Analyzing a Artifact

David Rawas

5/13/10

 

Analyzing  a Artifact

When writing a paper there are three different kinds of artifacts that one has to think about, the most important is the rhetorical artifact. The three different types of artifacts are artifacts, cultural artifacts and rhetorical artifacts. An artifact is an object that is created by someone. The object can be anything from art to a fork it does not particular matter. A cultural artifact is an object that is trying to tell us something, such as painting or other forms of art. It can also be something like TV show or play. Rhetorical artifact is cultural artifact that has exigence. Exigence is when something is trying to convince you to go out do something. These artifacts are speaking to an audience and are trying to convince them to go out and do something. This can range from revolutions to putting the seat down. When speaking to an audience, a speaker often has to constrain themselves. They have to work around the audience to make sure that they get the message and carry it out. The difference between cultural and rhetorical is subtle, but the key difference is that cultural is not trying to make you change your mind while a rhetorical one is.
            To analyses a rhetorical object one must first figure out what it is trying to argue to its audience. When listening to a speech this often easy to figure out, but what about a TV show or a painting. For the TV the exigence is to convince people to keep watching the show. To find out what the painting is saying, try to study the context giving you an idea of why it was made. What was the exigence of the artist? Who were they trying to convince and why did he do so in such a way? The next two things to do are to break everything up into pieces and focus on the strangest pieces. The reason is it is important to take apart all the pieces and look at them separately, since it allows us the see each role they play and how they work well together. It also allows us to find patterns in the work thus allowing us to find a theme or message. This gives us a better idea how complex the argument really is giving us a better appreciation for the artifact. It is most important to look at the pieces that don’t make sense and try to figure out why they are there.

For my paper I went to a theater that was hosting a bi-weekly story for children. When I first arrived there the first thing that struck me as odd was how one paid for the ticket. One had to roll a die to see if they paid between 5-7 dollars. Another thing that stuck was that parents brought food to donate to the theater. Then other parents would then buy the food for their children and the money would go the theater. They were many other small things like this that stuck out. I later went online to find some context to what was going and learned that the theater was nonprofit. All these factors lead me to see that the exigence was in designed to keep a community project and the theater alive. Also even though the show was for children the audience was in fact the adults. From this I was able to figure out the goal of the theater was to create a community that would sustain itself.

Try to do this yourself by going on to you tube and finding a speech by a political candidate from the 2008 election. The paper should 2-4 page double spaced. The first things you need to do are find the exigence, the audience and what constraints they are working under. Make sure to use these terms when describing their speech. To help you do this look at the strangest parts of their speech and ask why they would talk in such a way. Also keep in mind what kind of audience are they speaking to. Are they people who disagree with them or disagree with them?  Find a pattern in the way they speak to their audience.  Look for anything that you thought was odd for them to say.