TODAY

1.Icebreaker2.Quick and fun: visual illusions3.Benjamin’s “Aura” – quick discussion/writing activity4.Make a new header for the course website5.Homework

ICEBREAKERToday’s icebreaker should be fairly easy, I hope. Say your name for everyone– like last time– and tell us your favorite artist.

Dr. Phill’s favorites:

Some quick Visual fun

Take a look at the next few slides and tell me what’s going on here. Look carefully. Sometimes you might need to squint.

These illusions depend on intricate line work, very specific color and contrast choices, the mind’s desire to complete shapes and patterns and the fact that our eyes jitter a bit normally.

If you squint hard and look at each of these images, they WILL become still. But not for long.

From the readingsNext class meeting– on Thursday– we will put the full set of readings for this week in conversation. But to start us out today, I want us to think for a few moments about the concept of “aura” which Walter Benjamin describes.

From page 5

“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. Thistradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example,stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than withthe clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equallyconfronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.”

What, then, is Aura? Open up ye olde Tumblre.

I’d like you to take a few minutes to write about what this concept of “aura” means in relation to two different images. The first is on the next slide.

Please write, for let’s say three minutes, about how (or whether or not) in this setting you are experiencing the aura of this piece as Benjamin would describe it.

And…

And also, the same question. Are you, or how are you, experiencing the aura of the next image.

[this is a billboard image]

For the rest of class…..group up. Make sure at least one person can use Photoshop or InDesign.

I want you to spend the rest of class re-designing the banner on our course website. It needs to be 160 pixels high. You can fudge a bit with the width (mine is 1200 pixels).

When you finish, email your banner to me atalexanp3 at Miami Oh dot EDU.

For Thursday

Read for class: Wysocki “The Multiple Media of Texts” and “With Eyes That Think and Compose and Think,” (on Niihka)

In class we will put these two readings in conversation with the three from today and look at how the collection might modify our definition of visual rhetoric.