LEV MANOVICH :
NEW MEDIA FROM BORGES TO HTML
The New Media Field: a Short Institutional
History
The appearance of The New Media Reader is a
milestone in the history of a new field that, just a
few years ago, was somewhat of a cultural
underground. Before taking up the
theoretical challenge of defining what new media
actually is, as well as discussing the particular
contributions this reader makes to answer this
question. I would like very briefly to
sketch the history of the field for the benefit of
who is who are newcomers to it. If we are to look at
any modern cultural field sociologically,
measuring its standing by the number and the
importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such
as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications,
conferences, and so on, we
can say that in the case of new media
(understood as computer-based artistic
activities) it took about ten years for
it to move from cultural periphery to the
mainstream. Although SIGGRAPH in the United
States and Ars Electronica in Austria had already
acted as annual gathering places of artists working
with computers since the late 1970s, the new
media field began to take real shape only in the
end of the 1980s. Around that time new institutions
devoted to the production and support of new
media art were founded in Europe: ZKM in
Karlsruhe (1989), New Media Institute in
Frankfurt (1990), and ISEA (Inter-Society for the
Electronic Arts) in the Netherlands (1990). (Jeffrey
Shaw was appointed to be director of the part of
ZKM focused on visual media while the Frankfurt
Institute was headed by Peter Weibel.) In 1990 as
well, Intercommunication Center in Tokyo began its
activities in new media art (it moved into its
own building in 1997). Throughout the 1990s,
Europe and Japan remained the best places to see
new media work and to participate in high-level
discussions of the new field. Festivals such as
ISEA, Ars Electronica. and DEAF have been
required places of pilgrimage for interactive
installation artists, computer musicians,
choreographers working with computers, media
curators, critics, and, since the mid-1990s,
net artists.
As was often the case throughout the twentieth
century, countries other than the United States
were first to critically engage with new technologies
developed and deployed in the
United States. There are a few ways to explain this
phenomenon. Firstly, the speed with which new
technologies are assimilated in the United States
makes them "invisible" almost overnight: they
become an assumed part of the everyday
existence, something which does not seem to
require much reflection. The slower speed of
assimilation and the higher costs involved give
other countries more time to reflect upon new
technologies, as it was the case with new
media and the Internet in the 1990s. In the case of
the Internet, by the end of the 1990s it became as
commonplace in the United States as the
telephone, while in Europe the Internet still
remained a phenomenon to reflect upon, both
for economic reasons (U.S. subscribers would pay
a very low monthly flat fee; in Europe they had to
pay by the minute) and for cultural reasons (a more
skeptical attitude towards new technologies in
many European countries slowed down their
assimilation). So when in the early 1990s the Soros
Foundation set up contemporary art centers
throughout the Eastern Europe, it wisely gave them
a mandate to focus their activities on new media
art, both in order to support younger artists who
had difficulty getting around the more established
"art mafia" in these countries and also in order to
introduce the general public to the Internet.
Secondly, we can explain the slow U.S.
engagement with new media art during the 1990s
by the very minimal level of the public support for
the arts there. In Europe, Japan, and Australia
festivals for media and new media art such as the
ones I mentioned above, commissions for artists to
create such work, exhibition catalogs and other
related cultural activities were funded by the
governments. In the United States the lack of
government funding for the arts left only
two cultural players which economically could have
supported creative work in new media: antiintellectual,
market- and cliche-driven commercial
mass culture and equally commercial
art culture (i.e., the art market). For different
reasons, neither of these players would support
new media art nor would
foster intellectual discourse about it. Out of the two,
commercial culture (in other words, culture
designed for mass audiences) has played a more
progressive role in adopting and experimenting
with new media, even though for obvious
reasons the content of commercial new media
products has had severe limits. Yet without
commercial culture we would not have computer
games using artificial intelligence; network-based
multimedia (including various Web plug-ins
which enable distribution of music, moving images
and 3-D environments over the Web); sophisticated
3-D modeling; animation and rendering tools;
database-driven Web sites; CD-ROMs, DVDs, and
other storage formats; and most other
advanced new media technologies and forms.
The 1990s the U.S. art world proved to be the most
conservative cultural force in contemporary society,
lagging behind the rest of the cultural and social
institutions in dealing with new media technologies.
(In the 1990s a standard joke at new media
festivals was that a new media piece requires two
interfaces: one for art curators and one for
everybody else.) This resistance is understandable
given that the logic of the art world and the logic
of new media are exact opposites. The first is
based the romantic idea of authorship which
assumes a single author, the notion of a
one-of-a-kind art object, and the control over the
distribution of such objects which takes place
through a set of exclusive places: galleries,
museums, auctions. The second privileges
the existence of potentially numerous copies;
infinitely many different states of the same work;
author-user symbiosis (the user can change the
work through interactivity); the collective'
collaborative authorship; and network distribution
(which bypasses the art system distribution
channels). Moreover, exhibition of new media
requires a level of technical sophistication and
computer equipment which neither U.S. museums
nor galleries were able to provide in
the 1990s. In contrast, in Europe generous federal
and regional funding allowed not only for
mountings of sophisticated exhibitions but also for
the development of a whole new form of art: the
interactive computer installation. It is true that after
many years of its existence, the U.S. art
world learned how to deal with and in fact fully
embraced video installation—but video installations
require standardized equipment and don't demand
constant monitoring. Neither is the case with
interactive installations or even with Web pieces.
While in Europe equipment- intensive forms of
interactive installation have flourished throughout
the 1990s, the U.S. art world has taken the easy
way out by focusing on "net art," i.e., Web-based
pieces whose exhibition does not require much
resources beyond an off- the-shelf computer and a
net connection.
All this started to change with increasing speed by
the end of the 1990s. Various cultural institutions in
the United States finally began to pay attention to
new media. The first were education institutions.
Around 1995 universities and art schools,
particularly on the West Coast, began to initiate
programs in new media art and design as well as
open faculty positions in these areas; by the
beginning of the new decade, practically every
university and art school on the West Coast
had both undergraduate and graduate programs in
new media. A couple of years later museums such
as Walker Art Center begun to mount a number of
impressive online exhibitions and started to
commission online projects. The 2000 Whitney
Biannual included a room dedicated to net art
(even though its presentation conceptually was
ages behind the presentation of new media in such
places as Ars Electronica Center in Linz,
ntercommunication Center in Tokyo, or ZKM in
Germany). Finally in 2001, both the
Whitney Museum in New York and the San
Francisco Museum of Modern art (SFMOMA)
mounted large survey exhibitions of new media art
(Bitstreams at the Whitney, 010101: Art in
Technological Times at SFMOMA). Add to this
a constant flow of conferences and workshops
mounted in such bastions of American Academia
as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton;
fellowships in new media initiated by such
prestigious funding bodies as the Rockefeller
Foundation and Social Science Research Council
(both begun in 2001); book series on new media
published by such well-respected presses as the
MIT Press. What ten years ago was a cultural
underground became an established
academic and artistic field; what has emerged from
on-the-ground interactions of individual players has
solidified, matured, and acquired institutional forms.
Paradoxically, at the same time as the new media
field started to mature (the end of the 1990s), its
very reason for existence came to be threatened. If
all artists now, regardless of their preferred
media, also routinely use digital computers to
create, modify, and produce works, do we need
to have a special field of new media art? As
digital and network media rapidly become an
omnipresent in our society, and as most
artists 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. I personally do think that the existence
of a separate new media field now and in the future
makes very good sense, but it does require a
justification—something that I hope the rest of this
text, by taking up more theoretical
questions, will help to provide.
Software Design and Modern Art:
Parallel Projects
Ten years after the appearance of the first cultural
institutions solely focused on new media, the field
has matured and solidified. But what exactly is
new media? And what is new media art?
Surprisingly, these questions remain not so easy to
answer. The book you are now holding in your
hands does provide very interesting answers to
these questions; it also provides the most
comprehensive foundation for the new media field,
in the process redefining it in a very productive
way. In short, this book is not just a map of the field
as it already exists but a creative intervention into
it. The particular selections and their juxtaposition
this book re-define new media as parallel
tendencies in modern art and computing
technology after the World War II. Although the
editors of the anthology may not agree with this
move, I would like to argue that eventually this
parallelism changes the relationship between art
and technology. In the last few decades of the
twentieth century, modern computing and
network technology materialized certain key
projects of modern art developed
approximately at the same time. In the process of
this materialization, the technologies overtook art,
That is, not only have new media technologies—
computer programming, graphical human-computer
interface, hypertext, computer multimedia,
networking (both wired- based and wireless)—
actualized the ideas behind projects by artists, they
have also extended them much further than the
artists originally imagined. As a result these
technologies themselves have become the greatest
art works of today. The greatest hypertext is the
Web itself, because it is more complex,
unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that
could have been written by a single human writer,
even James Joyce. The greatest interactive work
is the interactive human-computer interface itself:
the fact that the user can easily change everything
which appears on her screen, in the process
changing the internal state of a computer or even
commanding reality outside of it. The greatest
avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro
or After Effects which contains the possibilities of
combining together thousands of separate tracks
into a single movie, as well as setting various
relationships between all these different tracks—
and it thus it develops the avant-garde idea of a
film as an abstract visual score to its logical end,
and beyond. Which means that those
computer scientists who invented these
technologies—J. C. R. Licklider (005), Douglas
Engelbart (008. Ol6), Ivan Sutherland (009), Ted
elson (Oil, 021, 030), Seymour Papert (028), Tim
Bemers-Lee (054) and others—are the important
artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are
truly important and who will be remembered from
this historical period.
To prove the existence of historical parallelism, The
New Media Reader positions next to each of the
key texts by modern artists that articulate certain
ideas those key texts
by modern computer scientists that articulate
similar ideas in relation to software and hardware
design. Thus we find next to each other a story by
Jorge Luis Borges (1941) (001) and an article by
Vannevar Bush (1945) (002; which both
contain the idea of a massive branching structure
as a better way to organize data and to represent
human experience The parallelism between texts
by artists and by computer scientists involves not
only the ideas in the texts but also the form of the
texts. In the twentieth century artists typically
presented their ideas either by writting manifestos
or by creating actual art works In the case of
computer scientists we either have theoretical
articles that develop plans for particular software
and/or hardware designs or more descriptive
articles about already created prototypes or the
actual working systems. 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 do work and to
demonstrate these ideas to colleagues, sponsors
and clients. Therefore The New Media Reader to a
large extent consists of these two types of texts:
either theoretical presentations of new ideas and
speculations about projects (or types of projects)
that would follow from them; or the descriptions of
the projects actually realized.
Institutions of modern culture that are responsible
for selecting what makes it into the canon of our
cultural memory and what is left behind are always
behind the times. It may take a few decades or
even longer for a new field which is making an
important contribution to modern culture to "make
it" into museums, books, and other official registers
of cultural memory. In general, our official cultural
histories tend to privilege art (understood in a
romantic sense as individual products an individual
artists) over mass industrial culture. For instance,
while modern graphical and industrial designers do
have some level of cultural visibility, their names,
with the exception of a few contemporary
celebrity designers such as Bruce Mau and Philip
Stark, are generally not as known as the names of
fine artists or fiction writers. Some examples of key
contemporary fields that so far have not been
given their due are music videos, cinematography,
set design, and industrial design. But no cultural
field so far has remained more unrecognized than
computer science and, in particular, its specific
branch of human-computer interaction, or HCI
(also called humancomputer
interface design).
It is time that we treat the people who have
articulated fundamental ideas of human-computer
interaction as the maior modern artists. Not only
did they invent new ways to represent any data
(and thus, by default, all data which has
to do with “culture” i.e. the human experience in the
world and the symbolic representations of this
experience) but they have also radically redefined
our interactions with all of old culture. As the
window of a Web browser comes to supplement
the cinema screen, museum space, CD player,
book, and library, the new situation manifests itself:
all culture, past and present, is being filtered
through the computer, with its particular
human-computer interface.
Human-computer interface comes to act as a new
form through which all older forms of cultural
production are being mediated.
The -New Media Reader contains essential articles
by some of the key interface and software
designers in the history of computing so far, from
Engelbart to Berners-Lee. Thus in my view this
book is not just an anthology of new media but also
the first example of a radically new history of
modern culture—a view from the future when more
people will recognize that the true cultural
innovators of the last decades of the twentieth
century were interface designers, computer
game designers, music video directors and DJs —
rather than painters, filmmakers, or fiction writers,
whose fields remained relatively stable during this
historical period.
What Is New Media? Eight Propositions
Having discussed the particular perspective
adopted by The New Medici Reader in relation to
the larger cultural context we may want to place
new media in—the notion of parallel developments
in modern art and in computing—I now want
to go through other possible concepts of new
media and its histories (including a few proposed
by the present author elsewhere). Here are eight
answers; without a doubt, more can be invented if
desired.
1 New Media versus Cyberculture
To begin with, we may distinguish between new
media and cyberculture. In my view they represent
two distinct fields of research. I would define
cyberculture as the study of various social
phenomena associated with the Internet and other
new forms of network communication. Examples of
what falls under cyberculture studies are online
communities, online multi-player gaming, the issue
of online identity, the sociology and the
ethnography of email usage, cell phone
usage in various communities, the issues of gender
and ethnicity in Internet usage, and so on.' Notice
that the emphasis is on the social phenomena;
cyberculture does not directly deal with new cultural
objects enabled by network communication
technologies. The study of these objects is
the domain of new media. In addition, new media is
concerned with cultural objects and paradigms
enabled by all forms of computing and not just by
networking. To summarize: cyberculture is
focused on the social and on networking; new
media is focused on the cultural and
computing.
2 New Media as Computer Technology
Used as a Distribution Platform
What are these new cultural objects? Given that
digital computing is now used in most areas of
cultural production, from publishing and advertising
to filmmaking and architecture, how can we single
out the area of culture that specifically owes its
existence to computing? In my The
Language of New Media I begin the discussion of
new media by invoking its definition which can be
deduced from how the term is used in popular
press: new media are the cultural objects which
use digital computer technology for distribution
and exhibition.2
Thus, Internet, Web sites,
computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs
and DVDs, virtual reality, and computer-generated
special effects all fall under new media. Other
cultural objects which use computing for production
and storage but not for final distribution—television
programs, feature films, magazines, books and
other paper-based publications, etc.—are not new
media.
The problems with this definition are three-fold.
Firstly, it has to be revised every few years, as yet
another part of culture comes to rely on computing
technology for distribution (for instance, the shift
from analog to digital television; the shift from filmbased
to digital projection of feature films in movie
theatres; e-books, and so on) Secondly,
we may suspect that eventually most forms of
culture will use computer distribution, and therefore
the term "new media defined in this way will lose
any specificity. Thirdly, this definition does not tell
us anything about the possible effects of computerbased
distribution on the aesthetics of
what is being distributed. In other words, do Web
sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CDROMs,
and virtual reality all have something in
common because they are delivered to the user via
a computer? Only if the answer
is at least a partial yes does it makes sense to think
about new media as a useful theoretical category.
3 New Media as Digital Data
Controlled by Software
The Language of New Media is based on the
assumption that, in fact, all cultural objects that rely
on digital representation and computer-based
delivery do share a number of common
qualities. In the book I articulate a number of
principles of new media: numerical
representation, modularity, automation,
variability, and transcoding. I do not assume
that any computer-based cultural object will
necessary be structured according to these
principles today. Rather, these are tendencies of a
culture undergoing computerization that
gradually will manifest themselves more and more.
For instance, the principle of variability states that a
new media cultural object may exist in potentially
infinitly many different states. Today the examples
of variability are commercial Web sites
programmed to customize Web pages for each
user as she is accessing the site, or DJs remixes of
already existing recordings; tomorrow the principle
of variability may also structure a digital film which
will similarly exist in multiple versions.
I deduce these principles, or tendencies, from the
basic fact of digital representation of media. New
media is reduced to digital data that can be
manipulated by software as any other
data. This allows automating many media
operations, to generate multiple versions of the
same object, etc. For instance, once an image is
represented as a matrix of numbers, it can be
manipulated or even generated automatically by
running various algorithms, such as
sharpen; blue, colorize, change contrast, etc.
More generally, extending what I proposed in my
book, could say that two basic ways in which
computers model reality—through data
structures and algorithms—can also
be applied to media once it is represented digitally.
In other words, given that new media is digital data
controlled by particular "cultural" software, it make
sense to think of any new media object in terms of
particular data structures and/or particular
algorithms it embodies3
Here are
examples of data structures: an image can be
thought of as a two-dimensional array (x, y), while a
movie can be thought
of as a three-dimensional array (x, y, t). Thinking
about digital media in terms of algorithms, we
discover that many of these algorithms can be
applied to any media (such as copy, cut, paste,
compress, find, match) while some still
retain media specificity. For instance, one can
easily search for a particular text string in a text but
not for a particular object in an image. Conversely,
one can composite a number of still or moving
images together but not different texts.
These differences have to do with different semiotic
logics of different media in our culture: for example,
we are ready to read practically any image or a
composite of images as being meaningful, while for
a text string to be meaningful we require that it
obey the laws of grammar. On the other
hand, language has a priori discrete structure (a
sentence consists of words which consist if
morphemes, and so on) that makes it very easily to
automate various operations on it (such as search,
match, replace, index), while digital representation
of images does not by itself allow for automation of
semantic operations.
4 New Media as the Mix Between Existing
Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of
Software
As a particular type of media is turned into digital
data controlled by software, we may expect that
eventually it will fully obey the principles of
modularity, variability, and automation. However, in
practice these processes may take a long time and
they do not proceed in a linear fashion—
rather, we witness "uneven development." For
instance, todav some media are already totally
automated while in other cases this automation
hardly exists—even though technologically it can
be easily implemented.
Let us take as the example contemporary
Hollywood film production. Logically we could have
expected something like the following scenario. An
individual viewer receives a customized version of
the film that takes into account her/his previous
viewing preferences, current preferences,
and marketing profile. The film is completely
assembled on the fly by AI software using predefined
script schemas. The software also
generates, again on the fly, characters, dialog,
and sets (this makes product placement particularly
easy) that are taken from a massive "assets"
database.
The reality today is quite different. Software is used
in some areas of film production but not in others.
While some visuals may be created using computer
animation, cinema still centers on the system of
human stars whose salaries account for a large
percent of a film budget. Similarly, script writing
(and countless re-writing) is also trusted to
humans. In short, the computer is kept out of the
key "creative" decisions, and is delegated to the
position of a technician.
If we look at another type of contemporary media—
computer games—we will discover that they follow
the principle of automation much more thoroughly.
Game characters are modeled in 3D; they move
and speak under software control. Software also
decides what happens next in the game,
generating new characters, spaces, and scenarios
in response to user's behavior. It is not hard to
understand why automation in computer games is
much more advanced than in cinema. Computer
games are one of the few cultural forms
"native" to computers; they began as singular
computer programs (before turning into a complex
multimedia productions which they are today)—
rather than being an already established medium
(such as cinema) which is now slowly undergoing
computerization.
Give that the principles of modularity, automation,
variabily and transcoding are tendencies that
slowly and unevenly manifest themselves, is there
a more precise way to describe new media, as it
exists today? The Language of New
Media analyzes the language of contemporary new
media (or, to put this differently, "early new
media") as the mix (we can also use software
metaphors of "morph" or "composite")
between two different sets of cultural forces, or
cultural conventions: on the one hand, the
conventions of already mature cultural forms
(such as a page, a rectangular frame, a
mobile point of view) and, on the other hand, the
conventions of computer software and, in
particular, of HCI as they have developed until
now.
Let me illustrate this idea with two examples. In
modern visual culture a representational image
was something one gazed at, rather than interacted
with. An image was also one continuous
representational field, i.e. a single scene. In the
1980s the graphical user interface (GUI) redefined
an image as a figure-ground opposition between a
non-interactive, passive ground (typically a desktop
pattern) and active icons and hyperlinks (such as
the icons of documents and applications appearing
on the desktop). The treatment of representational
images in new media represents a mix between
these two very different conventions. An image
retains its representational function while at the
same time is treated as a set of hot spots ("imagemap").
This is the standard convention in
interactive multimedia, computer games, and Web
pages. So while visually an image still appears as a
single continuous field, in fact it is broken into a
number of regions with hyperlinks connected to
these regions, so clicking on a region opens a new
page, or re-starts the game narrative, etc. This
example illustrates how a HCI convention is
"superimposed" (in this case, both metaphorically
and literally, as a designer places hot spots over an
existing image) over an older representational
convention. Another way to think about this is to
say that a technique normally used for control and
data management is mixed with a technique of
fictional representation and fictional narration.
I will use another example to illustrate the opposite
process: how a cultural convention normally used
for fictional representation and narration is
"superimposed" over software techniques of data
management and presentation. The cultural
convention in this example is the mobile camera
model borrowed from cinema. In The Language of
New Media I analyze how it became a generic
interface used to access any type of data:
Originally developed as part of 3D computer
graphics technology for such applications as
computer-aided design, flight simulators, and
computer movie making, during the 1980s and
1990s the camera model became as much of an
interface convention as scrollable windows or cut
and paste operations. It became an accepted way
for interacting with any data which is represented in
three dimensions—which, in a computer culture,
means literally anything and everything: the results
of a physical simulation, an architectural site,
design of a new molecule, statistical data, the
structure of a computer network and so on.
As computer culture is gradually spatializing all
representations and experiences, they become
subjected to the camera's particular grammar of
data access. Zoom, tilt, pan, and track: we now use
these operations to interact with data spaces,
models, objects and bodies.4
To sum up: new media today can be understood
as the mix between older cultural conventions for
data representation, access, and manipulation and
newer conventions of data representation, access,
and manipulation. The "old" data are
representations of visual reality and human
experience, i.e., images, text-based and audiovisual
narratives—what we normally understand
by "culture." The "new" data is numerical data.
As a result of this mix, we get such strange
hybrids as clickable "image-maps," navigable
landscapes of financial data, QuickTime (which
was defined as the format to represent any timebased
data but which in practice is used
exclusively for digital video), animated icons—a
kind of micro-movies of computer culture—and so
on.
As can be seen, this particular approach to new
media assumes the existence of historically
particular aesthetics that characterize new media,
or "early new media," today. (We may also call it
the "aesthetics of early information culture.") This
aesthetics results from the convergence of
historically particular cultural forces: already
existing cultural conventions and the conventions
of HCI. Therefore, it could not have existed in the
past and it unlikely to stay without changes for a
long time. But we can also define new media in
the opposite way: as specific aesthetic features
which keep re-appearing at an early stage of
deployment of every new modern media and
telecommunication technology.
5 New Media as the Aesthetics that
Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New
Modern Media and Communication
Technology
Rather than reserving the term "new media" to refer
to the cultural uses of current computer and
computer-based network technologies, some
authors have suggested that every modern media
and telecommunication technology passes through
its "new media stage." In other words, at
some point photography, telephones, cinema, and
television each were "new media." This perspective
redirects our research efforts: rather than trying to
identify what is
unique about digital computers functioning as
media creation, media distribution and
telecommunication devices we may instead 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. Here are a
few examples of such ideological tropes: new
technology will allow for "better democracy;" it will
give us a better access to the "real" (by offering
"more immediacy" and/or the possibility "to
represent what before could not be represented"); it
will contribute to "the erosion of moral values"; it
will destroy the "natural relationship between
humans and the world" by "eliminating the
distance" between the observer and the observed.
And here are two examples of aesthetic strategies
that seem to often accompany the appearance of a
new media and telecommunication technology (not
surprisingly, these aesthetic strategies are directly
related to ideological tropes I just mentioned). In
the mid 1990s a number of filmmakers started to
use inexpensive digital cameras (DV) to create
films characterized by a documentary style (for
nstance,
Timecode, Celebration, Mifune). Rather than
treating live action as a raw material to be later rearranged
in post- production, these filmmakers
placed premier importance on
the authenticity of the actors' performances. DV
equipment is small enough to allow a filmmaker to
literally be inside the action as it unfolds. In addition
to adopting a more intimate filmic approach, a
filmmaker can keep shooting for a whole duration
of a 60 or 120 minute DV tape as opposed to the
standard ten-minute film roll. This gives the
filmmaker and the actors more freedom to
improvise around a theme, rather than being
shackled to the tightly scripted short shots of
traditional filmmaking. (In fact the length of
Timecode exactly corresponds to the length of a
standard DV tape.)
These aesthetic strategies for representing the
real, which at first may appear to be unique to
digital revolution in cinema, are in fact not unique.
DV-style filmmaking has a predecessor in an
international filmmaking movement that
begun in the late 1950s and unfolded throughout
the 1960s. Called "direct cinema," "candid" cinema,
"uncontrolled" cinema, "observational" cinema, or
cinema verite ("cinema truth"), it also involved
filmmakers using lighter and more mobile (in
comparison to what was available before)
equipment. Like today's "DV realists," the 1960s
direct cinema" proponents avoided tight staging
and scripting, preferring to let events unfold
naturally. Both then and now, the filmmakers used
new filmmaking technology to revolt
against the existing cinema conventions that were
perceived a5 being too artificial. Both then and
now, the key word of this revolt was the same:
"immediacy."
My second example of similar aesthetic strategies
re-appearing deals with the development of moving
image technology throughout the nineteenth
century and the development of digital technologies
to display moving -mages on a computer desktop
during the 1990s. In the first t:art 3: the 1990s, as
computers' speed kept gradually increases. CDROM
designers were able to go from a slide show
format to the superimposition of small moving
elements over static backgrounds and finally to fullframe
moving images. This evolution repeats the
nineteenth century progression: from sequences of
still images (magic lantern slides presentations) to
moving characters over static
backgrounds (for instance, in Reynaud's
Praxinoscope Theater) to full motion (the Lumieres'
cinematograph).
Moreover, the introduction of QuickTime by Apple
in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the
Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present
short loops, both featured the images
approximately two by three inches in size, both
called for private viewing rather than collective
exhibition.
Culturally, the two technologies also functioned
similarly: as the latest technological "marvel." If in
the early 1890s the public patronized Kinetoscope
parlors where peep-hole machines presented them
with the latest invention—tiny moving photographs
arranged in short loops; exactly a hundred years
later, computer users were equally fascinated
with tiny QuickTime movies that turned a computer
in a film projector, however imperfect. Finally, the
Lumieres first film screenings of 1895 which
shocked their audiences with huge moving images
found their parallel in 1995 CD-ROM
titles where the moving image finally fills the entire
computer screen (for instance, in the Johnny
Mnemnonic computer game, based on the film by
the same tit.e) Thus, exactly a hundred years after
cinema was officially “born” , it was reinvented on
a computer screen. Interesting as they are, these
two examples also illustrative the limitations of
thinking about new media in terms of historically
recurrent aesthetic strategies and ideological
tropes. While ideological tropes indeed seem to be
reappearing rather regularly, many aesthetic
strategies may only reappear two or three times.
Moreover, some strategies and/or tropes can be
already found in the first part of the
nineteenth century while others only made their
first appearance much more recently In order for
this approach to be truly useful it would be
insufficient to simply name the strategies and
tropes and to record the moments of their
appearance; instead, we would have to develop a
much more comprehensive analysis which would
correlate the history of technology with social,
political, and economical histories of the modern
period.
So far my definitions of new media have focused
on technology; the next three definitions will
consider new media as material re-articulation, or
encoding, of purely cultural tendencies—in short,
as ideas rather than technologies.
6 New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms
Previously Executed Manually or through
Other Technologies
A modern digital computer is a programmable
machine. This simply means that the same
computer can execute different algorithms. An
algorithm is a sequence of steps that need to be
followed to accomplish a task. Digital computers
execute most algorithms very quickly—however in
principle an algorithm, since it is just a sequence of
simple steps, can also be executed by a human,
although much more slowly. For instance, a human
can sort files in a particular order, or count the
number of words in a text, or cut a part of an image
and paste it in a different place.
This realization gives us a new way to think about
both digital computing, in general, and new media
in particular as a massive speed-up of various
manual techniques that all have already existed.
Consider, for instance, the computer's ability to
represent objects in linear perspective and to
animate such representations. When you move
your character through the world in a first person
shooter computer game (such as Quake), or when
you move your viewpoint around a 3D architectural
model, a computer recalculates perspectival views
for all the objects in the frame many times every
second (in the case of current desktop hardware,
frame rates of 80 frames a second are not
uncommon). But we should remember that the
algorithm itself was codified during the
Renaissance in Italy, and that
before digital computers came along (that is, for
about five hundred years) it was executed by
human draftsmen. Similarly, behind many other
new media techniques there is an algorithm that,
before computing, was executed manually.
(Of course since art has always involved some
technology—even as simple as a stylus for making
marks on stone—what I mean by "manually" is that
a human had to systematically go through every
step of an algorithm himself, even if he was
assisted by some image making tools.) Consider,
for instance, another very popular new media
technique: making a composite from different
photographs. Soon after photography was
invented, such nineteenth century photographers
as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar G. Rejiander
were already creating smooth "combination prints"
by putting together multiple photographs.
While this approach to thinking about new media
takes us away from thinking about it purely in
technological terms, it has a number of problems of
its own. Substantially speeding up the execution of
an algorithm by implementing this algorithm in
software does not just leave things as they are.
The basic point of dialectics is that a substantial
change in quantity (i.e., in speed of execution in
this case) leads to the emergence of qualitatively
new phenomena. The example of automation of
linear perspective is a case in point. Dramatically
speeding up the execution of a perspectival
algorithm makes possible previously non-existent
representational technique: smooth movement
through a perspectival space. In other words, we
get not only quickly produced perspectival
drawings but also computer-generated.
The technological shifts in the history of
"combination prints" also illustrate the cultural
dialectics of trans-formation of quantity into quality.
In the nineteenth century, painstakingly crafted
"combination prints" represented an exception
rather than the norm. In the
twentieth century, new photographic technologies
made possible photomontage that quickly became
one of the basic representational techniques of
modern visual culture. And finally the arrival of
digital photography via software like
Photoshop as well as scanners and digital
cameras, in the late 1980s and 1990s, not only
made photomontage much more omnipresent than
before but it also fundamentally altered its visual
characteristics. In place of graphic and hard-edge
compositions pioneered by Moholy-Nagy and
Rodchenko we now have smooth multi-image
composites which use transparency, blur,
colorization, and other easily available digital
manipulations and which often incorporate
typography that is subjected to exactly the same
manipulations (thus in post-Photoshop visual
culture the type becomes a subset of a photobased
image). To see this dramatic change, it is
enough to compare a typical music
video from 1985 and a typical music video from
1995: within ten years, the visual aesthetics of
photomontage had undergone a fundamental
change.
Finally, thinking about new media as speeding up
of algorithms which previously were executed by
hand foregrounds the use of computers for fast
algorithm execution, but ignores two other essential
uses: real-time network communication and realtime
control. The abilities to interact with or control
remotely located data in real time to communicate
with other human beings in real time, and
control various technologies (sensors, motors,
other computers) in real time constitute the very
foundation of our information society—phone
communications internet, financial networking,
industrial control, the use of microcontrollers
in numerous modern machines and
devices, and so on. They also make possible many
forms of new media art and culture: interactive net
art, interactive computer installations, interactive
multimedia, computer games, real- time music
synthesis.
While non-real-time media generation and
manipulation via digital computers can be thought
of as speeding up of previously existing artistic
techniques, real-time networking and control seem
to constitute qualitatively new phenomena.
When we use Photoshop to quickly combine
photographs
together, or when we compose a text using a
Microsoft Word, we simply do much faster what
before we were doing either completely manually
or assisted by some technologies (such
as a typewriter). However, in the cases when a
computer interprets or synthesizes human speech
in real time, monitors sensors and modifies
programs based on their input in real-time, or
controls other devices, again in real-time, this is
something which simply could not be done
before. So while it is important to remember that,
on one level, a modern digital computer is just a
faster calculator, we should not ignore its other
identity: that of a cybernetic control device. To put
this in different way, while new media
theory should pay tributes to Alan Turing (003), it
should not forget about its other conceptual
father—Norbert Wiener (004).
7 New Media as the Encoding of Modernist
Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
The approach to new media just discussed does
not foreground any particular cultural period as the
source of algorithms that are eventually encoded in
computer software. In my article 'Avant-Garde as
Software" I have proposed that, in fact, a particular
historical period is more relevant to new media than
any other—that of the 1920s (more precisely, the
years between 1915 and 1928).6
During
this period the avant-garde artists and designers
invented a whole new set of visual and spatial
languages and communication techniques that we
still use today. According to my hypothesis,
With new media, 1920s communication
techniques acquire a new status. Thus new media
does represent a new stage of the avant-garde.
The techniques invented by the 1920s Left artists
became embedded in the commands and
interface metaphors of computer software. In
short, the avant-garde vision became materialized
in a computer. All the strategies developed to
awaken audiences from a dream- existence of
bourgeois society (constructivist design, New
Typography, avant-garde cinematography and
film editing, photo-montage, etc.) now define the
basic routine of a post-industrial society: the
interaction with a computer. For example, the
avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as a
"cut and paste" command, the most basic
operation one can perform on any computer data.
In another example, the dynamic windows, pulldown
menus, and HTML tables all allow a
computer user to simultaneously work with
practically unrestricted amount of
information despite the limited surface of the
computer screen. This strategy can be traced to
Lissitzky's use of movable frames in his 1926
exhibition design for the International Art
Exhibition in Dresden.
The encoding of the 1920s avant-garde
techniques in software does not mean that new
media simply quantitatively extends the
techniques which already existed. Just as it is the
case with the phenomenon of real-time
computation that I discussed above, tracing new
media heritage in the 1920s avant-garde reveals a
qualitative change as well. The modernist avantgarde
was concerned with "filtering" visible reality
in new ways. The artists were concerned with
representing the outside world, with "seeing"
it in as many different ways as possible. Of course
some artists already began to react to the
emerging media environment by making collages
and photo-montages consisting of newspaper
clippings, existing photographs, pieces of posters,
and so on; yet these practices of manipulating
existing media were not yet central. But a
number of decades later they have moved to the
foreground of cultural production. To put this
differently, after a century and a half of media
culture, already existing media records
(or "media assets," to use the Hollywood term)
become the new raw material for software-based
cultural production and artistic practice. Many
decades of analog media production
resulted in a huge media archive and it is the
contents of this archive—television programs,
films, audio recordings, etc.— which became the
raw data to be processed, re-articulated.
mined and re-packaged through digital software—
rather than raw reality. In my article I formulate this
as follows New media indeed represents the new
avant-garde and its innovations are at least as
radical as the formal innovations of the 1920s. But
if we are to look for these innovations in the realm
of forms, this traditional area of cultural evolution,
we will not find them there. For the new avantgarde
is radically different from the old:
1. The old media avant-garde of the
1920s came up with new forms, new
ways to represent reality and
new ways to see the world. The new
media avant-garde is about new ways of
accessing and manipulating information.
Its techniques are hypermedia,
databases, search engines, data mining.
image processing, visualization, and
simulation.
2. The new avant-garde is no longer
concerned with seeing or representing the
world in new ways but rather with
accessing and using in new ways
previously accumulated media. In this
respect new media is post-media or metamedia,
as it uses old media as its primary
material
My concept of "meta-media" is related to a more
familiar notion of "postmodernism"—the recognition
that by the 1980s the culture became more
concerned with reworlding already existing content,
idioms and style, rather than genially creating new
ones. What I would like to stress (and
what I think the original theorists of post-modernism
in the 1980s have not stressed enough) is the key
role played by the material factors in the shift
towards postmodernist aesthetics: the
accumulation of huge media assets and the
arrival of new electronic and digital took which
made it very easy to access and re-work these
assets. This is another example of quantity
changing into quality in media history: the gradual
accumulation of media records and the gradual
automation of media management and
manipulation techniques eventually receded
modernist aesthetics into a very different
postmodern aesthetics.
8 New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar
Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern
Computing
Along with the 1920s, we can think of other cultural
periods that generated ideas and sensibilities
particularly relevant to new media. In the 1980s a
number of writers looked at the
connections between Baroque and post-modern
sensibilities; given the close link between postmodernism
and new media I just briefly discussed,
it would be logical if parallels between
the Baroque and hew media can also be
established.7
It can also be argued that in many
ways new media returns us to a pre-modernist
cultural logic of the eighteenth century: consider for
instance, the parallel between eighteenthcentury
communities of readers who were also all
writers and participants in Internet newsgroups and
mailing lists who are also both readers and writers.
In the twentieth century, along with the 1920s,
which for me represents the cultural peak of this
century (because during this period more radically
new aesthetic techniques were prototyped than in
any other period of similar duration), the second
cultural peak—the 1960s—also seems to contain
many of new media's genes. A number of writers
such as Söke Dinkla have argued that interactive
computer art (from the 1980s on) further develops
ideas already contained in the new art of the 1960s
(happenings, performances, installation): active
participation of the audience, an artwork as a
temporal process rather than as a fixed object, an
artwork as an open system.8
This connection
makes even more sense when we remember that
some of the most influential figures in new media
art (Jeffrey Shaw, Roy Ascott (OlO)) started their
art careers in the 1960s and only
later moved to computing and networking
technologies. For instance, at the end of the 1960s
Jeffrey Shaw was working on inflatable structures
for film projections and performances which were
big enough to contain a small audience inside—
something which he later came back to in
many of his VR installations, and even more
directly in the EVE project."
There is another aesthetic project of the 1960s that
also can be linked to new media not only
conceptually but also historically, since the artists
who pursued this project with computers (such as
Manfred Mohr) knew of minimalist artists who
during the same decade pursued the same project
"manually" (most notably, Sol LeWitt).10
This
project can be called "combinatorics,"" It involves
creating images and/or objects by systematically
varying a single parameter or by systematically
creating all possible combinations of a small
number of elements," "Combinatorics" in computer
art and minimalist art of the 1960s led to the
creation of remarkably similar images and spatial
structures; it illustrates well that the algorithms, this
essential part of new media, do not
depend on technology but can be executed by
humans.
Four Decades of New Media
Along with the ones I already mentioned, more
connections between 1960s cultural imaginations
and new media exist. As with another recent
important anthology on new media
(Randall Packer and Ken Jordan's Multimedia:
From Wagner to Virtual Reality), The New Media
Reader contains a number of important texts by the
radical artists and writers from the
1960s which have conceptual affinity to the logic of
computing technology: those of Allan Kaprow
(006), William Burroughs (007); the Oulipo (Ol2)
(whose members pursued the combinatorics
project in relation to literature), Nam June Paik
(Ol5) and others. Section I, "The Complex hanging,
and the Intermediate" and section II. Collective
Media, Personal Media," present what is to date
the most comprehensive set of cultural texts from
the 1960s These ideas particularly resonate with
the developments in computing in the same period.
Although modern computing has many
conceptual fathers and mothers, from Leibnitz to
Ada Lovelace, and its prehistory spans many
centuries, I would argue that the paradigm that still
defines our understanding and usage of
computing was defined in the 1960s. During the
1960s the principles of the modern interactive GUI
were given clear articulation (although the practical
implementation and jjt'l refinement of these ideas
took place later, in the 1970s at
Xerox PARC). The articles by Licklider (005),
Sutherland (009), Nelson (Oil, 021, 030), and
Engelbart (008, Ol7) from the 1960s included in the
reader are the essential documents of our time;
one day the historians of culture will
generate them on the same scale of importance as
texts by Marx, Freud, and Saussure. (Other key
developments that also took place in the 1960s and
early 1970s were the Internet, Unix,
and object-oriented programming. A number of
other essential ideas of modern computing such as
networking itself, the use of computers for real-time
control, and the graphical interactive display were
articulated earlier, in the second part of the 1940s
and the Brst part of the 1950s.)13
The first two sections of the reader take us into
the end of the 1970s; during the time period
covered in section II the key principles of modern
computing and the GUI had already been
practically implemented and refined by the
developers at Xerox PARC but they were not yet
commercially available to consumers. The third
section, "Design, Activity, and Action," runs from
the* end of the 1970s into die 1980s. Near
the end of this period the Macintosh (released in
1984) popularized the GUI; it also shipped with a
simple drawing and painting programs which
emphasized the new role of a computer as a
creative tool; finally, it was the first
inexpensive computer which came with a bitmapped
display. Atari computers made computerbased
sound manipulation affordable; computer
games achieved a new level of popularity; cinema
started to use computers for special effects (Tron,
released by Disney in 1982, contained
seventeen minutes of 3-D computer generated
scenes); towards the very end of the decade,
Photoshop, which can be called the key software
application of postmodernism, was, the finally
released. Ail these developments of the 1980s
created a new set of roles for the modern digital
computer: a manipulator of existing media
(Photoshop); a media synthesizer (film special
effects, sound software); and a new
medium (or rather, more than one new media) in its
own right (computer games). The New Media
Reader collects essential articles by computer
scientists from the 1980s that articulate ideas
behind these new roles of a computer (Bolt
(029), Shneiderman (033), Laurel (038) and thers).
As computing left the strict realm of big business,
the military, the government, and the. university
and entered society at large, cultural theorists
begin to think about its effects, and it is appropriate
that The New Media Reader also
reprints key theoretical statements from the 1980s
(e.g., Sherry Turkle (034), Donna Haraway (035)). I
should note here that European cultural theorists
reacted to computerization earlier than the
Americans: both Jean-Francois Lyotard's The PostModern
Condition (1979) and Jean Baudrillard's
Simulacra and Simulations (1981) contain
detailed discussions of computing, something
which their 1980s American admirers did not seem
to notice.
The last section of the reader, "Revolution,
Resistance, and the Launch of the Web" continues
to weave texts by computer scientists, social
researchers, cultural theorists, and critics from the
end of the 1980s onward; it also takes us into
the early 1990s when the rise of the Web redefined
computing one again. If the 1980s gradually made
visible the new role of a computer as a media
manipulator and an interface to media—the
developments which eventually were codified
around 1990 in the term "new media”- in the 1990s
another role of a digital computer (which was
already present since the late 1940s) came to the
foreground: that of a 'foundation for real-time
multimedia networking, available not just for
selected researchers and the military (as it was for
decades) but for millions of peer--
In the 1960s we can find strong conceptual
connections between computing and radical art of
the period, but with the sole exception of Ted
Nelson (the conceptual father of
hypertext) no computer scientist was directly
applying radical political ideas of the times to
computer design. In fact these ideas had a strong
effect on the field, but it was delayed
until the 1970s when Alan Kay (026) and his
colleagues at Xerox PARC pursued the vision of
personal computer workstation that would empower
an individual rather than a big organization. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, however,
we seem to witness a different kind of parallel
between social changes and computer design.
Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes
sense that the end of Cold War and the
design of the Web took place at exactly the same
time. The first development ended the separation
of the world into parts closed off from each other,
making it a single global system; the second
development connected world's computers into a
single network. The early Web (i.e., before it
came to be dominated by big commercial portals
towards the end of the 1990s) also practically
implemented a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical
model of human existence in
which no idea, no ideology, and no value system
can dominate the rest—thus providing a perfect
metaphor for a new post-Cold-War sensibility.
The emergence of new media studies as a field
testifies to our recognition of the key cultural role
played by digital computers and computer-enabled
networking in our global society. For a field in its
infancy, we are very lucky to now
have such a comprehensive record of its origins as
the one provided by The New Media Reader; I
believe that its readers will continue to think about
both the ideas in its individual texts and the endless
connections which can be found between different
texts for many years to come.
---
1. For a good example of cyberculture paradigm, see the
Resource
Center for Cyberculture Studies,
<http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/>
2. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge: MI Press, 2001).
3. I don't mean here the actual data structures and
algorithms
which may be used by particular software—rather, I am
thinking of them in a more abstract way: what is the
structure of a cultural
object and what kind of operations it enables for the user.
4. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 80.
5. I believe that the same problems apply to Erkki
Huhtamo's very
interesting theory of media archeology which is close to
the
approach presented here and which advocates the study
of tropes
which accompany the history of modern media
technology, both
the ones which were realized and the ones which were
only
imagined.
6. Lev Manovich, "Avant-Garde as Software," in
Ostranenie, edited
by Stephen Kovats (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999).
<http://www.manovich.net/docs/avantgarde_as_software.
doc>
(Quotations are from the online text.)
7. Norman Klein is currently completing a book entitled
From
Vatican to Las Vegas: A History of Special Effects that is
discussing
in detail the connections between the treatment of space
in the
Baroque and in cyberculture.
8. See for instance Soke Dinkia, "From Participation to
Interaction: Towards the Origins of Interactive Art," in
Clicking In:
Hots Links to a Digital Culture, edited by Lynn Herhman
Leeson
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1996).
9. Jeffrey Shaw, ed., Jeffrey Shaw—A User's Manual
(DAP, 1997).
10. Information on Manfred Mohr can be found online
at
<http://www.emohr.com/>.
11.^Frank Dietrich has used the term "combinatorics"to
talk about
a particular direction in the early computer art of the
1960s. See
Dietrich, Frank, "Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of
Computer
Art," Computer Graphics, 1985.
12. It is interesting that Sol LeVtitt was able to produce
works " by hand" which often consisted of' more
systematic variations o
f
the same elements than similar
works.done by other artists who USED computers. In other
words, we can say that Sol LeWitt was Dette-in
executing certain minimalist algorithms than the
computers of the time. 13. See Paul N.
Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the
Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1.997).