Scholars Day proposal

The panel presents and discusses experimental forms of academic composition in the "Media Culture" course of the MFA Program in Visual Studies (at the Visual Studies Workshop). While exploring themes and elements of the media environment, the goal was to further our understanding of the role of the image in society by the direct application of our visual skills to the academic content of the course. In designing the final project, the course employed W. J. T. Mitchell's concept of the "imagetext" - a composite, synthetic work that gives images and audio-visual signs a primary role along with text. The course encouraged multiple forms of communication - short videos, web pages, cartoons, and artists' books – while insisting on standards of research, argumentation and rigor. While summarizing and reflecting on the results, the panel addresses open questions about visual rhetoric as a valid form of academic scholarship. See: Media Culture syllabus

Working with Visual Information

Draft of my Introduction -

# 2 - Found photographs from the Visual Studies Workshop

The visionary historian and photographic archivist Paul Vanderbilt is the patron saint for our investigation of the 3rd Effect using large scale picture collections. Vanderbilt envisioned the use of archives as an exploration rather than the routine selection of illustrations to accompany prescribed arguments. To encourage an open-ended, imaginative use of pictures, Vanderbilt worked out a long-term practice of forming combinations of images, usually in pairs, that were unrelated to each other by the usual archival categories of photographer, time period, geographic location, genre, and subject matter. Escaping the regulation of these control vocabularies, the pairings would reveal an unexpected line of interpretation and lead to larger associative patterns of imagery and ideas. He later used these picture combinations to make unique table-top "exhibitions" brought out as needed to have "conversations" with like-minded visual researchers.

The members of the "Working with Visual Information" class are pleased to participate in this wider conversation using the Internet. We hope our pairings enhance the use of picture collections as a speculative adventure and will contribute to the 3rd Effect. See: The 3rd Effect website

My first digital camera

This is my first digital camera from 1996.

I sold it in Kansas City in yard sale in 2001.