MITS Assignment

>>>>The MITS Assignment

The basics:

1. Alone, or with one or two partners, grab the MITS bus and take it to the downtown MITS station.
2. Please note: despite rumors to the contrary, this area of downtown is not scary and dangerous. It’s six minutes from campus, and it’s got some nice little shops and restaurants. Also, until a few months, I lived in this area.
3. When you get to the MITS station, walk over a block to Walnut Plaza and start hunting for visual rhetoric.
4. I’m looking for you to have about twenty good shots for class on Wednesday.

More help and explanation:

This assignment has a few purposes. One is just to get you to see some bits of Muncie that some people never find. Walnut Plaza, just a block away from the main MITS bus terminal downtown, has several nice shops and restaurants, including The Blue Bottle, which is a nice little coffee shop with free wireless internet access. Vera Mae’s and Mezza Luna are down there, too, and they’re a couple of the best nicer restaurants in the area. There’s an art gallery. There’s an ice cream shop at Walnut and Charles. The Civic theatre is nearby. So I want you to explore.

I also, of course, want you to go looking for samples of visual rhetoric. There are a lot of different things in the area that could be analyzed for the visual communication: buildings and signs, graffiti, shop fronts, people and statues. Keep your eyes open.

Also, maybe go online before you go and check out the Daily News article on downtown locations that was run in the paper the first week of school.

And you may want to visit the MITS website. There are some helpful tips there.

When we get back to class next week, we’ll be talking about the experience and working with these photos.

On cameras: If you have a digital camera or a cell phone camera that can upload to your computer, please use that. You’ll need to have your pictures available, onscreen, for class next Wednesday. If you don’t have a digital camera or know anyone who loan one to you, you should stop at Educational Resources in the basement of the library, where you can check one out for a few hour. Or, if absolutely necessary, you can use a regular film camera.

Storage: If you’re working with a digital camera, please bring your pictures to class either on your laptops, on a burned CD, on a zip disk, or on your flash drive. (If you’ve figured it out, you could also use iLocker for this.) If you had to go non-digital, just bring the prints.

Please: email with questions . . .