By TOBY WALNE

Special Issue on the visual rhetorics of command and control for The Poster Journal.

Call theme

Visual rhetorics are by definition in the business of persuasion: in both private and public spheres, such rhetorics attempt to change the behaviours of both individuals and groups. From the “Stop” sign at the end of our street, through the visual and verbal warnings on packs of cigarettes, to the recruitment posters of our armed forces, common sense instruction blends into health-expert authority insistence and then into state invitations to die for one’s country.

In this first special issue of The Poster, we invite contributions on the many and different ways in which visual rhetoric intends and is used to inform, instruct, persuade and control our lives. Submissions should be in for October 14th 2011.

The Poster

• Are all visual communications artefacts, at their core, attempts to control others?
• Are some media forms and technologies more effective agencies for control than others?
• Is it possible to have a rhetorically neutral communication.
• Are there visual forms that indicate a form of visual persuasion as opposed to an honest source of information: or is the distinction impossible to make.
• Who uses visual rhetoric in this way?
• How may visual rhetoric be resisted?
• Can we determine where and how informing turns into instruction and where instruction turns into compulsion?
• From the point of view of authorship how the control is communicated to the public sphere?
• What are their “tools”
• How does visual persuasion address ethical and moral issues?

Call focus

The work of artists, designers and other visual practitioners is vitally important to The Poster and in this spirit we are actively seeking visual contributions from practitioners whose work addresses the mechanics of visual control. Visual contributions can be submitted as either peer or non-peer reviewed work (see below for submission information). We are also seeking papers and articles: research, critical, philosophical and theoretical papers on the call theme. All papers will be subject to a rigorous blind peer review process before publication. The journal supports the active exchange of views and encourages contributors to present strong stances where their research supports them.

We also call for reviews of books, exhibitions, mass media and examples of visual rhetorics where they are thematically relevant and are likely to engage the reader’s interests.

Submission details

Papers – Papers should, in the first instance, be provided as MS Word (.doc or .docx), Open Document Text (.odt) or Rich Text Format (.RTF) files with low-resolution images (72dpi) included in the text at the intended positions in the text. Both colour and greyscale images are welcome. Please help us out by using the standard Heading 1 (H1, H2, H3) and Text Body styles as this, and the indication of position of the images, helps us enormously in the editing and production of the final document. Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words long. Once a paper is accepted we’ll ask for the full resolution images.

Visual contributions – The contributions may be on any subject relevant to the theme but should demonstrate an explicable intent. They should be presented, in the first instance, as low-resolution .jpg or .png files (72 dpi), numbered or otherwise ordered in the way they will be read (if ambiguity is the intent please help us out by sending us a visual that explains their intended organisation). Please include (as either metadata or on an accompanying list) details of copyright, authorship and ownership.

Reviews should be between 1000 and 2000 word long and if they carry images or excerpts of the reviewed material should be copyright cleared with the author or the owners of the intellectual copyright.