How I Explain Visual Rhetoric...

Visual Rhetoric is no simple topic, consisting of several interpretable elements that aid our understanding of what Visual Rhetoric means.One interpretation of rhetoric alone by James J. Murphy states, "A rhetorician is someone who provides his fellows with useful precepts or directions for organizing and presenting his ideas or feeling to them". I particularly like this definition as it encompasses several Visual Rhetoric elements we have studied so far.

First, Murphy's use of feeling applies directly to the term affect, coined by Massumi in The Autonomy of Affect. Affect is the half second between the moment when a person first eyes a visual and the moment a person creates a story of the visual to interpret meaning. Plainly, affect is the physical response that instigates interpretation. Because of the complexity and unique experience for each person, affect is described as the ultimate struggle of language.

Unlike Professor Kyburz, I am a lover of words. That might sound like an extreme statement; in this case, it is not. Upon understanding the term affect, I finally realized why I love words just so much. Writing is the act of continually trying to describe and recreate the feeling of affect through a textual medium. This realization has been my favorite "ah, ha!" moment this semester.

Similar to affect is the idea of punctum, the element that pierces each individual differently. Again, punctum is something a person can not always articulate which is why the attempt through words is so enchanting to me. Documenting the individual interpretation or meaning a visual creates, attempts to capture the physical reaction or the affect. I love this.

Requiring acknowledgement is my least favorite element, studium. Studium is attempting to understand the photographer's intentions. For me picking apart the creation of a visual is interesting, but not as much compared to identifying the physical feeling. Studium looks at the facts of the picture, meaning most viewers will identify.

So, how do I plainly explain Visual Rhetoric, you ask?
Visual Rhetoric is the study of the facts (studium), the individual interpretation (punctum) and the physical feeling (affect) of images. Once these concepts are identified, intentional creation of all three is projected. The viewer becomes the artist.

Reflections...

The Enchanting the Mundane project is unlike any other activity I have undertaken in school. Because I am allowed creative freedom, I find myself looking for an instruction sheet- not yet used to looking inside myself and compiling my internal set of instructions.

Upon close inspection of my bookshelves, half are literary texts (mostly accumulated through schooling) while the other half are simply books for pure pleasure. There is not much enchantment from an academic level, but each book resting there enchanted me for hours, through every page. Literacy is an undeniably influential part of my past, present and future which is why I chose it as my topic for the Enchanting the Mundane project.

Compiling visual elements representative of my literacy perspective has been difficult. I feel exposed and not nearly compelling enough. I turned to capturing pictures of my little boy reading our favorite stories, also to my grandmother who has willing read anything that has enchanted me at one point or another-Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Secret Life of Bees and everything in between. One of my favorite creative moments in this process was capturing my favorite reading spots with snippets of the page clearly defined in the frame.

After working the images through my mind, the audio to fit my project just came to me much like the spontaneous illumination of a light bulb. While I am still working through the compilation of this project, I am becoming more and more thrilled at having to instruction sheet to bridle my ideas.

Studium vs Punctum

Studium
This picture is full of it. A two year old stands, partially naked, in a messy living room watching Blue's Clues. You can see pieces of abandoned adventures on the floor namely, the Wii remote, the bee toy, the book and the Wii games lined up on the floor. The bottoms of his legs are tan giving the tush a white glow. Essentially, a toddler at play.

Punctum
As his mother, it makes me giggle. My emotions when I see this picture are a mixture of overwhelming adoration and slight stress. Adoration because it may be the cutest bum of all time, and his pose with his hands gripping the bill of his hat makes the picture more interesting. Stress because I wonder if he will pee or already has, and the messy floor makes me wonder what else he has been into. The Wii games lined up on the floor remind me of his half brother's same habit which makes me think of my husband who they both inherited the quality from.

Introduction Comparison

                After a thorough reading of each introduction, I seemed to gravitate toward Wes Anderson’s Color Palette. On the Blueness of the Sky clearly depicts the different meanings or arguments two images instigate. Likewise, the questions instigated from each image vary because of the mathematical nature of the first image and the artistic nature of the second.

                I was drawn more to Wes Anderson’s Color Palette because the same image displayed on different blogs created new meaning each instance. Each blog displays the color palette in a slightly different way, not to mention, the blog displaying the image adds meaning to the image as well. Likewise, the accompanying text or lack of narrows or broadens the meaning of the image.

                I could, most likely, be missing interpretation opportunities in the Blueness of the Sky post; however, I find many more dimensions to analyze the Wes Anderson’s Color Palette post. Both are great examples of visual rhetoric, the latter simply seems more complex.