Below is a table showing the grade you received on your final test. The percentage that follows should give you a rough idea of how well you’re doing in the course right now (it is a cumulative percentage). Remember that your final project is worth 30% so you can pretty seriously raise or lower that grade. The class average right now is 76%.
I commented on the last assignment (Major Scrapbook Assignment) today. My main concern was to tell you all that I’ll be grading this more critically and carefully than the minor scrapbook assignments. This means that I’ll be looking for more nuance and critique in your work. You should be writing careful, well argued and coherent papers. I’ll be looking for the quality of references that you use and the degree to which they are appropriately deployed.
I showed a clip from a lecture given by Liz Wells in 2006.
Liz Wells
Landscape, Geography and Topographical Photography
51:51
GMRC Lecture Series Free
Recorded on March 27, 2006.
Cut-ups and collage are approached in this project (and have been approached in the scrapbooking project) as a way of making the familiar strange. As the American writer and critic Greil Marcus said in an interview:
“I always hope that people will find what I do interesting and that it will spark questions of their own. If my writing has any goal it is to show that the world is more interesting than we sometimes think it is and that it is more full of contingency and doubt” (interview, Dec. 18, 2007).
For cultural studies and analysis that can be taken as a challenge to consider the limits of our techniques for looking (observing), comprehending, and representing. You are encouraged to engage with cut-ups and collage as a way improving your skills as a cultural analyst or critic.
In this studio class you will have the opportunity to work on a collage/cut-up. The piece you work on is up to you but keep in mind that I have been asking you to focus your scrapbook work so far on observation and social environments. Extending your last scrapbook entry would be good. Alternatively you could use this as a chance to explore your final scrapbook assignment. You could also do something completely different (say work on a question of subjectivity, think about a particular built environment, or you could look at a found object or image). You will be using the cut-up as a mode of inquiry and will come away at the end of the studio class with a tabloid-sized collage.
When: Monday, March 2nd. (9am – 10am)
Where: HUB mall, ground level Art Studio (Studio 3, room 154).
What you need:
Necessary
scissors (and/or a scalpel or knife)
glue stick
Optional
scrabooking embellishments
magazines
better quality paper
old shoe, bit of wool, dead ant, bird wing, quart of milk, cutting of human hair, the last breath of a dying rat, sparkle from a unicorn’s eye, etc.
Hey all, sorry about the SNAFU this morning. I returned from Texas and came down with a nasty bit of food poisoning. In my delirium I asked the department of sociology to post a notice that class would be canceled for 9:30, not 9am. Any how please accept my most humble apologies.
All will be back to normal on Wednesday. See you then.
After class today I came across this article in the New York Times about the “Dissonant undertones” of M.I.A.s songs. While the author has obviously little capacity to sympathize with ‘terrorists’ there is a pretty reasonable coverage of the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. It certainly lights up our discussion of the ‘culture industry’.
View Larger Map
You need to email me to be added to the group of people who are collaborating on this map. Once you’ve been added, you’ll be able to add placemarks to the map (and to link to images and add commentary). There is a good tutorial for google maps here, here, and here.
note: To be able to edit the collaborative map, it seems that you need to have a google account. When I send you an invitation to see the map, you’ll be able to view it. You’ll also have an option to “Save to my maps”. If you follow that link, you’ll be given the option to log in to your google account or to “Create an account now.” Follow one of these options and you’ll be able to edit the map.
I’ve never watched the show but from what i’ve seen it must’ve been a big upset…I just think the video is interesting because of how much adoration the girls in the video had for the finalist.
This is a good point. Their adoration seems so genuine. We can ask, though, what exactly is adoration and how do we measure this. Clearly there is a lot of performance here, maybe all performance. One thing that interests me about this . . .
We looked at a little bit of an old soviet propaganda film the other day. Thinking about propaganda, persuasion and social manipulation links us to theories of (mass) media and ideology. One more current example of the intentional manipulation of thought/opinion can be seen in the internet phenomenon of ‘astroturfing‘. There is a recent article on the BBC website about how the Chinese government appears to be astroturfing the internets with positive impressions of life in China:
The Alberta government is also interested in public perception of the oilsands (having spent X$ on advertising last year). With recent studies showing that the ‘public’ thinks that the Tarsands industry is doing a poor job of curtailing environmental impacts, it is likely that we’ll see a lot more effort to represent the industry as a green industry (they’ve done a lot already, but they’ve admitted that they need to spend more money on public information/persuasion).
The critique of this is that the Alberta government and the petroleum industry have a lot more money to represent their interests than does ‘the public.’ Arguably the role of government of Alberta is to represent the public but do they really do so? If so which public?
Cut-ups and collage are approached in this project (and have been approached in the scrapbooking project) as a way of making the familiar strange. As the American writer and critic Greil Marcus said in an interview:
The Alberta government is also interested in public perception of the oilsands (having spent X$ on advertising last year). With recent studies showing that the ‘public’ thinks that the Tarsands industry is doing a poor job of curtailing environmental impacts, it is likely that we’ll see a lot more effort to represent the industry as a green industry (they’ve done a lot already, but they’ve admitted that they need to spend more money on public information/persuasion).