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Hope you felt some connection with some of the images
It’s ironic that such a powerful form of communication is not studied as a matter of course! [refers to image slideshow shown before this lecture]
Please note that although the slides (and some notes) will be posted on the Web, you should still take your own notes! Use a notebook for the class—or print out the slides before class so you can write on them.
•Mirriam-Webster: “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works <the canon of great literature>” related to Middle English usage as “an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture”  List of books that there is a consensus about—their importance for understanding Western culture.
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•These lists/documents CHANGE over time:  In Jefferson’s time, in terms of the library that he said every literate person ought to have—filled with Greek and Latin texts. Probably had few if any works by women  or people of color.
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•How much is any canon influenced by popular culture? If you had a canon defined by lay-people it might have nothing with the canon done by scholars. From church to High Priest of academia (but a Marxist canon would differ from Bloom’s).
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•Politics and ideology, some things we’ll be discussing in their relationship with images, certainly play a role. “Culture Wars” in academia/education. Certain books banned by religious groups even today: the Catholic Church’s “index.” People serious about SpongeBob being “outed.”
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• Bloom’s “Western canon” and  “100 greatest” and other sources for the key texts of western culture (and others), but what about images?
•Our attempt is only a beginning of a set of materials that visually literate people should know about.
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•No clear canon: still quite divided by disciplines and genres
there’s survey’s of art history, but they won’t include such important images as the bombing of Pearl Harbor or Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Which have actually influenced our culture more?  And what about the vast quantity of images from science? (And this doesn’t even begin to approach non-Western cultures, and sub-cultures here).
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•When should you need to know what about images? Middle school? high school? College?
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•Just as we would disappointed in a college grad who couldn't’ tell Shakespeare from Dickens or had no idea who they were , so in the future we may be disappointed to talk to college grads who can’t identify an Rafael or Michelangelo or  Mondrian –or the plumes of smoke from the exploded space shuttle or the ships sinking in Pearl Harbor…
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•The images you just saw, with captions and explanations, will be available on the Web site. We’ll be studying many of them during the semester. We welcome suggestions for other images that should be in this canon.
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SOURCES
http://www.literarycritic.com/bloom.htm
(Bloom, Western Canon)
Non-existence of image canon in part  because great quantities of accessible images are historically recent
Factoids from Visual Literacy, Lynell Burmark
P7 Rise of Image:” ..most of the world’s inhabitants are now devoting about half their leisure time to an activity that did not exist two generations ago. Most of the rest are held back only by the lack of electricity or the money to buy a set.”
“According to a Gallup poll, the number of Americans who admitted to having read no books of any kind during the past year—and this is not an easy thing to admit to a pollster—doubled from 1978 to 1990, from 8 to 16 percent.” p9
1820: almost all same type face, small type, long story leads—nothing breaks on first half of first page,
Headline tiny
Visually homogenous: gray from a distance
1950: variety of type (still pre computer)
Black and white photos
But text dominant
NYT 100 year history show
Intelligencer from http://www.rarenewspapers.com/browseissues.asp?C=moments&SC=precivilwar
Brinks: http://www.rarenewspapers.com/browseissues.asp?C=20thcentury
Plato warned us against confusing images with reality and others have gone beyond that to explain why images cannot be trusted.
 This is a theme in many areas of theory in humanities and science (we will be discussing in course)
More recent criticism of the role of images also related to changing philosophies—in particular those of Descartes and 19th c French philosophers (e.g., Saussure, Derrida and others  to others pursuing rationalizing, logical ordering, linguistic explanations for everything…
Easier to express logical argument in text than images. Distrust of image “rhetoric”.
Images treated as inferior part of more general semantics [stafford p[5]]
We’ll be studying some of the work of these theorists soon.
Philosophical discourse on the nature of reality as perceived through sense—in particular vision
Common reference you will hear/see over and over again in reading about images is that of Plato’s Cave …
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SOURCES
Full text of Reublic: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
Relevant section of the Republic http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/platoscave.html
On Cave and Matrix similarities.
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_partridge.html
Picture from http://www.zlw-ima.rwth-aachen.de/forschung/publications/question_of_reality.html
You can say that it’s rather a gothic metaphor (the cave), but fundamentally we still agree today that he had the distinctions right -- but depressing components of the way he suggested it. Stafford is opposing the metaphor not the underlying distinction between images and reality.
Every tool has its appropriate use: language text, mathematics, imagery. You are an optimal tool user if you can recognize both the power and limitations of the tools.
Book cover: [Stafford 1996]
So, In addition to being a field with runaway explosion of content, visual thinking and communication have been under suspicion in academia for hundreds of year.
We’ll be exploring some more of the history and  reasons in detail later.
SOURCES
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Image mine
Downcast eyes (Martin Jay), Barbara Stafford’s Good Looking.
The ubiquitous role of images is new and is still threatening to many.
Historically important to know that new information technologies are virtually all denigrated at the outset. Rise of image pp31,32:
Writing also viewed with suspicion when first invented and literacy becoming widespread.
Greeks believed in oral transmission, memorization, mnemonics ( palace metaphor), believed writing would dumb down the mind and education
Answering machines
Call waiting
These arguments similar to use of TV and also of computer, particularly in its visual aspects (gaming, etc.)
Similarly, we hear that images deceive, are for the illiterate, are not an important part of academic discourse. Studying of ancient art OK, but of modern, non-art images often ridiculed as subject matter in universities. “DJ/VJ course”
MCM became department here only recently…  previously semiotics part of English departments…
SOURCES_______________________
Factoids from Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word
So today we have more images than ever but still a great deal of suspicion and lack of understanding about how images “work” and about their role in academia and elsewhere.
Let’s switch modes for a minute and instead of talking about images in general, let’s look at a few of the images from the slide show because meaning and intent are not always obvious…
and we’ll discuss how different disciplines can add different perspectives to looking at an image…
An important distinction is “looking at/perceiving” vs. “interpreting”
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•Let’s do some interpretation of an image from the slide show- because meaning and intent are not always obvious…
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•Starting with caption actually, not even image yet:
•ASK how many know what “VJ” stands for
•not captioned “WWII Day” (tells us something about the times in which it was taken)
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•LIFE caption: “Photographers across America captured victory kisses on August 14, 1945, the day World War II came to an end. So why did one embrace become a universal symbol of jubilation - and perhaps the most reprinted image in LIFE's history? Having spied a sailor smooching his way through Times Square, Alfred Eisenstaedt followed until he found the perfect composition - a confluence of lines and curves that draws the eye into a vortex of pure joy.”  --reads  as an unambiguously happy event
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•But look at the  rather strange positions of the two figures—the man appears to have his girlfriend in a head lock—and her hand hangs lax, not embracing him at all. We might use research from psychology and anthropological approached to  human gesture and body language interpretation to further analyze this image, as well as media theory issue of gender expectations. Would this be a canonical picture if the woman was dressed very differently, for instance?
•And just formally, what contribution did the black and white outfits have on the aesthetic of this b&w photo?
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•I wondered about the strange pose and did some research online. Here’s what Eisenstaedt himself had to say about the image:
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•“VJ Day in Times Square on August 15, 1945 provided the opportunity for Eisenstaedt to photograph the image for which he is possibly most famous. "I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight." he explained. "Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn't make any difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder...Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse." Eisenstaedt was very gratified and pleased with this enduring image. "People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture." “http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0397/AEisenstaedt.html
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Mores of the times: So instead of say boyfriend returning to girlfriend, this is an aggressive, really somewhat weird, photo… today man would have been slapped or had complaint filed against him instead of been made famous in this picture…
Gender issue: At the same time, there are tons of pictures of French girls throwing themselves at  the liberating American GIs marching in the streets of Paris. Even back then, women kissing GIs seems less offensive (if at all) than the reverse…
Nationality issue: Would this same image with Eiffel tower in back have angered the French? Probably
SOURCES
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•1945: Alfred Eisenstaedthttp://www.life.com/Life/millennium/photos/eyerman.html
And what about this, also famous image?
Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla 1968
Photo Eddie Adams/AP
•LIFE: “With North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive beginning, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, was doing all he could to keep Viet Cong guerrillas from Saigon. As Loan executed a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain, AP photographer Eddie Adams opened the shutter. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for a picture that, as much as any, turned public opinion against the war.
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•NOT what Adams had intended:
•he felt that many misinterpreted the scene as one of a horrific act with the implied villain the man shooting the other man in the head. •when told in 1998 that the immigrant Loan (the shooter) had died of cancer at his home in Burke, Va., he said, “The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.”
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•Interesting that interpreting imagery, including something as basic as understanding the role of captioning is not formally taught in any required course in college. •critical readers and not to believe everything we read, but it’s equally important not to look assume that images have obvious, unambiguous  messages •Understanding this image draws on issues in photojournalism, the cognitive science area of understanding how we related text and images and how they can work best together, and again formal compositional issues—it’s not just a picture of someone being shot in the head, without judging content in any way, it also is an excellent composition.
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One could also look at  the neurological issue of how process images of violence, pictures of faces, etc. New research shows different facial emotions are processed in different areas of the brain.
images are powerful, but they need study and critical thinking just as text does.
We’ll be doing this throughout the semester.
BUT This is hardly news (these photos are both quite old), so why is it of particular importance now?
So images are powerful, but need interpretation –this is hardly news!
And why is the need not being filled by art 10, mcm 11, etc.
The answer, as you may have guessed from the title of the course, has to do with the computer.
In this manuscript, all lettering and drawing done by hand as part of a whole integrated work…
But the difference in the nature of the lettering —the underlying limited alphabet, allowed this part of the manuscript to be reproduced by anyone with finite set of letter forms/ metal letters and punctuation. Don’t even need access to the original to do this!
The beautiful illustration of the initial “W”, though got left behind. There was no abstract language—you’d have to make a printing plate with the full image on it.
No way (in general) to describe it so that someone somewhere else could accurately reproduce it
Computer graphics has changed this, and we’ll be studying how is some depth. For now, suffice it to say that images are empowered by the computer in a truly profound way.
Sources
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www.luminarium.org/ medlit/elles.htm
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•with the advent of computer graphics and the Web has it become, as it was thousands of years ago,  almost as easy to make and distribute images as it to make and distribute texts.
this change has set off a chain reaction, an exponential growth in the use and exchange of images that is changing our lives.
 
•Malcom Gladwell, in his book “The Tipping Point”, suggests how these types of dramatic change can come about.
•SLIDE POINTS
•Creating a discrete way of making and showing images isn’t just a convenience, we believe it is  a tipping point for images, and thus for the need for visual literacy.
•ANALOGY: invention of the printing press made textual communication profoundly easier and created a need for textual literacy, so  CG and Web are creating a need for visual literacy (there was need before but this is tipping point).
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•It is time once again to integrate visual education with the textual and mathematical
EXTRAS
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1.  What is The Tipping Point about?
It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us. http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html#whatis
•Similar to: Idea of memes and memetics
•Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory.
Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes
•A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991). http://pcp.lanl.gov/MEMES.html
There are several ways in which the computer ha impacted our use of images. These are so important we will take a movement to talk about each of them in turn….
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Transistor density doubling every 18 months. In Graphics chips doubling in power every 6 months! You now wear on your wrist a computer more powerful than any the government had in the 1960s. In 1970s your laptop would have been a national security risk because it would be a supercomputer that could break codes. Difficult to conceive of the rate of change. Most like—an epidemic (only more positive I hope)
All about scale .
10x movie
Nothing else is exponential for so long: hard to comprehend. By graph, by analogy.  Makes brute computation lighting fast. Changing many aspects of our world, but huge impact for the visual, which is very computationally expensive. (whole abstract-for-first-time argument—see previous writings).
Also can compute about things on a much smaller (and larger) scale than before—open new arena for computation (bio, material science, etc.), astronomy… computers in the sky and under out skin.
http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm
ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/Gordon_Moore_ISSCC_021003.pdf great presentation with excellent visuals
How big is a nanometer?
“a nanometer is one hundred million times smaller than a large potato “http://www.cientifica.com/archives/000048.html
Moore’s Law is not a law of physics—it’s a prediction. Will eventually hit barrier—feature size too small—quantum effects.
Optimists—another 10 years,
pessimists –5 years.
Quantum computer, biological, organic computers, more parallelism in short term. 15 years ago people thought today’s chips would not be possible. Now talking about just a few atoms making the various regions---used to be thousands. Part of nano revolution as well. avd: have just bought a “nanomanipulator” for Brown – let’s you move atoms around!
Graphics chips doubling price/performance every 6-9 months
Already more complex than microprocessor chips. People thinking of using them to substitute for microprocessor chips—because graphics so compute-intensive
Graphics processor never idle whereas microprocessor often idle.
Gordon Bell Http://www.mylifebits.com
Raj Reddy’s mega-visions…
Steven Mann—U of Toronto “a human cyborg”
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SOURCES
http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/scienceforum/sld042.htm
_____
SOURCES
Lasowska http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/faculty.lecture/exponential/laptop.html
Also check out:
http://www.mirrorshades.org/wc/archives/002796.php