Tài liệu Lev Manovich The Language of New Media doc

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Lev Manovich


The Language of New Media







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To Norman Klein / Peter Lunenfeld / Vivian Sobchack



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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 Griffith to Vertov. Indeed, millions of computer users
communicate with each other through the same computer interface. And, in
contrast to cinema where most of its ‘users’ were able to ‘understand’ cinematic
language but not ‘speak’ it (i.e., make films), all computer users can ‘speak’ the
language of the interface. They are active users of the interface, employing it to
perform many tasks: send email, organize their files, run various applications, and
so on.”

VIII
2.
[figure 2] [figure 3] [figure 4] [figure 5]

(91) “The incorporation of virtual camera controls into the very hardware of a
game consoles is truly a historical event. Directing the virtual camera becomes as
important as controlling the hero's actions… the computer games are returning to
"The New Vision" movement of the 1920s (Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Vertov
and others), which foregrounded new mobility of a photo and film camera, and
made unconventional points of view the key part of their poetics.


IX
3.
[figure 6] [figure 7] [figure 8] [figure 9]

(140) “Editing, or montage, is the key twentieth technology for creating fake
realities. Theoreticians of cinema have distinguished between many kinds of
montage but, for the purposes of sketching the archeology of the technologies of
simulation leading to digital compositing, I will distinguish between two basic
techniques. The first technique is temporal montage: separate realities form
consecutive moments in time. The second technique is montage within a shot. It is
the opposite of the first: separate realities form contingent parts of a single
image… examples [of montage within a shot] include the superimposition of a
few images and multiple screens used by the avant-garde filmmakers in the
1920’s (for instance, superimposed images in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
and a three-part screen in Gance Abel’s 1927 Napoléon).

X
4.
[figure 10] [figure 11] [figure 12]

(140) “As theorized by Vertov, through [temporal] montage, film can overcome
its indexical nature, presenting a viewer with objects which never existed in
reality.”


XI
5.
[figure 13] [figure 14]

(147) “While the dominant use of digital compositing is to create a seamless
virtual space, it does not have to be subordinated to this goal. The borders
between different worlds do not have to be erased; the different spaces do not
have to be matched in perspective, scale and lighting; the individual layers can
retain their separate identity rather then being merged into a single space; the
different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe.”


XII
6.
[figure 15] [figure 16] [figure 17] [figure 18] [figure 19]

(158) “The cameraman, whom Benjamin compares to a surgeon, ‘penetrates
deeply into its [reality] web’; his camera zooms in order to ‘pray an object from
its shell.’ With its new mobility, glorified in such films as A Man with the Movie
Camera, the camera can be anywhere, and, with its superhuman vision, it can

obtain a close-up of any object Along with disregarding the scale, the unique
locations of the objects are discarded as well as their photographs brought
together within a single picture magazine or a film newsreel, the forms which fit
in with the demand of mass democratic society for ‘the universal equality of
things.’”


XIII
7.
[figure 20] [figure 21]

(160) “Modernization is accompanied by the process of disruption of physical
space and matter, the process which privileges interchangeable and mobile signs
over the original objects and relations…The concept of modernization fits equally
well Benjamin's account of film and Virilio's account of telecommunication, the
latter just being a more advanced stage in this continual process of turning objects
into mobile signs. Before, different physical locations met within a single
magazine spread or a film newsreel; now, they meet within a single electronic
screen.”


XIV
8.
[figure 22] [figure 23]

(183) “Whose vision is it? It is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, a automatic
missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be
augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a
digital grid. Synthetic computer-generated image is not an inferior representation
of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality.”

XV
9.
[figure 24]

(209) “Along with Greenaway, Dziga Vertov can be thought of as a major
‘database filmmaker’ of the twentieth century. Man with a Movie Camera is
perhaps the most important example of database imagination in modern media
art.”



XVI
10.
[figure 25] [figure 26] [figure 27]

(210) “Just as new media objects contain a hierarchy of levels (interface —
content; operating system — application; Web page — HTML code; high-level
programming language — assembly language — machine language), Vertov's
film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming
material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the
finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from
footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a
progression of one day: waking up — work — leisure activities. If this third level
is a text, the other two can be thought of as its meta-texts.”


XVII
11.

[figure 28] [figure 29] [figure 30] [figure 31] [figure 32] [figure 33] [figure 34]

(211) ”If a ‘normal’ avant-garde film still proposes a coherent language different
from the language of mainstream cinema, i.e. a small set of techniques which are
repeated, Man with a Movie Camera never arrives at anything like a well-defined
language. Rather, it proposes an untamed, and apparently endless unwinding of
cinematic techniques, or, to use contemporary language, ‘effects’, as cinema's
new way of speaking.”



XVIII
12.
[figure 35] [figure 36]

(212) ”And this is why Vertov’s film has a particular relevance to new media. It
proves that it is possible to turn “effects” into a meaningful artistic language. Why
in the case of Witney's computer films and music videos the effects are just
effects, while in the hands of Vertov they acquire meaning? Because in Vertov's
film they are motivated by a particular argument, this being that the new
techniques to obtain images and manipulate them, summed up by Vertov in his
term "kino-eye," can be used to decode the world. As the film progresses,
"straight" footage gives way to manipulated footage; newer techniques appear one
after one, reaching a roller coaster intensity by the film's end, a true orgy of
cinematography. It is as though Vertov re-stages his discovery of the kino-eye for
us. Along with Vertov, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered
by the camera. Vertov's goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking,
to make us share his excitement, his gradual process of discovery of film's new
language. This process of discovery is film's main narrative and it is told through
a catalog of discoveries being made. Thus, in the hands of Vertov, a database, this

normally static and "objective" form, becomes dynamic and subjective. More
importantly, Vertov is able to achieve something which new media designers and
artists still have to learn — how to merge database and narrative merge into a new
form.”



XIX
13.
[figure 37] [figure 38] [figure 39]

(226) “If modern visual culture exemplified by MTV can be thought of as a
Mannerist stage of cinema, its perfected techniques of cinematography, mise-en-
scene and editing self-consciously displayed and paraded for its own sake,
Waliczky's film presents an alternative response to cinema’s classical age, which
is now behind us. In this meta-film, the camera, part of cinema’s apparatus,
becomes the main character (in this we may connect The Forest to another meta-
film, A Man with a Movie Camera).”



XX
14.
[figure 40] [figure 41] [figure 42] [figure 43]

(236) “Vertov stands half-way between Baudelaire's flâneur and computer user:
no longer just a pedestrian walking through a street, but not yet Gibson’s data
cowboy who zooms through pure data armed with data mining algorithms. In his
research on what can be called “kino-eye interface,” Vertov systematically tried
different ways to overcome what he thought were the limits of human vision. He

mounted cameras on the roof of a building and a moving automobile; he slowed
and speed up film speed; he superimposed a number of images together in time
and space (temporal montage and montage within a shot). A Man with a Movie
Camera is not only a database of city life in the 1920s, a database of film
techniques, and a database of new operations of visual epistemology, but it is also
a database of new interface operations which together aim to go beyond a simple
human navigation through a physical space.”



XXI
15.
[figure 44] [figure 45]

(258) “Avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and
interface metaphors of computer software. The avant-garde became materialized
in a computer. Digital cinema technology is a case in point. The avant-garde
strategy of collage reemerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic
operation one can perform on digital data. The idea of painting on film became
embedded in paint functions of film editing software. The avant-garde move to
combine animation, printed texts and live action footage is repeated in the
convergence of animation, title generation, paint, compositing and editing systems
into single all-in-one packages.”



XXII
16.
[figure 46] [figure 47]

(265) “Cinema's birth from a loop form was reenacted at least once during its
history. In one of the sequences of A Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov shows
us a cameraman standing in the back of a moving automobile. As he is being
carried forward by an automobile, he cranks the handle of his camera. A loop, a
repetition, created by the circular movement of the handle, gives birth to a
progression of events a very basic narrative which is also quintessentially
modern: a camera moving through space recording whatever is in its way.”



XXIII
17.
[figure 48]

(266) “Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age? It
is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to
computer programming. Programming involves altering the linear flow of data
through control structures, such as ‘if/then’ and ‘repeat/while’; the loop is the
most elementary of these control structures…. As the practice of computer
programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be
thought as being mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to
end end by executing a series of loops.”


XXIV
18.
[figure 49] [figure 50] [figure 51]

(270) “Spatial montage represents an alternative to traditional cinematic temporal
montage, replacing its traditional sequential mode with a spatial one. Ford's

assembly line relied on the separation of the production process into a set of
repetitive, sequential, and simple activities. The same principle made computer
programming possible: a computer program breaks a tasks into a series of
elemental operations to be executed one at a time. Cinema followed this logic of
industrial production as well. It replaced all other modes of narration with a
sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots which appear on the screen one at a
time. A sequential narrative turned out to be particularly incompatible with a
spatial narrative which played a prominent role in European visual culture for
centuries.”


XXV
19.
[figure 52]

(271) “Since the Xerox Park Alto workstation, GUI used multiple windows. It
would be logical to expect that cultural forms based on moving images will
eventually adopt similar conventions… We may expect that computer-based
cinema will eventually have to follow the same direction — especially when the
limitations of communication bandwidth will disappear, while the resolution of
displays will significantly increase, from the typical 1-2K in 2000 to 4K, 8K or
beyond. I believe that the next generation of cinema — broadband cinema — will
add multiple windows to its language.”