I Lev Manovich the Language of New Media
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I Lev Manovich The Language of New Media II To Norman Klein / Peter Lunenfeld / Vivian Sobchack III Table of Contents Prologue: Vertov’s Dataset.................................................................................VI Acknowledgments........................................................................................ XXVII Introduction ......................................................................................................... 30 A Personal Chronology........................................................................... 30 Theory of the Present.............................................................................. 32 Mapping New Media: the Method.......................................................... 34 Mapping New Media: Organization ....................................................... 36 The Terms: Language, Object, Representation ...................................... 38 I. What is New Media?........................................................................................ 43 Principles of New Media.............................................................................. 49 1. Numerical Representation................................................................... 49 2. Modularity .......................................................................................... 51 3. Automation ......................................................................................... 52 4. Variability ........................................................................................... 55 5. Transcoding ........................................................................................ 63 What New Media is Not............................................................................... 66 Cinema as New Media............................................................................ 66 The Myth of the Digital .......................................................................... 68 The Myth of Interactivity........................................................................ 70 II. The Interface................................................................................................... 75 The Language of Cultural Interfaces......................................................... 80 Cultural Interfaces................................................................................... 80 Printed Word........................................................................................... 83 Cinema....................................................................................................87 HCI: Representation versus Control....................................................... 94 The Screen and the User.............................................................................. 99 A Screen's Genealogy ............................................................................. 99 The Screen and the Body...................................................................... 105 IV Representation versus Simulation......................................................... 111 III. The Operations ........................................................................................... 115 Menus, Filters, Plug-ins.............................................................................120 The Logic of Selection.......................................................................... 120 “Postmodernism” and Photoshop ......................................................... 124 From Object to Signal........................................................................... 126 Compositing................................................................................................ 130 From Image Streams to Modular Media............................................... 130 The Resistance to Montage................................................................... 134 Archeology of Compositing: Cinema...................................................138 Archeology of Compositing: Video...................................................... 141 Digital Compositing..............................................................................143 Compositing and New Types of Montage ........................................... 145 Teleaction.................................................................................................... 150 Representation versus Communication ................................................ 150 Telepresence: Illusion versus Action.................................................... 152 Image-Instruments ................................................................................ 155 Telecommunication .............................................................................. 156 Distance and Aura................................................................................. 158 IV. The Illusions ................................................................................................162 Synthetic Realism and its Discontents...................................................... 168 Technology and Style in Cinema.......................................................... 168 Technology and Style in Computer Animation .................................... 171 The icons of mimesis ............................................................................ 177 Synthetic Image and its Subject................................................................180 Georges Méliès, the father of computer graphics ................................. 180 Jurassic Park and Socialist Realism......................................................181 Illusion, Narrative and Interactivity ........................................................ 185 V. The Forms ..................................................................................................... 190 Database...................................................................................................... 194 The Database Logic .............................................................................. 194 Data and Algorithm .............................................................................. 196 Database and Narrative......................................................................... 199 Paradigm and Syntagm ......................................................................... 202 V A Database Complex ............................................................................ 205 Database Cinema: Greenaway and Vertov ........................................... 207 Navigable space .......................................................................................... 213 Doom and Myst .................................................................................... 213 Computer Space.................................................................................... 219 The Poetics of Navigation..................................................................... 223 The Navigator and the Explorer............................................................ 231 Kino-Eye and Simulators...................................................................... 234 EVE and Place ...................................................................................... 240 VI. What is Cinema?......................................................................................... 244 Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image...............................249 Cinema, the Art of the Index ................................................................ 249 A Brief Archeology of Moving Pictures............................................... 251 From Animation to Cinema ..................................................................252 Cinema Redefined................................................................................. 253 From Kino-Eye to Kino-Brush ............................................................. 259 New Language of Cinema.......................................................................... 260 Cinematic and Graphic: Cinegratography ............................................ 260 New Temporality: Loop as a Narrative Engine.................................... 264 Spatial Montage .................................................................................... 269 Cinema as an Information Space .......................................................... 273 Cinema as a Code ................................................................................. 276 NOTES ............................................................................................................... 279 VI Prologue: Vertov’s Dataset The avant-garde masterpiece A Man With a Movie Camera completed by Russian director Dziga Vertov in 1929 will serve as our guide to the language of new media.This prologue consists of a number of stills from the film. Each still is accompanied by quote from the text summarizing a particular principle of new media. The number in brackets indicates a page from which the quote is taken. The prologue thus acts as a visual index to some of the book's ideas. VII 1. [figure 1] (87) ”A hundred years after cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, are being extended to become the basic ways in which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. In this way, the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto which pre-occupied many film artists and critics in the 1920s, from