What you need to do before class:
1) Post a response (to your tumblr) to the two readings (by Trevor Paglen and Erol Morris). One possible thing to consider: Morris concludes "photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves," while Paglen asserts that "all images are like cave paintings" in that "they can't explain or narrate much of anything at all." Both authors, however, make and work with images for a living. What do you think of this duality - that images are simultaneously powerful and powerless things?
* See some more of the pictures selected by Paglen and the research team for Last Pictures. I'll bring the book for anyone who wants to see more.

For our next class, we'll discuss a writing by scholar W.J.T. Mitchell on the "problem" of words and images.
Mitchell questions the commonsensical ease with which images and language are considered different. He gives some common justifications for this and follows with examples that attempt to dispel, or at least make less certain, the divide between the two.

FOR WEDNESDAY:
1) Bring in your picture of a landscape on paper (should be a "found" picture - NOT be a picture you made using a camera). Write its source on the back.
2) Create your tumblr and make your first post in response to the Mitchell reading and Curtis film: Here are a few thoughts/questions to get you started, but you can take on other aspects of the reading and film and/or pose your own questions.

• As Mitchell discusses the relationship between words and image, we can understand him to be highlighting the impossible task of understanding either language or images without the other. How does one recognize a rabbit, or a duck, without a linguistic identifier of some kind? To this we can add some other questions. In the Adam Curtis video "It Felt Like a Kiss," he uses images that are directly indexical (meaning that they reflect a specific thing, not an idea of a thing), like former president Richard Nixon. Those same images are also used as symbols; for example, Nixon was a specific person, but also a symbol of a growing, public disillusionment in US politics that exceeds him. This tension (we could even say contradiction) between the indexical and the symbolic is part of the "message" Curtis is making.
• What specific references (to geopolitics, to pop music, to cinema, to historical events) were recognizable to you? What symbolic references seemed clear to you? Did you find symbolic meaning in the film without indexical meaning, or vice versa?

Your post only needs to be a few sentences, and can include questions you have about the reading as well as direct answers to the questions/ideas above.
Send me a link to your Tumblr.

Bookmark this space, as you will need to refer here for important information related to the course. When you have readings due, I will frequently post questions that you can use as a prompt if you are not sure where to start. Similarly, I will link to things that come up in class and that relate to assignments and exercises.