Lev Manovich- Cultural Software

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TEXTS

The Language of New Media
<www-apparitions.ucsd.edu/~manovich/LNM/Manovich.pdf>
The Language of New Media addition
<www.manovich.net/DOCS/windows_montage.doc>
Generation Flash:
<www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc>

<www.penrose-press.com/idd/eve/index.html>

PROJECTS

cinema
<www.manovich.net/little-movies/index.html>
<www.manovich.net/AA/index.html>
<www.manovich.net/cinema_future/samples_qt.html>

software
<www.manovich.net/FLN/index.html>
<www.manovich.net/TSD/tsd_index.html>
<www.manovich.net/Data_beatiful.html>

www.manovich.net links
<www.electronicorphanage.com/biennale>
<www.futurefarmers.com>
<www.sas21.de/>

Abstract

While computers bring a number of new unprecedented cultural techniques such as dynanmic data visualisation, AL, AR, etc., the use of computers to simulate old media is as revolutionary, because this simulation is not just a mechanical process. By combining old media techniques with new software techniques computers make possible new cultural forms.

The computer allows us to preserve the granularity and the syntactical structure of the old media object, while giving us new ways to navigate it, to experience its structure, to compress and expand our views of the object, and to interactively control it. This is why I refer to this type of new media as "meta-media." A meta-media object contains both language and meta-language - both the original media structure (a film, an architectural space, a sound track) and the software tools that allow the user to generate descriptions of this structure and to change this structure.

If you think that meta-media is a conservative phenomenon which "betrays" the movement of computer culture to develop its own unique cultural techniques - Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, simulation, etc. - you are wrong. Since the late 1960s modern computing has been grounded in Alan Kay's concept (influenced by previous groundbreaking work in human computer interface, most importantly Sutherland's 1962 Sketchpad software) of a computer as a "personal expressive media." After he arrived to Xerox PARC, Kay directed the development of a word processor program, a music composition program, a paint program, and other tools that redefined the computer as a simulation machine for old media. So while the routine use of computers as media simulators did not become possible until the 1980s, the paradigm itself was already set around 1970. Gradually, other roles of a
modern computer - a machine for computation, real-time control, and network communication - became less visible than its role as "simulation engine" (although the development of the World Wide Web since 1993 obviously made network communication also very important). In summary, the computer's ability to simulate other media (which means simulating their interfaces and "data formats" such as written text, image, and sound) is not an after-thought - it is the essence of a modern post-1970 computer.

What is crucial to realize is that computer's simulation role is as revolutionary as its other roles. Most software tools for media creation and manipulation do not simply simulate old media interfaces - a book page and a table of contents in Acrobat, a pan and a zoom of a virtual camera in Maya, time code count and a razor blade in FCP - but also allow for new type of >operations on the media content. In other words, these tools carry the potential to transform media into meta-media. Re-mapping media data into a new domain is one of the most important among these operations.

The fact that today meta-media - rather than other seemingly "truly" original computer techniques - is in the center of computer culture is not accidental. The logic of meta-media fits well with other key aesthetic paradigms of today - the remixing of previous cultural contents and forms of a given media (most visible in music, architecture, and fashion), and the second type of remixing - that of national cultural traditions now submerged into the medium of globalization. (In the first approximation, the terms "postmodernism" and "globalization" can be used as aliases for these two remix paradigms.) Meta-media then can be thought alongside these two types of remixing as the third type: the remixing between the interfaces of various cultural forms and the new software techniques - in short, the remix between old media culture and software.