In October, I sent an email to my advanced modernist survey students asking them to select a few lines from one of the assigned Eavan Boland poems to explicate in class, with the further instructions that they were to choose lines that formed a coherent quotation they might conceivably post on an online profile. Towards the end of a fruitful discussion section, we walked as a class to the Lawn and I distributed pieces of chalk; the students copied their quotations on the sidewalk, working together if they had chosen the same quotation, and walked away from class looking over their shoulders at their anonymous handiwork: difficult, aching text clouds interspersed the announcements for activities and events by organizations along paths that students in the humanities take a few times a day.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it is we do in an English department, and how, as a graduate instructor, I can do that better. Our new department site will feature images that represent faculty, students, and staff engaging with texts and each other, just as the textual reproduction of Boland’s words was a collective act that allowed the students to quote their chosen quotations. Chalking makes the quotations active in ways different from Facebook profile “information” fields, which are updated and administered by the user and Facebook walls where users scrawl messages to each other in an ongoing layer aggregation that, like a wiki, records a history (although the history can be deleted).

Last Monday, I saw these Microsoft chalkings around campus, which I assume were done with a stencil and spray chalk.

The ie7 Flickr clusters show similar chalkings at Duke and Purdue in recent weeks, as well as “internal” chalkings on Microsoft’s corporate campus for ie7 and Vista. It’s one thing in Redmond, and certainly Microsoft has a troubled history with education and chalk, but this campus jamming sinks the company to a new low.

In 2001, IBM was fined $100,000 by the city of San Francisco, where officials found nothing funny about the “Peace, Love, and Linux” campaign symbol trio (the Linux penguin is the Darth Vaderish icon on the right side)

sprayed in “biodegradable chalk” that did not wash off city sidewalks. The following year, warchalking advocates used symbols to indicate wi-fi availability on sidewalks. This latest, banal attempt by Microsoft carries neither scenester cred nor a slogan nor new iconography differentiating the latest browser version as safer or more compliant, retaining only the militant belief in cultural dissemination (here colonization) through chalk.

Inside and outside the academy, even holding our collective breath and hoping for the best, ie7 may still be known as Internet Exploder. And in response to those anonymous campus representatives who, in Bad Taste and likely for compensation, vandalized the sidewalks in the name of the Monopoly, deneholically spreading the viral marketing of a very sick behemoth to this university, I scuffed at and smudged the logos I encountered.

I am happy to report rain is predicted for the middle of the week.

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1. Ben:
   December 12th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

   I love the image of you as a vandal of corporate graffiti.

2. ally cintins:
   December 12th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

   i love how your posts start with one thing, and expand into something related, but different. it’s like a simpson’s episode.

   also, that’s terrible. i hate ie, and ie7 is no better. i actually have it on my computer (blaugh) and i can’t stand the obnoxious beeping sounds every time you click something.

   it reminds me of selective power-cleaning of concrete, kinda like inverted graffiti, that companies have been doing. too bad companies do it and not artists, because it looks pretty cool.

3. Kristen:
   December 12th, 2006 at 11:43 pm

   Ally, I think we will have to explore this; perhaps we can attach some sort of algorithmically-generated stencils to the cleaning units…

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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Sunday, December 10th, 2006, 10:49 pm * Filed in Design, Pedagogy, Photography. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.