I hesitate to define visual rhetoric to myself since it seems it is as expansive as the meaning of “text”.
At first, I thought visual rhetoric simply encompassed what we can see with our eyes. Real life objects, images, videos, animations, etc. My definition of visual rhetoric was like “a study of the process of looking, ‘the gaze,’ with all of the psychological and cultural implications that have become wrapped within that term” according to Hill and Helmers (2004).
Therefore, anything we’re able to see with our eyes constitutes visual rhetoric because nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything has some use in rhetoric whether it’s intentional or not. What “text” is can overlap into this visual rhetoric realm because we must gaze upon text to understand it.
Bogost’s Complication
The complication is introduced at the end of this week’s reading’s section, when Eyman brings up Ian Bogost (2007)’s argument about how “there is much value to be gained from the study of images in all media… in procedural media like videogames, images are frequently constructed, selected, or sequenced in code, making the stock tools of visual rhetoric inadequate. Image is subordinate to process.”
Bogost’s argument largely baffles me. Procedural media, after a quick search, seems to be media that is self-contained and focuses on specific things in a given field. Crime shows, standalone mystery novels, and video games. Such pieces of media establish the plot, the problem, and the resolution while also walking the viewer through technical details of what it centers on.
From this, does such media not engage itself and constitute as visual rhetoric? Procedural media is digital rhetoric, that’s a given, but the aforementioned complication is, well, complicated. How might an image be subordinate to process? I suppose this is why Eyman thinks visual rhetoric is limited to digital rhetoric analysis.
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