<nettime> Review of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media

["Inke Arns" <inke@snafu.de>]

[This is my review of Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media 
(2001) which was recently published in ArtMargins 
<http://www.artmargins.com> and in an abridged version in Cream 10 
<http://www.laudanum.net/cream>. Greetings, Inke]


Inke Arns 

Metonymical Mov(i)es 

Review of Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media. MIT Press: 
Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England 2001. $34.95, 7x9, 354 
pages, ISBN 0-262-13374-1 


Upon reading Lautréamonts Chants de Maldoror (1869) surrealist king pin
André Breton took over the author's famous words "beautiful as the
unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an
umbrella", thus coining the Surrealist aesthetic of jarring
juxtapositions.  Almost as beautiful as Breton's observation was another
unexpected meeting taking place some years later, namely, the use of
punched 35mm movie film in order to control computer programs in the
world's first working digital computer built between 1936 and 1938 by
German engineer Konrad Zuse. This significant event which did not happen
on a Surrealist dissecting table but, interestingly, in the appartment of
Zuse's parents in Berlin-Kreuzberg, further rapproached computing and
media technologies - and thus further advanced the gradual entwinement of
these two distinct historical trajectories. It was, metaphorically
speaking, this strange superimposition of 'binary' over 'iconic' code,
that, according to Lev Manovich, anticipated the convergence of media and
computer that followed about 50 years later: "All existing media are
translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The results:
graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become
computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short media become
new media."(1)

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 […]
honhierarchical 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) Now, 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.

Inke Arns, Berlin, June 2002 
  

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.



Inke Arns
http://www.v2.nl/~arns





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net