Lev Manovich

Manovich at Video Vortex in Brussels in October 2007

Lev Manovich is an author of new media books, professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, U.S. and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches new media art and theory, software studies, and digital humanities.^[1] His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and translated into Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Lithuanian and Chinese. According to two reviewers, this book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject"^[2] and "it places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan".^[3]

Biography

Manovich was born in Moscow where he studied painting, architecture, computer science, and semiotics.^[4] After spending several years practicing fine arts, he moved to New York in 1981. This move caused him to have a shift in interests from still image and physical 3D space to virtual space, moving images, and the use of computers in media. While in New York he received an M.A. in Experimental Psychology (NYU, 1988) and additionally worked professionally in 3d computer animation from 1984 to 1992. He then went on to receive Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester 1993. His Ph.D. dissertation The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers^[5] traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s.

Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include Little Movies, the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history, and Anna and Andy, a streaming novel (2000). He is also well known for his insightful articles, including "New Media from Borges to HTML" and "Database as Symbolic Form." In the latter article, he explains reasons behind the popularity of databases, while juxtaposing it to concepts such as algorithms and narrative. His works have been included in many key international exhibitions of new media art. In 2002 ICA in London presented his mini-retrospective under the title Lev Manovich: Adventures of Digital Cinema.

Manovich has been teaching new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design Helsinki. In 1993, students of his digital movie making classes at the UCLA Lab for New Media founded the Post-Cinematic Society which organized some of the first digital movie festivals based on his ideas about new media, such as database cinema.^[6]

Currently, Manovich is working on a new book called Info-aesthetics.^[7] The book focuses on how software is a societal source that has allowed information to spread.^{[citation needed]}He is also currently working on two other books: "Software Studies" and "Expanded Image". His current involvement in software studies has led to be part of a software Studies Initiative group.^[8] Another recent project is Soft Cinema which was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002–2003; traveling to Helsinki and Tokyo in 2003-2004).[1] "At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors." ^[9] Each Soft Cinema piece is a unique viewing experience for the audience; the software works with a set of parameters that allow for almost every part of a film to change.

Manovich's awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara, Fellowship from The Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin, and Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts.

The principles of new media

In his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Manovich describes the general principles underlying new media:

• Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data
• Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently
• Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically
• Variability: new media objects exist in multiple versions
• Transcoding: The logic of the computer influences how we understand and represent ourselves.

In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort's new media anthology, The New Media Reader, Lev Manovich wrote an introductory piece called "New Media from Borges to HTML" . This article addresses the question: What is new media? Through history, and digital media as a medium, he details the Enframing of new media by debunking old definitions. Inside the article he proposes eight ways to look at and define what is new media. In the article New Media from Borges to HTML, Manovich criticizes the United States government for hesitant funding towards new media until the late 90s, as opposed to Japan and Europe who got a head start in the beginning of the 90s. In 1995, Universities on the West Coast began to incorporate new media art and design in their curriculum. Later, museums and online projects followed in the same digital footsteps. Next, he compares and contrasts the new media and cyber-culture such as online community, online multi-gaming, cell phone and online identity. Then, he describes the distribution the new media which follows his 2001 book The Language of New Media analysis. Manovich reminds us that "We will see that many of the principles [of new media] are not unique to new media, but can be found in older media as well" (50). He also adds that Borges and Bush envisioned "a massive branching structure as a better way to organize data and to represent human existence" (15).^[10] Manovich also goes into the World Wide Web and Unix in the 1970s as well as GUIs and Atari computers invented in the 1980s. Last but not least, the invention of hypertext by Ted Nelson.

Manovich's 8 Propositions on What is New Media

^[11]

1. New Media versus Cyberculture
2. New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software
4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology
6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies
7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

Manovich's Proposition of what New Media Is Not

1. New Media is not continuous or digitally encoded
2. New Media can be played on multimedia machine
3. New Media allows random access unlike a film or videotape
4. New Media can be lost because it contains a fixed amount of information
5. New Media can be copied endlessly, analog media cannot
6. New Media is interactive and participatory
^[12]

Database as a Symbolic Form

In 1998, Lev Manovich came out with an essay called "Database as a Symbolic Form". In this essay, Manovich defines the term database and compares it to narratives. He explains how a database is like a big unordered list, whereas narratives orders their list with a beginning, an end, and a certain path to follow. Readers tend to want to mold things into a narrative. He uses the example of Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, and describes it as "the most important example of database imagination in modern media art".^[13] Manovich applauds Vertov for creating something that illustrates a middle-ground between databases and narratives. As well, he discusses the concepts of paradigm and syntagm and how new media reverses their original relationship. Instead of syntagm being explicit and paradigm implicit, the paradigm (database) is given material existence and the syntagm (narrative) is de-materialized.

Works

• Soft Cinema^[14] 2002-2003
• Software Takes Command. Released under CC license, November 20, 2008. http://www.softwarestudies.com/softbook .
• The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). http://www.manovich.net/LNM/index.html
• Database as a Symbolic Form (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998). http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/Database_as_symbolic_form.htm
• Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993).
• The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computer (University of Rochester, 1993).
• Little Movies Vol.1: microcinema: cinema for the early Net 1994-1997
• Freud-Lissitzky Navigator: Computer Game History Browser, 1999
• Anna and Andy: a Streaming Novel Emotional Movie Engine, 1999–2000
• FROZE 01 curated for Electronic Orphanage, 2001
• DATA BEAUTIFUL for Mapping the Web Infome exhibition, 2001

Quotes

• "We...look for certain aesthetic techniques and ideological tropes which accompany every new modern media and telecommunication technology at the initial stage of their introduction and dissemination" (19).
• “[new media destroys the] natural relationship between humans and the world by eliminating the distance”
• "Structurally manifestos correspond to the theoretical programs of computer scientists, while completed artworks correspond to working prototypes or systems designed by scientists to see if their ideas work." ^[15]
• "It is time that we treat the people who have articulated fundamental ideas of human-computer interaction as the major modern artists. Not only did they invent new ways to represent any data but they've also radically redefined our interactions with all of old culture..." ^[16]
• "Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other."
• "As digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artist came to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues-a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts."

See also

• Electronic literature

References

1. ^ Lev Manovich faculty profile at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee
2. ^ CAA reviews
3. ^ Telepolis
4. ^ http://www.manovich.net/bio_000.html
5. ^ http://www.scribd.com/doc/3097905/
6. ^ http://pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu/
7. ^ http://www.manovich.net/
8. ^ http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2007/05/about-software-studies-ucsd.html
9. ^ http://www.softcinema.net/
10. ^ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. The New Media Reader.2003. The MIT Press.
11. ^ New Media from Borges to HTML
12. ^ http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf
13. ^ Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press.
14. ^ http://softcinema.net/?reload
15. ^ Manovich, Lev. "New Media From Borges to HTML". The New Media Reader. The MIT Press.
16. ^ Manovich, Lev. "New Media From Borges to HTML". The New Media Reader. The MIT Press.

External links

• Manovich.net, official homepage
• Lev Manovich faculty profile at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee Biography, bibliography, and video lectures
• GENERATION FLASH a talk given by Lev Manovich at the Electronic Language International Festival Symposium/August/2003
• Abstraction and Complexity
• The Language of New Media (MIT Press/Leonardo Books)
• softcinema.org, film project
• Essay: Database as a Symbolic Form
• Essay: New Media from Borges to HTML
• Essay:Database as a Genre of New Media
• The Engineering of Vision Constructivism to Computers
• Video of lecture given by Manovich at The Computational Turn (Swansea) (2010)

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