|
|
Manovich
considers the historical merging of computer and media,
symbolized by the superimposition of 'binary' code over
'iconic' code, so central an event for his argumentation
that it also adorns the cover of The Language of New
Media (2001). Beautiful as this symbol may be, it also
represents the limitations of this valuable book: (analogue)
media and new (digital) media are generally equated with
visual media, in particular cinema. Although photographic
and moving images are but one element of, resp. have, among
other influences, contributed to the development of a
language of (new) media, in this publication they are made
to represent the whole of (new) media. To put it bluntly:
Movies metonymically make up the language of new media. This
is what one has to bear in mind when reading this insightful
and valuable publication.
When asked in an interview
about how long he had been writing the book, Moscow-born Lev
Manovich, today Associate Professor in the Visual Arts
Department at the University of California, San Diego, gives
three alternative answers: it's seven years since the first
articles were published in 1992, fifteen years since he
began to work with computer graphics around the mid-1980s
(he came to New York in 1981), and twenty-five years since
be had been studying fine arts, architecture and computer
science in Moscow. His 1993 Ph.D. dissertation in Visual and
Cultural Studies, The Engineering of Vision from
Contructivism to Computers, traced the origins of computer
media, relating it to the avant-garde art of the
1920s.
His Language of New
Media, which in many instances is connected to his Ph.D.
thesis, is structured according to the principles of a
computer: the chapters gradually advance the reader from
five very basic principles of the underlying code via the
interface, the operations and forms to surface phenomena,
literally to the surface of the computer (screen). The
meeting of media and computer, and the computerization of
culture as a whole changes the identity of both media and
the computer itself - whereby, as Manovich asserts, "the
identity of media has changed even more dramatically than
that of the computer." (p. 27) Therefore, the focus of
Manovich's book lies on answering the question of how the
shift to computer-based media redefines the nature of static
and moving images. In the first chapter of the book Manovich
describes five principles of new media which summarize the
differences between old (analogue) and new (digital)
media:
1. numerical
representation,
2. modularity,
3. automation,
4. variability,
5. transcoding.
First, all new media objects
are composed of digital code, they are numerical
representations. Two key consequences follow from that: new
media objects can be described formally, i.e. by using a
mathematical function, and they can be subjected to
algorithmic manipulation. Media thus become programmable.
Second, all new media objects have a modular structure, i.e.
they consist of discrete elements which maintain their
independence even when combined into larger objects. A Word
document as well as the World Wide Web consist of discrete
objects which can always be accessed on their own.
Modularity thus highlights the "fundamentally
[…] nonhierarchical organization" (p. 31) of
all new media objects (this actually holds true as long as
you use the terms in a metaphorical way as Manovich does
with most of the terms throughout his book. As soon as you
employ them in a literal way, it becomes clear that new
media objects can, indeed, despite their principal
modularity, be organized in strictly non-hierarchical ways).
The numerical coding of media and the modular structure of a
media object (i.e. the first two principles) allow,
according to Manovich, thirdly, "for the automation of many
operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and
access." Thus, "human intentionality can be removed from the
creative process, at least in part." (p. 32) Examples for
automation can be found in image editing, chat bots,
computer games, search engines, software agents, etc.
The fourth principle of new
media, deduced from the more basic principles - numerical
representation and modularity of information - is
variability. New media objects are not "something fixed once
and for all, but something that can exist in different,
potentially infinite versions." (p. 36) Film, for example,
whose order of elements is determined once and for all, is
diametrically opposed to new media whose order of elements
is essentially variable (or, 'mutable' and 'liquid').
Examples for variability would be customization and
scalability. The fifth principle, and the "most substantial
consequence of the computerization of media" (p. 45), is
transcoding. Transcoding basically means translating
something into another format. However, the most important
aspect is that the structure of computerized media (which,
on the surface still may look like media) "now follows the
established conventions of the computer's organization of
data." (p. 45) Structure-wise, new media objects are
compatible to, and transcodable into other computer files.
On a more general ("cultural") level, the logic of a
computer "can be expected to significantly influence the
traditional cultural logic of media" (p. 46); that is, we
can expect the "computer layer" to affect the "cultural
layer".
In the main chapters of the
book Manovich discusses some of these changes (esp. the
database as the "new symbolic form"). In the very insightful
and entertaining "What New Media is Not" he scrutinizes some
of the popularly held notions about new media, discussing
the historical (dis)continuities between old and new media.
The Cultural Interfaces chapter analyzes how three cultural
forms of printed word, cinema, and a general human-computer
interface (HCI) contributed to shaping "cultural interfaces"
during the 1990s. Manovich uses the term 'cultural
interface' to describe a "human-computer-culture interface -
the ways in which computers present and allow us to interact
with cultural data." (p. 70) According to Manovich's main
thesis, "[r]ather than being merely one cultural
language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural
interface […]" (p. 86). Cinematic ways "of
seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story,
of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic
means by which computer users access and interact with all
cultural data." (p. 78f.). Here, one starts wondering which
computer users he is talking about: definitely not about
computer users in general. What we are confronted with here
is another of Manovich's metonymical moves: without much
notice, Manovich deduces from very special forms of new
media, in this case computer games and Virtual Reality (VR),
a whole general language of new media. While one can say
that cinematographic approaches to interfacing "cultural
data" were typical for the whole VR industry's discourse in
the beginning of the 1990s, cinema can by no means be called
"the cultural interface". Cinema is just one of the possible
interfaces to datascapes, among many others.
In the following chapters
Manovich meticulously analyses how the shift to computer-
based media redefines the nature of static and moving
images: "New media may look like media, but this is only the
surface." (p. 48) He analyses the operations, illusions and
forms of new media. According to Manovich, the main
operations of new media are selection, compositing, and
teleaction. Digital compositing refers to the process of
"assembling together a number of elements to create a single
seamless object." (p. 136) This is what makes it radically
different to montage of the 1920s up to the 1980s: it is
essentially "anti- montage" (p. 143). While montage "aims to
create visual, stylistic, semantic, and emotional dissonance
between different elements", compositing aims to "blend them
into a seamless whole, a single gestalt." (p. 144).
Teleaction, as the third operation of new media, enables to
see and act at a distance. Manovich prefers the notion of
"teleaction" to "telepresence" exactly because one is not
present in the distant location, but one acts at a distance.
Teleaction allows the user - given that information can be
transmitted in real time - "to manipulate reality through
representations" (p. 165), through so-called "image-
instruments" which allow the user "not only to represent
reality but also to control it" (p. 167). Here, Manovich
includes a great passage on distance and aura, namely, on
Benjamin and Virilio, concluding that for both of them,
"distance guaranteed by vision preserves the aura of an
object […] while the desire 'to bring things
closer' destroys objects' relations to each other,
ultimately obliterating the material order altogether and
rendering the notions of distance and space meaningless.
[…] The potential aggressiveness of looking
turns out to be rather more innocent than the actual
aggression of electronically enabled touch." (p.
175)
In the "Illusions of new
media" chapter Manovich entertains the reader with some very
enlightening remarks on the partiality and unevenness of
synthetic realism generated by VR engines. An animator using
a particular software can, for instance, "easily create the
shape of a human face, but not hair; materials such as
plastic or metal, but not cloth or leather; the flight of a
bird but not the jumps of a frog." (p. 193) This unevenness
of synthetic realism not only reflects the range of problem
addressed and solved, but als bears witness to the fact that
the research of particular problems was "determined by the
need of the early sponsors of this research - the Pentagon
and Hollywood." (p. 193) In addition to this sponsor-induced
focus on certain areas in research, it is also the
researchers themselves who "privilege particular subjects
that culturally connote the mastery of illusionistic
representation" (p. 195). Examples for these "icons of
mimesis", or privileged signs of realism, would be, e.g.,
animations of smoke, fire, sea waves, and moving grass. Also
highly amusing is Manovich's witty comparison between
Jurassic Park and Socialist Realism. His thesis is that both
can be understood as synthetic images or constructs pointing
to a future event which, in order to be understood by their
contemporaries, have to be disguised in 'sub-optimal'
aesthetics. While the synthetic film images in Jurassic Park
are the "result of a different, more perfect than human,
vision", "the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic
missile" (whose images were too perfect and thus for the
film had to be degraded quality-wise), it is also, according
to Manovich, "a realistic representation of human vision in
the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics
and cleansed of noise" (p. 202). Likewise, also Socialist
Realism "had to retain enough of then-everyday reality while
showing how that reality would look in the future when
everybody's body would be healthly and muscular, every
street modern, every face transformed ba the spirituality of
communist ideology." (p. 203) Socialist Realism never
depicted this future directly: "The idea was not to make the
workers dream about the perfect future while closing their
eyes to imperfect reality, but rather to make them see the
signs of this future in the reality around them." (p. 203)
It is here that Manovich makes the connection between the
Hollywood movie and Socialist Realism: Just "as Socialist
Realist paintings blended the perfect future with the
imperfect reality, Jurassic Park blends future supervision
of computer graphics with the familiar vision of the film
image." (p. 204)
The most important forms of
new media are, according to Manovich, database and navigable
space. Self-confidently, Manovich states in the beginning:
"After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged
narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the
modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - the
database." (p. 218). Databases which Manovich calls the "new
symbolic form of the computer age" (p. 219), appear as
"collections of items on which the user can perform various
operations - view, navigate, search. The user's experience
of such computerized collections is, therefore, quite
distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film
[…]" (p. 219). The database (a term which
Manovich uses metaphorically, i.e. not only strictly for
databases, but in a more general sense) presents the world
as a list of items which it refuses to order. In contrast,
narrative "creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of
seemingly unordered items (events)." (p. 225) While database
and narrative seem to be diametrically opposed in the
beginning of the chapter, it increasingly becomes clear in
the course of Manovich's argument that linear narrative is
just one method of accessing data among many other possible
trajectories. Manovich redefines the concept of narrative:
"The 'user' of a narrative is traversing a database,
following links between its records as established by the
database's creator. An interactive narrative (which can be
also called a hypernarrative in an analogy with hypertext)
can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories
through a database." (p. 227) Here, Manovich observes a very
interesting change concerning the database logic: In old
media, as outlined, e.g. by Roman Jakobson,(2)
the database of choices from which narrative is constructed
is implicit (the paradigm); while the actual narrative is
explicit (the syntagm). New media completely reverse this
relationship: "Database (the paradigm) is given material
existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialised.
Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is
real; syntagm virtual." (p. 231)
As historical predecessors
Manovich mentions two "database filmmakers" who reconcile
database and narrative form: Dziga Vertov and Peter
Greenaway. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera literally
projects the paradigm onto the syntagm. Therefore, Manovich
concludes, Man with a Movie Camera cannot simply be labeled
"avant-garde", exactly because it never arrives at anything
like a well-defined language (like all avant-garde films),
but, rather, "it proposes an untamed, and apparently
endless, unwinding of techniques, or, to use contemporary
language, 'effects', as cinema's new way of speaking" (p.
242). Man with a Movie Camera is a "database of film
techniques, and a database of new operations of visual
epistemology, but also a database of new interface
operations that together aim to go beyond simple human
navigation through physical space." (p. 276) As Manovich
argues, while interactive interfaces foreground the
paradigmatic dimension, they are yet still organized along
the syntagmatic dimension: "Although the user is making
choices at each new screen, the end result is a linear
sequence of screens that she follows." (p. 232). Why do new
media insist on the sequential form, why this persistence on
a linear order? Manovich's hypothesis is that new media
follow "the dominant semiological order of the twentieth
century - that of cinema" (p. 232):
"[C]inema
replaced all other modes of narration with sequential
narrative, an assembly line of shots that appear on the
screen one at a time. For centuries, a spatialized
narrative in which all images appear simultaneously
dominated European visual culture; in the twentieth
century it was relegated to 'minor' cultural forms such
as comics or technical illustrations. 'Real' culture of
the twentieth century came to speak in linear chains,
aligning itself with the assembly line of the industrial
society […]. New media continue this mode,
giving the user information one screen at a time. At
least this is the case when it tries to become 'real'
culture (interactive narratives, games); when it simply
functions as an interface to information, it is not
ashamed to present much more information on the screen at
once, whether in the form of tables, normal or pull-down
menues, or lists." (p. 232)
While it would be really
interesting and necessary to critically discuss Manovich's
notion of "real culture" and of the "cultural interface"
(When exactly does an interface become 'cultural'? Should
not the computer itself be included in the notion of
'culture'?), he introduces many other notions that would be
likewise worth discussing, like "cinegratography", and the
"loop as narrative engine". Let's stop here and try to
summarize. Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media is a
very well written book (which can also be used as a
database) which guides the reader through its rich contents
by always providing short summaries of the chapter s/he just
read or s/he is about to read. The author illustrates his
arguments very well, not by providing images (apart from
some stills from Man with a Movie Camera there are no
illustrations whatsoever), but by always giving a broad
range of examples from his own practical working with these
new media technologies. Moreover, many examples he uses to
illustrate his arguments are net or media art projects and
not Hollywood movies, thus giving a new context to these
projects, but also implicitely underlining the avant-garde
role of art in the digital realm.
While reading the book I
wondered why I could not recognize the world Manovich is
describing. I would claim that one can experience new media
without ever being so massively confronted with visuals or
cinematic code as Manovich suggests. Manovich writes that
"the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in
its appearance" (p. 180). If you talk about computer games,
or about VR discourses developed over the last ten to twenty
years, yes, it is cinematographic plus some other elements.
Hollywood's and Silicon Valley's language of new media is
indeed massively cinematographic. But, for example, if you
talk about net culture, or media art, fields I have been
involved in over the last ten years, or even if you talk
about practices like chatting or SMS culture, then you just
cannot claim that we have to deal with a visual culture
which is predominantly cinematographic. The reader also has
to bear in mind that when Manovich speaks about 'computer
culture' he essentially talks about computer game culture,
VR development, and, partly, also about what others have at
times called the "Californian Ideology".(3)
Similarly, when he speaks about new media, he essentially
means those visual cultures that predominantly work with
filmic or cinematographic codes. Generally, any attempt to
define a field as broad as the "language of new media" has
to be welcomed quite enthusiastically. If one cannot expect
an author of such a study to include several historical
trajectories (there are, as I would claim, at least two
important ones: the trajectory of photography, film, and
television, and the trajectory of telegraphy, radio and the
Internet, with television and Internet converging at
present), then one should at least expect that the author
makes clear that, while writing about the "language of new
media" s/he is focussing only on one trajectory. However, by
describing in detail, e.g., navigable space, database, and
"image-instruments", he already points to the fact that new
media are not indebted to the filmic paradigm only. Still,
Manovich repeatedly comes back to implicitely using the
notion of visual media as a metonymy for media. Perhaps,
thus, in order to avoid misunderstandings, the book should
have been called "The Language of New Visual
Media".
In short: Manovich's precise
observations of operations and forms of new media that can
be found throughout the whole book come from his practical
experience and make the book a very valuable, sometimes
funny and even entertaining source of information on new
media. This is a wonderful example of the fact that whoever
writes on new media should also be in the state of using
them actively. If one takes into account the points I have
mentioned, i.e. Manovich's focus on the visual, on games and
VR and cinema, then reading The Language of New Media is
really rewarding.
Lev
Manovich: The Language of New Media.
MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts/London 2001
$34.95, 7x9, 354 pages, ISBN 0-262-13374-1
Notes:
1 Manovich,
Lev: The Language of New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts / London, England 2001. 25.
2 C.f.
Jakobson, Roman: Linguistik und Poetik [1960]. In:
Ders.: Ausgewählte Aufsätze 1921 - 1971.
Frankfurt/Main 1993. 83-121. Jakobson, Roman: Der
Doppelcharakter der Sprache und die Polarität zwischen
Metaphorik und Metonymik [1960]. In: Theorie der
Metapher. Hg. v. A. Haverkamp. Darmstadt, 1996.
163-174.
3 Barbrook,
Richard / Cameron, Andy: The Californian Ideology. In:
Nettime 1995.
***
This review was first published in July, 2002, by
ARTMargins (http://www.artmargins.com)
dichtung-digital
|
|