Bawarshi & Delagrange

Analyzing Susan Delagrange's "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement” we understand her focus on digital media work that emphasizes areas of embodied digital representation and the cannon of arrangement to discover ethical bases for action. Through her projects and acts of remediation, she constructs a hybrid genre to create an epistemological act and determine meaning. This techne (productive art) is interactive digital media that involves both abstract and applied knowledge for viewers to manipulate and learn from material evidence. Working against traditional print, this rhetorical art opens up new opportunities for emotional response, as it arranges and articulates visual evidence, artifacts and links for audience engagement. Upon entering this website, one views a closed wooden cabinet that can be opened by clicking the doors to reveal small tile graphics of Delagrange’s art, in which the viewer can navigate across. She uses "Wunderkammer” to argue the 16- century cabinet as models of visual provocation, to manipulate objects to create and discover new meaning. The concept of this project makes it a productive thought engine that allows viewers to reflect on abstract thought through tangible visuals. This framework bridges the gap between the mental and physical, enabling rhetorical practice and discovery.

While engaging with Susan Delagrange's "Wunderkammer” I drew connections between her work and newfound genre and the ideas of Bawarshi’s “Genre and the Invention of the Writer.” Bawarshi views genre as a rhetorical strategy and site of action used to recognize, organize, and act in all kinds of situations and social actions (both literary and nonliterary), allowing us to critically analyze and interrogate the artist or writer’s position to articulate their desires as recognizable, meaningful and consequential. Genre is a concept that, within each, allows discourse to be received in a certain mode and must receive a certain status, and conceptually and rhetorically frames given situations and the reaction and response to them by audience members while unfolding social practices, activities and relations. This operates as a material practice to enables the audience to conceptualize, act and articulate these practices and situations.

 As an audience it is imperative that we identify the purpose of what the genre(s) should and shouldn’t do, while engaging in the overall significance. Viewing Delagrange’s genre of digital media, we are captivated by the unique structure and identify, process and engage with the visual content in a new manner unlike the way we would if we were absorbing the information via literary texts.  Therefore, through this specific genre the audience is able to create and discover new meaning from the content than in its original form or genre. This collection of media and artifacts demonstrates an academic tone in a modernized model that allows for rhetorical criticism but a full understanding of the author’s position and intentions, generating the desired audience response.

Sources: 

Bawarshi, Anis. “The Genre Function.” In Genre and the Invention of the Writer. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2003.

Delagrange, Susan. "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2). 2009. Retrieved March 7, 2018 from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.html.