viz.

I’ve spent the past hour trying to think of an educational or theoretical reason for posting this link, but I can’t come up with anything. Here it is anyway.

The image above was taken from Google Earth and shows the barracks at the U.S. Naval base in Corronado, California. Aparently the buildings are lovely from the ground, but from the air they’re, uh, offensive. The Navy is planning to spend “$600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications” to alter the way the barracks look from the air.

What I find interesting about this story is that Google Earth “created” this problem for the Navy. The technology literally allowed people to see this symbol. It reminded me of this passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph”:

The New York Times has posted an interview with Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, the creator of “digital forensics.” Here’s how Dr. Farid describes the field:

It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media—images, audio and video—and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.

In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.

Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.

Dr. Farid makes some other interesting claims as well. Since 1990, the percentage of fraud cases involving photos has risen from 3 percent to 44.1 percent. While the majority of the interview focuses on digital manipulation in scientific research, clearly photographic forgery is becoming a significant problem in all areas of society.

Those of you interested in the rhetoric of science should enjoy The Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, which is supported by the fantastically-named Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter. The site boasts some beautiful imagery which, along with the accompanying text, should be able to spark some fantastic discussions about the relationship of visuals and scientific knowledge.

Some feminists are all atwitter about Italian Vogue's questionable new "photostory," decrying it as a glorification of sexual violence in theatres of war. (And yes, the spread is pretty heinous on many levels.) But I'd like to submit that the American flags splattered all over these debauched, disturbing scenes function as a none-too-subtle criticism of our government's actions. What do you think?

I just came across this nifty new feature from blogspot called "Blogger Play." Its designers describe Blogger Play as "a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!"

While it may not actually be as exciting as their exclamation point suggests, it's still pretty mesmerizing. Most of the photos are pretty mundane, lots of them are weird, and of course there are tons and tons of baby pictures.

UT’s First-Year Forum text for 2007–2008 will be Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. Yesterday I sat in on a seminar hosted by the DRW where Domino Perez discussed some of the background and context of the issues that the book engages.

One theme of the discussion was the influence of film on the Urrea’s prose, as well as how images of Latinos can both support and trouble Urrea’s arguments. In the wake of that discussion, I thought I would post links to some Latin-American and Border Studies visual resources for use by DRW instructors and anyone else who is teaching a class that deals with these fields.

Can you guess why these two are so happy?

Is it because

A. Online recipes are the best recipes?

B. The white powder in that bowl isn’t flour?

C. They have a standby electrical generator, so while everyone else in their neighborhood is cold and powerless, they can still surf the web and set their lights to supernova?

If you guessed C, you are correct. Thanks for playing.