[Nettime-bold] Interview with Lev Manovich

[Daniel Palmer <e@danielpalmer.com>]

[The following interview was originally published in the Australian 
arts newspaper, Real Time, Issue 44, August-September, 2001, p25 
http://www.realtimearts.net/rt44/lev.html ]

Lev Manovich: how to speak new media
Interviewed by Daniel Palmer

Lev Manovich suggests that if it had one, the subtitle of The 
Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) would be: "everything you 
always wanted to know about new media (but were afraid to ask Dziga 
Vertov)." Indeed, cinema is especially privileged in his ambitious 
examination of the continuities of new media with 'old media.' 
Currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the 
University of California, San Diego, Manovich was born in Moscow and 
holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture. 
Working with computer media for almost 20 years as an artist, 
designer, animator, computer programmer and teacher, his work has 
been published in more than 20 countries, and he frequently lectures 
on new media around the world. While working on a new book, 
Info-Aesthetics, his current artistic projects include Software for 
the 20th Century, a set of 3 'imaginary' software applications, and 
Macro-Cinema, a set of digital films to be exhibited as an 
installation at Cinema Future at ZKM next year. Manovich will be in 
Australia at the end of November to speak at conferences in Sydney 
and Melbourne.

DP: Why the language of 'new media'-which would seem to be a 
historically variable term-and not, for instance, 'digital culture' 
(given that you suggest that your method might be called 'digital 
materialism')?

LM: I decided to use 'new media' because this term is a standard one 
used both in the field and in popular media. At the same time, the 
term is open enough, a kind of a placeholder, and I like this open 
character. Historically, I think it appeared around 1990. Its 
emergence marked the shift from understanding the computer as a tool 
in the 1980s to a new understanding that the computer also came to 
function as a new medium (or, more precisely, a number of mediums: 
virtual space, network, screen-based multimedia, etc).

DP: Your book starts with scenes from Vertov's Man With a Movie 
Camera, ends with a chapter called 'What is Cinema?', and a spool of 
film appears on the cover. Why is cinema so central to your 
understanding of new media?

LM: There are a few answers to this question. Cinema has been the 
most important cultural form of the 20th century, so it natural that 
new media both inherits many conventions from cinema (similar to how 
cinema itself inherited conventions from previous 19th century forms, 
in particular the novel) and also contains a promise of replacing 
cinema as the key form of the 21st century. Methodologically, I find 
the theory of cinema is more relevant to new media than, say, 
literary theory, because, cinema is a cultural form also heavily 
based on technology; and the evolution of film language is closely 
linked to the technological developments and changes in cinema's 
industrial mode of production. Finally, I was originally attracted to 
new media in the early 1980s (then called 'computer graphics' and 
'computer animation') because I saw in it the promise of being able 
to create films without big budgets, lots of heavy equipment and big 
crews-something which tools like DV cameras and Final Cut Pro running 
on a Powerbook has finally made possible, although it took about 20 
years!

DP: Why a formal analysis of new media?

LM: Artists, designers, as well as museums and critics, need terms to 
talk about new media work. We can talk about a painting using such 
terms as 'composition', 'flatness', 'colour scheme' and we can talk 
about a film using such terms as 'plot', 'cinematography', and 
'editing.' With new media, the existing discourse focuses on 2 
extremes: either purely industrial terms such as 'Flash animation' or 
'JPEG image' (which all describe software used and don't tell you 
much about the work's poetics and the user's experience of it), or 
rather abstract theoretical terms created during the previous 
historical period (between 1968 and 1989, ie between the student 
revolutions of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of 
Soviet Communism) such as 'rhizome' and 'simulation.' I would like to 
help develop a vocabulary that will fill in the gap between these 2 
extremes. The focus of my work is on trying to come up with new 
terms, which can be used to talk about the works-both their formal 
construction and also the interaction between the work and the user. 
So, to be more precise, my analysis is not strictly formal as it is 
also concerned with what literary theory has called 'reader 
response', the user's experience of new media.

DP: One of the distinctions you make in the book is between the 
database and narrative as competing symbolic forms. What is the 
significance of this contemporary shift to the database?

LM: The shift to the database can be understood as part of the larger 
shift from a traditional 'information-poor' society to our own 
'information-rich' society. Narrative made sense for cultures based 
on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a 
culture-it was a way to make sense of this information and tie it 
together (for instance, Greek mythology). Databases can be thought of 
as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge 
amounts of information, which constantly keep changing. It may be 
impossible to tie it all together in a set of narratives, but you can 
put it in a database and use a search engine to find what you are 
looking for, to find information which you are not aware of but which 
matches your interests and finally to even discover new categories. 
In short, a narrative is replaced by a directory or index.

DP: In your archaeology of the screen, a central opposition that you 
arrive at is that the contemporary (realtime) screen alternates 
between the dimensions of 'representation' and 'control.'

LM: I think that the opposition 'representation-control' provides a 
practical challenge to artists and designers of new media. There are 
2 dimensions, which can be distinguished here: spatial and temporal. 
Spatial: how do you combine controls with a fictional image flow? For 
instance, how do you integrate menus and hot spots in an interactive 
film screen? (This is often done by not having any menus on the 
screen but by allowing the user to control the program through the 
keyboard.) Temporal: how do you combine immersive segments and 
control segments? Typically the way this is done so far in computer 
games and other interactive narratives (for instance, in a very 
interesting Blade Runner game from a few years ago) is that an 
immersive section is followed by an interactive section, to be 
followed by another interactive section. More successful are the 
games where the 2 modes co-exist, such as first-person action games 
like Mario and Tomb Raider. You are the character and you 
continuously control it through a mouse or a joystick. There is 
another way to think about this opposition since we are talking about 
computer games. Traditional 'non-interactive' narratives (books, 
movies) are more concerned with representation and narrative 
immersion, what can be called 'narrative flow.' In contrast, all 
real-time games, from tennis to Unreal require the user to exercise 
continuous control. So the challenge and promise of combining a 
traditional narrative form such as a movie with a game is how to 
combine the 2 logics of narrative flow and realtime control into a 
new aesthetics.

DP: At one point you suggest that the computer is the ultimate and 
omnipresent Other of our age, and you say that the space of new media 
becomes "a mirror of the user's subjectivity", but for the most part 
you do not theorise the subjectivities enabled by new media.

LM: In The Language of New Media I am more concerned with formal 
analysis of new media works and their historical formation than with 
users' subjectivities. I am hoping to deal with the latter topic in 
more length in my next book, where I want to think through the common 
types of behaviour/subjectivity in our culture-information access 
(for instance, web surfing), information processing, realtime 
telecommunication (talking on a cell phone, chatting online) and so 
on.

DP: Can you elaborate on the link you make between the 
post-industrial mode of production and 'variable media'?

LM: Post-industrial modes of production use computer-based design, 
manufacturing and distribution to enable massive customisation. This 
involves constant updates of product lines; large sets of 
models/variation for a single line of products (think of hundreds of 
different sneaker design as can be seen in Niketown and similar 
stores), and the idea that a given product can be customised for an 
individual customer. Manufacturing involves materials, ie 'hardware'; 
since new media is all 'software', in new media computers enable more 
radical and more thorough customisation than in manufacturing. For 
instance, the user of an interactive site can select her own 
trajectory through it, thus in effect automatically 'customising' a 
work for herself. Or, when you visit a commercial website, its engine 
can automatically pull the information about your previous visits and 
your location to put up a customizsed version of the site for you, 
including which language version you get, the ads displayed, etc.

DP: Are there any current directions in art or popular culture of 
particular interest to you?

LM: I am interested in all directions in popular culture and their 
interactions: dance culture, music, fashion, internet culture, 
computer games, graphic and industrial design. I am trying to educate 
myself about electronic music because I am convinced that the logic 
of digital media historically has always manifested itself in music 
before visual culture. In part this is because visual culture, in 
particular popular visual culture, is often representational, ie, 
photographs, illustrations, movies, all represent visual reality 
which puts limits on how images may look like. So it is in music that 
many key new ideas of digital media revealed themselves first: 
algorithmic composition, sampling and mixing as a new form of 
creativity, and online distribution of culture (MP3s on the internet).

As far as new media art is concerned, I am very impressed by Lisa 
Jevbratt's software which currently forms the basis of the online 
exhibition Mapping the Web Infome 
(http://www.newlangtonarts.org/netart/infome). Lisa invited a number 
of people (including me) to use her software to create their own Net 
Crawlers and to visualised the data they collect. In her words, "Just 
as the Human Genome Project strives to map the mysteries of the 
body's DNA, Mapping the Web Infome develops ways of representing the 
master plan behind the codes that created the Web. The newly 
commissioned net art project deploys software robots as cartographers 
of the continually changing internet and the resulting images chart 
the hidden relationships that lie beneath the screen's surface."

DP: Is net art dead?

LM: If we understand net art as an artistic and cultural practice 
which focused on a modernist analysis of an early period of the web 
(1994-1998), it is dead. As an institutional label for new media art 
as a whole, it is very much alive and gaining more and more 
recognition. What I don't like is that museums, art galleries, media 
and other cultural institution often use the term 'net art' as a 
stand in for 'new media art' (or 'digital arts') as a whole. As a 
result, the attention goes to net projects while many other distinct 
digital practices such as interactive computer installation, 
electronic music, interactive cinema, and hypermedia are ignored. In 
short, a particular practice is used as a stand in for the field as a 
whole. It happens in part not only because net art is the cheapest 
practice for museums to exhibit but also because we still do not have 
any real alternative to an aesthetic theory based around the idea of 
mediums. So now along with painting, sculpture, art on paper, film, 
and video we now have 'net art', ie art which uses the medium of a 
network.

Lev Manovich http://www.manovich.net will be speaking at College of 
Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, November 23, contact Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 
tel 02 9385 0726; and (dis)LOCATIONs conference, Cinemedia's Treasury 
Theatre, Melbourne, November 30 & December 1.



 

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold