viz.

Note to instructors: This exercise is meant to complement a unit on feminist theory within the context of a rhetoric and composition course. At the end of this assignment, you will find a list of suggested readings to aid you in compiling such a unit and to help enhance your students' understanding of what it means to "read" visual rhetoric through a feminist lens.

The questions following each image are drawn from Chapter 14 of Everything's An Argument, titled "Visual Arguments."

If you teach rhetoric and technology, you might be interested in “Googolopoly,” a version of the classic Parker Bros. game that charts the search giant’s quest for web-wide domination.

FYI: Rich Uncle Pennybags’ pitchfork is a clue that the creators are ambivalent about Google’s quest to “organize” your data and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those of you who have time to kill in during these last few weeks of class can download the entire game here.

via TechCrunch

While scrolling through HollaBackNYC, a site that allows users to post pictures of those that harass them on the street, I came across two websites that seemed like great visual rhetoric resources. The Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative offers a blog, resources, as well as information about current projects and artists. The picture below comes from a 2004 project from the Street Art Workers entitled "Whose Media?" You can also find archived material from the group's previous website here.
Just wanted to share!

The blog garfield minus garfield contains some wonderful examples of the ways in which images can be recontextualized to create new meanings. According to the site

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Garfield the strip is mostly lame; but, by removing the dull main character, the strip is completely transformed. I particularly enjoy the empty panels, and the effect their silence has on the meaning of each strip.

Continuing with the recent trend of discussing the fallacies of photography, as well as pictures with guns in them:

Gerry Canavan has posted a collection of images of the Statue of Liberty taken from science fiction stories and films.

Fantastic Universe, August-September 1953

from Thundarr the Barbarian

This list should be a great conversation starter for any classes discussing the rhetoric of science fiction or Americana.

If you are interested in animation art, you’ll probably enjoy Animation Backgrounds, a blog dedicated to the backgrounds from classic animated films and shorts.

via Boing Boing

“A Soviet Poster A Day” serves up images of Soviet propaganda posters with commentary. This site would be a great resource for anyone studying propagandistic images. Here’s an entry on the Five Year Plan:

When I teach writing, I like to occasionally give my students imitation exercises to point out the features of a particular text. Robot Chicken, Seth Green’s stop-motion-animation show, has provided a pretty funny video example of this practice (my favorite touch is when they bleep out the bad language). It would be interesting to assign this type of video exercise for students to familiarize them with video conventions.

See the video here.