlore
 * waybackmachine
 * Etsy
 * George Eastman House Photography Collections Online
 * The Commons on Flickr
 * Library of Congress American Memory
 * New York Public Library Digital Gallery
 * New York Public Library's Photostream on Flickr
 * Smithsonian Images
 * Smithsonian's Photostream on Flickr
 * VADS - the online source for visual arts

You can also collect the images yourself using a digital camera.

Your proposal should start with a brief overview of the installation and include the following topics
 * __the sample set__ - describe as precisely as possible the sample set you are proposing to use (constraints and variation)
 * __presentation method__ - how you will be presenting the sample on your wiki page (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Vodpod, etc)
 * __visual grammar feature(s)__ - discuss the visual grammar feature or features from Kress that you intend to use to analysis at least three examples from the sample set
 * __working hypothesis__ - state your current working hypothesis about variation within your set based on the feature or features you have proposed

To see what an "installation" might look like, check out the following on //in media res//:

**So Damn Hot – a From Eroica with Love vid by Diana Williams**

Other examples and sources for ideas for your installation:

__**Readings**__
 * __Wiki pages__**
 * Art of Clothing
 * Comfort of Things
 * Handbook of Material Culture
 * Material Culture Reader
 * I[|ntroduction: Photographic Interventions, Silke Horstkotte & Nancy Pedri]
 * Advertising images as social indicators: depictions of blacks in LIFE magazine, 1936–2000, " John Grady
 * "A private visual practice going public? Social functions and sociological research opportunities of Web-based family photography," LUC PAUWELS
 * "Flirting with space: thinking landscape relationally," David Crouch
 * THE POLITICS AND SEMIOTICS OF THE SMALLEST ICONS OF POPULAR CULTURE: Latin American Postage Stamps Jack Child
 * IMAGINING AND IMAGING "ANTHROPOS" IN EARLY-MODERN JAPAN, RONALD P. TOBY
 * THE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHIC CONDITION, MARY BOUQUET
 * "RECOGNIZING LINCOLN: IMAGE VERNACULARS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VISUAL CULTURE," CARA A. FINNEGAN

__**Visual Culture Viewer **__
 * [|Anime Mecha : an Interview With Actar]
 * [|A new way of looking at the world - CNN.com]
 * [|"Punk’ Era of Graphic Design]
 * [|Interpreting urban screens]
 * [|Black Action Heroes]
 * [|Indian Comics]
 * [|Jonathan Hyman, Visual Response to 9/11]
 * [|42 Free Online Magazines For Designers | Graphics]
 * [|Marvel Irony Theatre:]
 * [|The Social Practice of Wedding Photography]
 * [|Free Online Comics & Graphic Novels]


 * __Other sites__**
 * in media res
 * Flow TV
 * CIMATICS
 * 50s & 60s Science and Tech Ads on Flickr
 * Legitimizing the State

The proposal is due by Feb. 9 and the installation should be completed for class on Feb. 23. Make your proposal on a wiki page proposal - "lastname visual grammar proposal" and submit a printed copy of the proposal.

how to start

 * media type="custom" key="5257923" ||  ||~ You are creating a public installation to show your viewers something about the visual grammar of a given set of images:
 * __pick a topic that both interests you and other people can relate to__ - dorm rooms, bumper stickers, mall show windows, MySpace pages, bathroom signs, tattoos, celebrities, sports figures, magazine covers, textbook illustrations, news photos, posters, landscapes, buildings . ..
 * __keep your constraints simple__ - pictures of 9/11, women basketball players, vintage ads for Coke, row houses in Hampden . ..
 * __select for variation__ - race, class, gender, geography, decades ..
 * __think fractal__ - you can often expose a global pattern by looking at a tiny subset of the whole. Ten images of Rihanna might say more about cross-over black divas than images of ten different singers. Likewise it might be more useful to look at ten screen shots from a single video game than images from ten different games. ||

about Flickr

 * media type="custom" key="5256979" ||~ Flickr is, without question, now the world's premier digital image sharing site. Both professional and amateur photographers, as well as leading digital artists, regularly critique each other's work there and select favorites from other people's sets.

It has also become, as the list of sources above indicate, the site of choice for many digital archives to make images available to the public. [|The Commons]on Flickr offers a exceptional array of both archival and current images. In addition, because so many people upload images to Flickr and make them public through their accounts and group pools, the site is a constantly growing source for the study of visual grammar. ||
 * media type="custom" key="5256987" ||~ Since many of the images on Flickr are tagged or in group pools created by users, you can very easily search the entire site for particular subjects and, as the examples here show, display the results of a search as a slide show. More importantly, once you open a Flickr account, you can select images from one of these searches, save them to your own gallery, and then embed a slide show of those images on a wiki page.

The African American Flickr slide show on our wiki home page comes from a search of the archival images in The Commons. The slide show above, however, shows results from a search across the whole site for the terms "African American." This slide show thus includes any public image on Flickr which someone has tagged or described with those terms. It may thus be the single best source for images showing how African Americans picture their lives. ||
 * media type="custom" key="5257003" ||~ Consider Flickr then not only as a way to display images but as an "ethnographic" source. The slide show above, for example, from the search "wedding" returns a mix of the standard and not so standard representations of heterosexual weddings. Notice what happens with the slide show to the left when you modify that search by looking for "gay wedding." You could use either of these searches as the source for an installation on the visual grammar of straight or gay weddings. Or you could pick and pair off contrastive images from each set. Click through on the links below to see what happens when you add ethnic descriptors to the search term "wedding":
 * Mexican wedding
 * Japanese wedding
 * Gypsy wedding ||
 * media type="custom" key="5257007"

media type="custom" key="5257721" ||~ And then there is America's unique contribution to the anthropology of coming of age. ||

13 ways to cover a song

 * media type="custom" key="5258059" align="center"


 * If your set is composed of videos, you can display it on vodpod or YouTube. The first option gives you many choices (see our wiki home page) for using video and slide shows captured from sites such as the remarkable** [|Moving Image Archive] **.

If all your video comes from YouTube, the standard playlist player has its advantages: easy to set up and manage from your YouTube account. Plus it will play through the whole list without stopping. You can thus do demented things like making people listen to the original and 13 covers of "I Fought the Law."

Be sure to catch the final unplugged version:** 工事中の駅前で. なぜか相応しい曲だ.

In front of the station under construction. Somehow appropriate, considering all the resentment against the construction and the fact it's going on anyways.
 * What does this have to do with visual culture? Simple. Just give it an academic title: "Fighting the law of modality: a visual semiotics of the auditory on YouTube."

Works every time.** ||  ||  "**I Fought the Law**" is a much-covered song originally recorded by Sonny Curtis and //The Crickets // (post Buddy Holly ) in 1959. The song was famously covered by //Bobby Fuller Four //, who recorded a more successful version of the song in 1965, and by //The Clash //, who performed and recorded a punk rock version in 1979.

Just as the song became a top ten hit, Bobby Fuller was found dead in a parked automobile near his Los Angeles, California home. The police considered the death an apparent suicide ; "just about everyone who knew him disagreed",<span class="wiki_link_ext"> however, believing instead that Fuller was murdered.

//The <span class="wiki_link_ext">Dead Kennedys //, in particular, wrote and recorded a different version as a comment on <span class="wiki_link_ext">Dan White 's <span class="wiki_link_ext">1978 murder of <span class="wiki_link_ext">San Francisco mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor <span class="wiki_link_ext">Harvey Milk, and White's subsequent use of the "<span class="wiki_link_ext">Twinkie defense " to influence the court to convict him of the lesser charge of <span class="wiki_link_ext">manslaughter. The song, sung from White's perspective, replaced the line "I fought the law and the law won" with "I fought the law and I won".

In 1989 during <span class="wiki_link_ext">Operation Just Cause, when the U.S. Army had Panamanian dictator <span class="wiki_link_ext">Manuel Noriega confined to the <span class="wiki_link_ext">Papal Nunciature , the Vatican's Embassy. Journalists at the scene mistook the playing of loud music including "I Fought the Law" loudly and repeatedly over loudspeakers as an attempt to flush out Noriega using <span class="wiki_link_ext">PSYOPS tactics. In reality, the music was played to prevent the journalists hearing the negotiations taking place between the USA and Noriega. The //Bobby Fuller Four// version of this song is ranked #175 on //<span class="wiki_link_ext">Rolling Stone '//s list of the <span class="wiki_link_ext">500 Greatest Songs of All Time. from Wikipedia ||