Blog Readings

As I read my fellow students' blog responses, I was curious to note that a couple of students applied their growing knowledge to consider how visual rhetoric affects children. Both Camille and Viola noted that visual rhetoric and its impact can begin to 'track' children in institutional settings as well as the home.

Furthermore, Joe's comments about our class discussions and sharing of projects provided me insight to see how our work impacts each other in unanticipated ways. How much we choose to share, or not, creates a different kind of rhetorical response. Visual artists are quite familiar with the critique process, which is often not 'nice' in that context but can be very challenging indeed. I appreciate that we are able to defend our visual representations with a written justification. The critique process in our class is unique in my experience. Generally, like Joe, I like to see what my fellow students are doing and hear their points of view.

At the Human Zoo

Okay, so I am creating a museum in Second Life about the circus. I am trying an experiment to see if I can figure out how to upload a video file there by using this as a .url. I created this movie in Flash. Wish me luck!

How does PoMo make you feel?

HA Schult is a German conceptual artist who goes to famous landmarks and fills them up with hundreds of life-size statues made of garbage. This is a picture of one of the installations.

Postmodernism would appear to be stitched into the fabric of our contemporary global existence. Just as the industrial revolution parted people from their rural paths and led them down the lane of urban alienation it would appear that the contemporary visible information 'superhighway' has continued to lead the masses to an invisible black-hole of consumption.

Who gains from this consumption? Does mass consumption and production of visual images contaminate visual pleasure in a psychological way? The constant fragmentation we experience between real and unreal seems to behave like a fracturing between wakefulness and sleep -- the phase where one has disarranged snippets of reality combined with the surreal. Maybe we are just copying and pasting ourselves into a new reality as JibJab or Second Life allows us to do.

I find that I am fragmented by Postmodernism as well. I used to feel secure in knowing fact from fiction in the visual realm. However, I no longer feel that confidence. Postmodernism has fractured my security. There is no one 'real' truth with Postmodernism. Sometimes that is liberating; sometimes that is terrifying. It depends on what I am looking at and when.

'Madness' and Creativity

In this week's readings, I have been covering some familiar territory. However, I still am trying to understand how Foucault's ideas impact a contemporary audience. For example, if the Panopticon Penitentiary never had a guard and prisoners still thought they were being observed is that a bad thing. There is a balance between self-surveillance and societal surveillance. In order to live free of anarchy, we do a 'deal' with the dominant class. How far are we willing to go? Of course, this is a complicated question with no definitive answer.

Just prior to the beginning of photography, Gericault, at the behest of a Doctor of psychiatry, completed a series of paintings depicting different 'types' of madness. (See image at the left)

As I was doing research on the color 'orange,' I found a contemporary psychiatrist that seems to assert that psychiatrists can identify mental illness by the kind of colors, brush strokes, and content a painter uses (Rao, AJP). It would seem that old habits die hard. While we think that some artists live closer to the edges of the Bell curve of behavior, I am not sure that that justifies a label of 'mental illness.'

Now, we have a whole array of 'medications' that are meant to aleviate mental illnesses. Are we 'aleviating' creativity as well? It seems that we endow the contemorary psychiatrist with a great deal of power to deter or determine in this instance.

Rao, Anjali and Matcheri S. Keshavan, "Can Psychaitrists Recognize Mental Illness in Paintings?" American Journal of Psychiatry 143, no. 4 (April 2006):599-600.

Group Colors

Chris and I both took a number of on-line color analysis tests. I likened the tests to a color horoscope. Some tests were meant to be general; some tests were meant to sell you something, and some were redundant. However, I thought some aspects of the tests were useful for providing a sense of introspection.

Chris's test results indicated that he has a 'purple' personality. When I looked at the 'purple' personality my source indicated that, "talent comes easily but 'purples' may lean too heavily on endowment and not enough on endurance. They have great philosophical powers and are tolerant" (Birren 41). He agreed with some aspects of the results and not others as did I. On the other hand, my test indicated that I have a 'white' personality. At first, I had negative associations with this because I think of the world in shades of gray not 'pure' white. However, I realized that in this context 'white' indicated a person who is primarily a 'peacemaker'. That is a pretty accurate assessment of my overall outlook. Chris and I found common ground in our color associations. I think we are different but that that contrast will work well together. We will be able to employ our different strengths and augment each others weaknesses. That sounds like something a 'peacemaker' would say ... hmmmm. Despite having been burned in past 'group' projects, I think this will be a productive association.

However, I don't think that these color tests are a reliable predictor of human behavior. Furthermore, I think the designers of the tests, in some instances, have an ulterior motive. For example, the Pratt and Lambert test site was created essentially to sell you paint. Additionally, there are cultural values that are associated with different colors that these sites do not address. For example, both purple and white are associated with death in cultures other than that of middle-America.

Work cited: Birren, Faber. Color in Your World. London:New York, Collier MacMillan Publishers. 1974. 41.

What do pictures have to say about color?

Memory needs color in order to be vivid (Mirzoeff 83). Nan Goldin, a photographer, said that she was relying on her photographs of her family and friends to keep her memory of them alive. Goldin's skill as a photographer lies in part in finding the intense colors in everyday lives that might otherwise be depicted in the grainy black-and-white style favored by most other documentary photographers (Mirzoeff 83).

This photo Vivienne in the green dress, New York, 1980, places Goldin's places her subject against a green wall, finding color contrasts in a red watch and blue radio to provide a lesson in the effects of complementary color (Mirzoeff 83).

While this example is not directly related to Horton's article on color for the web, I think it is instructive. Goldin seems to adhere to Horton's eight uses of color in her photograph (Horton 167). Perhaps, Horton's advice is applicable to more than web design.

Those eight uses of color are:

1. To direct attention
2. To speed search
3. To aid recognition
4. To show organization
5. To rate or quantify
6. To represent color itself
7. To attract and please users
8. To arouse an emotion

Works Cited: Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "The Age of Photography," In An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. 65-90.
Horton, William K. "Color in Icons," In The Icon Book. 1994. 167.

What is wrong with this picture? The answer depends on when you asked. Until the 1950's stop signs were yellow and black. (source)

Yet, before that the answer was different. In 1915, the stop sign was black and white and not octagonal. In the 1920's, studies conducted by government safety commissions (Aikins 442) determined that black and yellow was a particularly strong color combination. {The natural world would seem to confirm this assessment, especially to anyone stung by a bumble bee or yellow jacket.}

As more research was conducted, red became 'the new yellow' at least for the color of the stop sign. Although people who have red/green blindness may be at a disadvantage, the color red remains a symbol of danger and power. The octagonal shape of the stop sign is meant to help alleviate this problem. Also, most electric traffic signals have red on top, then yellow, then green, to help people who are color blind as well.

What would a local road commissioner do if Stop Sign Red were to be co-opted by Coca Cola and the executives said they owned the color. It is difficult, but certainly not impossible, to imagine the legal chaos that would surround that issue. However, there seems to be plenty of litigation to go around. Pepsi has tried to co-opt a specific hue of blue (and so far failed) but D.A.P. (a company that makes caulking materials) has managed to get their red bucket legally branded. Why one and not the other? Well, maybe one company had lawyers that were better at rhetoric or perhaps one judge didn't like Pepsi products. I'm a Coca Cola gal myself. Either way the importance of color to corporate branding is big business.

Where does the 'little' guy fit into this picture? All this business is created to get us to buy into a brand or ideology of some sort. From the movie screen, to the small screen, to the closet rack we are bombarded by color decisions every day. I think about this every morning when I choose what to wear for the day. I used to love florals and patterns that reminded me of nature. Now that I have more responsibilities and less time to contemplate what to wear, I go for solids, usually black and one other color. I do this to streamline my decision making about the 'small' stuff. It makes doing laundry, shopping, and morning chaos go very smoothly so I can focus on the things that matter more to me like color theory. Is that ironic or what?

Work cited: Aikins, H. Austin. "Confusing Traffic Signals." Jstor, ISU Milner Library Download .pdf. April 1925: 442-444. (accessed 2/13/2010)