viz.

By now, you've probably seen the moving and (I assume) influential video by the Black-Eyed Peas' Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video in support of Barack Obama, which sets Obama's New Hampshire primary speech to a stripped-down tune, the words voiced by a coterie of A- and B-list celebrities:

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

In my rhetoric course, I ask students to find and bring in examples of protests. This week, one of my students brought in a news story about a man (Graziano Cecchini) who poured red dye into the Trevi fountain in Italy.

Following up on my post from yesterday, where I pointed out that Facebook originated as a way to display and comment on photos, Facebook has been a nexus of information about victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. The descriptions of 7 of the 15 victims listed on this page on NPR’s website contain references to Facebook memorial pages or have pictures that were acquired from Facebook accounts.

Facebook users have also generated a number of online memorials. Consider these images that I grabbed from the “Longhorns Commemorating the Virginia Tech Shooting” (requires login) group’s page:

According to this story from Wired, NASA has developed a workgroup devoted to providing open source solutions to the organization’s programming needs. The project is called “CosmosCode,” and what I find most interesting about it is that the meetings that led to its creation were held in Second Life. Also interesting is the fact that the group meeting on NASA’s island were not all experts, but often featured anything from doctoral students and retirees.

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard died this week. As this obituary from the BBC notes, Baudrillard was well known for his post-modernist theory and controversial statements.

His work is important to visual studies for his theory of the spectacle, which, the article points out, he argued “is crucial in creating our view of events--things do not happen if they are not seen.” You can read his article “Simulacra and Simulations” by following this link, which is referenced through the site’s bibliography. Or, if you are just interested in how his work relates to The Matrix, you can read this Wikipedia article.

Although this story has been in the news a while, I thought it was worth comment because of the recent visual response that has been generated on the internet.