Video Clip 1. This is an early experiment into micro-documentary.

Motorblade: Entropy, Delivery, Karma

We may think of posters as rhetorical artifacts. When considering the canons of rhetoric, we can easily see how invention, arrangement, style, and memory apply to posters. But have we given any thought to the rhetorical significance of the delivery of a printed artifact? Fritz Blaw has.

Blaw has spent 20 years delivering posters around Austin, Texas. His business, Motorblade, exists atop a network of bulletin boards in coffee shops, restaurants, and other venues. As in any other network, expert navigation of the bulletin boards requires specialized knowledge, rhetorical savvy, and an understanding of the complexity of the laws (written and unwritten, judicial and social) that govern the network. In the case of the bulletin board network, there are written laws that make them necessary; postering on public property like light poles or electricity poles is illegal. But there are also unwritten social laws that suggest optimal placement of posters and fliers: don't monopolize space; put adult-oriented material at or above an adult's eye level, and put kid-oriented material at a kid's eye level; printed material with large fonts can be put higher, whereas business cards should be lower. Once articulated, these "laws" may seem like common sense. But this common sense may not be initially obvious to the casual observer of a coffee shop bulletin board, where it looks like chaos reigns.

Beneath the surface-level postering laws there are more complicated social laws involving real estate. For example, Blaw knows that turf is valuable and protected. So he has developed ways to compensate the owners or managers for easy passage through their turf. He will buy bulletin boards for new coffee shops, thus enlarging his network. He'll grea$e wheels when he has to. But more than anything, he provides maintenance for the bulletin boards, which turns out to be a valuable service. This service is valuable because beneath the social laws, there are natural laws.

Think of it this way: All the out-of-date posters have to come down to make room for new ones. And all those out-of-date posters = trash. Someone has to recycle them. If no one performed this service, the bulletin boards would eventually become unusable. The physical properties required to make a push pin stick a piece of paper into a bulletin board require that posters be taken down. They can either be taken down in a systematic way, or they can be torn down by frustrated users. So by performing this service, Blaw maintains a sort of subtle harmony in this public space.