What is Visual/Material Communication?
What is "the visual"? What is "visuality"?
What is "the material"? What is "materiality"?
What is "communication"?
What is "performativity"?
What is a "methodology"?

If "all media are mixed media" (Mitchell), what part of any medium or object is visual? material?
In what ways is the visual material? In what ways is it not?
In what ways is the material visual? In what ways is it not?
What does it mean to say that a medium is a "material social practice" (Williams in Mitchell) instead of a "technology," an "interface," or a "platform"?
How is researching and analyzing visual/material communication similar to and different from analyzing other forms of communication?

key concepts from Rose:

Critical visual/material methodologies focus on a matrix of four sites and three modalities:

sites: production, image/object, circulation, use

modalities: technological, compositional, social

According to Rose, a critical visual/material methodology is "critical" not because it is dismissive towards or negative about what it studies, but because it thinks of visuals, objects, and spaces "in terms of the power relations that produce, are articulated through, and can be challenged by different ways of seeing and imaging" and doing (5).

"The notion of 'medium specificity' then, is never derived from a singular, elemental essence. It is more like the specificity associated with recipes in cooking: many ingredients, combined in a specific order in specific proportions, mixed in particular ways and cooked at specific temperatures for a specific amount of time" while it is cooked within a specific device (pan, pot, griddle, etc.), using a specific heat source (oven, stove, grill, microwave, etc), and presented in/on a specific container (plate, bowl, etc.), eaten by hand or with a specific implement (fork, spoon, chopsticks, etc.) within a specific place and a specific social and cultural context. (260-261)

"Seeing painting is seeing touching." (259)

McLuhan claimed that television "is actually a tactile medium . . in contrast to the printed word which, in McLuhan's view, was the closest that any medium has come to isolating the visual sense." (261)

"There are no purely visual media because there is no such thing as a pure visual perception in the first place." (264)

medium specificity is not essential to a medium
sensory ratios
semiotic ratios
(I would also add: "praxis ratios")
nesting & braiding
media as both extensions and amputations of senses (from McLuhan)