Lev Manovich
SOFTWARE TAKES COMMAND
THIS VERSION:
November 20, 2008.
Please note that this version has not been proofread yet, and it is also
missing illustrations.
Length: 82,071 Words (including footnotes).
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE:
Software Takes Command by Lev Manovich is licensed under a Creative
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States License.
ABOUT THE VERSIONS:
One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I
don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary
software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with
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of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and
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Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 2
Introduction: Software Studies for Beginners
Software, or the Engine of Contemporary Societies
In the beginning of the 1990s, the most famous
global brands were the companies that were in the
business of producing materials goods or processing
physical matter. Today, however, the lists of bestrecognized
global brands are topped with the names
such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (In fact,
Google was number one in the world in 2007 in
terms of brand recognition.) And, at least in the
U.S., the most widely read newspapers and
magazines - New York Times, USA Today, Business
Week, etc. - daily feature news and stories about
YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Apple, Google, and
other IT companies.
What about other media? If you access CNN web site
and navigate to the business section, you will see a
market data for just ten companies and indexes
displayed right on the home page.1
Although the list
changes daily, it is always likely to include some of
the same IT brands. Lets take January 21, 2008 as
an example. On that day CNN list consisted from the
following companies and indexes: Google, Apple,
S&P 500 Index, Nasdaq Composite Index, Dow Jones
Industrial Average, Cisco Systems, General Electric,
General Motors, Ford, Intel.2
This list is very telling. The companies that deal with
physical goods and energy appear in the second part
of the list: General Electric, General Motors, Ford.
Next we have two IT companies that provide
hardware: Intel makes computer chips, while Cisco
makes network equipment. What about the two
companies which are on top: Google and Apple? The
first appears to be in the business of information,
while the second is making consumer electronics:
laptops, monitors, music players, etc. But actually,
they are both really making something else. And
apparently, this something else is so crucial to the
workings of US economy—and consequently, global
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 3
world as well—that these companies almost daily
appear in business news. And the major Internet
companies that also daily appear in news - Yahoo,
Facebook, Amazon, eBay – are in the same business.
This “something else” is software. Search engines,
recommendation systems, mapping applications,
blog tools, auction tools, instant messaging clients,
and, of course, platforms which allow others to write
new software – Facebook, Windows, Unix, Android –
are in the center of the global economy, culture,
social life, and, increasingly, politics. And this
“cultural software” – cultural in a sense that it is
directly used by hundreds of millions of people and
that it carries “atoms” of culture (media and
information, as well as human interactions around
these media and information) – is only the visible
part of a much larger software universe.
Software controls the flight of a smart missile toward
its target during war, adjusting its course throughout
the flight. Software runs the warehouses and
production lines of Amazon, Gap, Dell, and numerous
other companies allowing them to assemble and
dispatch material objects around the world, almost in
no time. Software allows shops and supermarkets to
automatically restock their shelves, as well as
automatically determine which items should go on
sale, for how much, and when and where in the
store. Software, of course, is what organizes the
Internet, routing email messages, delivering Web
pages from a server, switching network traffic,
assigning IP addresses, and rendering Web pages in
a browser. The school and the hospital, the military
base and the scientific laboratory, the airport and the
city—all social, economic, and cultural systems of
modern society—run on software. Software is the
invisible glue that ties it all together. While various
systems of modern society speak in different
languages and have different goals, they all share
the syntaxes of software: control statements
“if/then” and “while/do”, operators and data types
including characters and floating point numbers, data
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 4
structures such as lists, and interface conventions
encompassing menus and dialog boxes.
If electricity and the combustion engine made
industrial society possible, software similarly enables
gllobal information society. The “knowledge
workers”, the “symbol analysts”, the “creative
industries”, and the “service industries” - all these
key economic players of information society can’t
exist without software. Data visualization software
used by a scientist, spreadsheet software used a
financial analyst, Web design software used by a
designer working for a transnational advertising
energy, reservation software used by an airline.
Software is what also drives the process of
globalization, allowing companies to distribute
management nodes, production facilities, and
storage and consumption outputs around the world.
Regardless of which new dimension of contemporary
existence a particular social theory of the last few
decades has focused on—information society,
knowledge society, or network society—all these new
dimensions are enabled by software.
Paradoxically, while social scientists, philosophers,
cultural critics, and media and new media theorists
have by now seem to cover all aspects of IT
revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such
as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory,
and digital culture, the underlying engine which
drives most of these subjects—software—has
received little or not direct attention. Software is still
invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural
professionals interested in IT and its cultural and
social effects. (One important exception is Open
Source movement and related issues around
copyright and IP that has been extensively discussed
in many academic disciplines). But if we limit critical
discussions to the notions of “cyber”, “digital”,
“Internet,” “networks,” “new media”, or “social
media,” we will never be able to get to what is
behind new representational and communication
media and to understand what it really is and what it
does. If we don’t address software itself, we are in
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danger of always dealing only with its effects rather
than the causes: the output that appears on a
computer screen rather than the programs and social
cultures that produce these outputs.
“Information society,” “knowledge society,” “network
society,” “social media” – regardless of which new
feature of contemporary existence a particular social
theory has focused on, all these new features are
enabled by software. It is time we focus on software
itself.
What is “software studies”?
This book aims to contribute to the developing
intellectual paradigm of “software studies.” What is
software studies? Here are a few definitions. The first
comes from my own book The Language of New
Media (completed in 1999; published by MIT Press in
2001), where, as far as I know, the terms “software
studies” and “software theory” appeared for the first
time. I wrote: ”New media calls for a new stage in
media theory whose beginnings can be traced back
to the revolutionary works of Robert Innis and
Marshall McLuhan of the 1950s. To understand the
logic of new media we need to turn to computer
science. It is there that we may expect to find the
new terms, categories and operations that
characterize media that became programmable.
From media studies, we move to something which
can be called software studies; from media theory —
to software theory.”
Reading this statement today, I feel some
adjustments are in order. It positions computer
science as a kind of absolute truth, a given which
can explain to us how culture works in software
society. But computer science is itself part of culture.
Therefore, I think that Software Studies has to
investigate both the role of software in forming
contemporary culture, and cultural, social, and
economic forces that are shaping development of
software itself.
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The book that first comprehensively demonstrated
the necessity of the second approach was New Media
Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort (The MIT Press, 2003). The publication of
this groundbreaking anthology laid the framework for
the historical study of software as it relates to the
history of culture. Although Reader did not explicitly
use the term “software studies,” it did propose a new
model for how to think about software. By
systematically juxtaposing important texts by
pioneers of cultural computing and key artists active
in the same historical periods, the Reader
demonstrated that both belonged to the same larger
epistemes. That is, often the same idea was
simultaneously articulated in thinking of both artists
and scientists who were inventing cultural
computing. For instance, the anthology opens with
the story by Jorge Borges (1941) and the article by
Vannevar Bush (1945) which both contain the idea of
a massive branching structure as a better way to
organize data and to represent human experience.
In February 2006 Mathew Fuller who already
published a pioneering book on software as culture
(Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software,
2003) organized the very first Software Studies
Workshop at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Introducing the workshop, Fuller wrote: “Software is
often a blind spot in the theorization and study of
computational and networked digital media. It is the
very grounds and ‘stuff’ of media design. In a sense,
all intellectual work is now ‘software study’, in that
software provides its media and its context, but
there are very few places where the specific nature,
the materiality, of software is studied except as a
matter of engineering.”3
I completely agree with Fuller that “all intellectual
work is now ‘software study.” Yet it will take some
time before the intellectuals will realize it. At the
moment of this writing (Spring 2008), software
studies is a new paradigm for intellectual inquiry that
is now just beginning to emerge. The MIT Press is
publishing the very first book that has this term in its
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 7
title later this year (Software Studies: A Lexicon,
edited by Matthew Fuller.) At the same time, a
number of already published works by the leading
media theorists of our times - Katherine Hayles,
Friedrich A. Kittler, Lawrence Lessig, Manual Castells,
Alex Galloway, and others - can be retroactively
identified as belonging to "software studies.4
Therefore, I strongly believe that this paradigm has
already existed for a number of years but it has not
been explicitly named so far. (In other words, the
state of "software studies" is similar to where "new
media" was in the early 1990s.)
In his introduction to 2006 Rotterdam workshop
Fuller writes that “software can be seen as an object
of study and an area of practice for art and design
theory and the humanities, for cultural studies and
science and technology studies and for an emerging
reflexive strand of computer science.” Given that a
new academic discipline can be defined either
through a unique object of study, a new research
method, or a combination of the two, how shall we
think of software studies? Fuller’s statement implies
that “software” is a new object of study which should
be put on the agenda of existing disciplines and
which can be studied using already existing methods
– for instance, object-network theory, social
semiotics, or media archeology.
I think there are good reasons for supporting this
perspective. I think of software as a layer that
permeates all areas of contemporary societies.
Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary
techniques of control, communication,
representation, simulation, analysis, decisionmaking,
memory, vision, writing, and interaction,
our analysis can't be complete until we consider this
software layer. Which means that all disciplines
which deal with contemporary society and culture –
architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political
science, humanities, science and technology studies,
and so on – need to account for the role of software
and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate.
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At the same time, the existing work in software
studies already demonstrates that if we are to focus
on software itself, we need a new methodology. That
is, it helps to practice what one writes about. It is
not accidental that the intellectuals who have most
systematically written about software’s roles in
society and culture so far all either have
programmed themselves or have been systematically
involved in cultural projects which centrally involve
writing of new software: Katherine Hales, Mathew
Fuller, Alexander Galloway, Ian Bogust, Geet Lovink,
Paul D. Miller, Peter Lunenfeld, Katie Salen, Eric
Zimmerman, Matthew Kirschenbaum, William J.
Mitchell, Bruce Sterling, etc. In contrast, the scholars
without this experience such as Jay Bolter, Siegfried
Zielinski, Manual Castells, and Bruno Latour as have
not included considerations of software in their
overwise highly influential accounts of modern media
and technology.
In the present decade, the number of students in
media art, design, architecture, and humanities who
use programming or scripting in their work has
grown substantially – at least in comparison to 1999
when I first mentioned “software studies” in The
Language of New Media. Outside of culture and
academic industries, many more people today are
writing software as well. To a significant extent, this
is the result of new programming and scripting
languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP,
Processing, and others. Another important factor is
the publication of their APIs by all major Web 2.0
companies in the middle of 2000s. (API, or
Application Programming Interface, is a code that
allows other computer programs to access services
offered by an application. For instance, people can
use Google Maps API to embed full Google Maps on
their own web sites.) These programming and
scripting languages and APIs did not necessary made
programming itself any easier. Rather, they made it
much more efficient. For instance, when a young
designer can create an interesting design with only
couple of dozens of code written in Processing versus
writing a really long Java program, s/he is much
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more likely to take up programming. Similarly, if
only a few lines in JavaScript allows you to integrate
all the functionality offered by Google Maps into your
site, this is a great motivation for beginning to work
with JavaScript.
In a 2006 article that reviewed other examples of
new technologies that allow people with very little or
no programming experience to create new custom
software (such as Ning and Coghead), Martin
LaMonica wrote about a future possibility of “a long
tail for apps.”5
Clearly, today the consumer
technologies for capturing and editing media are
much easier to use than even most high-level
programming and scripting languages. But it does
not necessary have to stay this way. Think, for
instance, of what it took to set up a photo studio and
take photographs in 1850s versus simply pressing a
single button on a digital camera or a mobile phone
in 2000s. Clearly, we are very far from such
simplicity in programming. But I don’t see any logical
reasons why programming can’t one day become as
easy.
For now, the number of people who can script and
program keeps increasing. Although we are far from
a true “long tail” for software, software development
is gradually getting more democratized. It is,
therefore, the right moment, to start thinking
theoretically about how software is shaping our
culture, and how it is shaped by culture in its turn.
The time for “software studies” has arrived.
Cultural Software
German media and literary theorist Friedrich Kittler
wrote that the students today should know at least
two software languages; only “then they'll be able to
say something about what 'culture' is at the
moment.”6
Kittler himself programs in an assembler
language - which probably determined his distrust of
Graphical User Interfaces and modern software
applications, which use these interfaces. In a
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classical modernist move, Kittler argued that we
need to focus on the “essence” of computer - which
for Kittler meant mathematical and logical
foundations of modern computer and its early history
characterized by tools such as assembler languages.
This book is determined by my own history of
engagement with computers as a programmer,
computer animator and designer, media artist, and a
teacher. This practical engagement begins in the
early 1980s, which was the decade of procedural
programming (Pascal), rather than assembly
programming. It was also the decade that saw
introduction of PCs and first major cultural impact of
computing as desktop publishing become popular
and hypertext started to be discussed by some
literary scholars. In fact, I came to NYC from Moscow
in 1981, which was the year IBM introduced their
first PC. My first experience with computer graphics
was in 1983-1984 on Apple IIE. In 1984 I saw
Graphical User Interface in its first successful
commercial implementation on Apple Macintosh. The
same year I got the job at one of the first computer
animation companies (Digital Effects) where I
learned how to program 3D computer models and
animations. In 1986 I was writing computer
programs, which would automatically process
photographs to make them look like paintings. In
January 1987 Adobe Systems shipped illustrator,
followed by Photoshop in 1989. The same year saw
the release by The Abyss directed by James
Cameron. This movie used pioneering CGI to create
the first complex virtual character. And, by
Christmas of 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee already created
all the components of World Wide Web as it exists
today: a web server, web pages, and a web browser.
In short, during one decade a computer moved from
being a culturally invisible technology to being the
new engine of culture. While the progress in
hardware and Moore’s Law of course played crucial
roles in this, even more crucial was the release of
software aimed at non-technical users: new
graphical user interface, word processing, drawing,
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 11
painting, 3D modeling, animation, music composing
and editing, information management, hypermedia
and multimedia authoring (HyperCard, Director), and
network information environments (World Wide
Web.) With easy-to-use software in place, the stage
was set for the next decade of the 1990s when most
culture industries gradually shifted to software
environments: graphic design, architecture, product
design, space design, filmmaking, animation, media
design, music, higher education, and culture
management.
Although I first learned to program in 1975 when I
was in high school in Moscow, my take on software
studies has been shaped by watching how beginning
in the middle of the 1980s, GUI-based software
quickly put computer in the center of culture.
Theoretically, I think we should think of the subject
of software in the most expanded way possible. That
is, we need to consider not only “visible” software
used by consumers but also “grey” software, which
runs all systems and processes in contemporary
society. Yet, since I don’t have personal experience
writing logistics software or industrial automation
software, I will be not be writing about such topics.
My concern is with a particular subset of software
which I used and taught in my professional life and
which I would call cultural software. While this term
has previously used metaphorically (see J.M. Balkin,
Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, 2003), in
this book I am using this term literally to refer to
software programs which are used to create and
access media objects and environments. The
examples are programs such as Word, PowerPoint,
Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, After Effects, Flash,
Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. Cultural software, in
other words, is a subset of application software
which enables creation, publishing, accessing,
sharing, and remixing images, moving image
sequences, 3D designs, texts, maps, interactive
elements, as well as various combinations of these
elements such as web sites, 2D designs, motion
graphics, video games, commercial and artistic
interactive installations, etc. (While originally such
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application software was designed to run on the
desktop, today some of the media creation and
editing tools are also available as webware, i.e.,
applications which are accessed via Web such as
Google Docs.)
Given that today the multi-billion global culture
industry is enabled by these software programs, it is
interesting that there is no a single accepted way to
classify them. Wikipedia article on “application
software” includes the categories of “media
development software” and “content access
software.” This is generally useful but not completely
accurate – since today most “content access
software” also includes at least some media editing
functions. QuickTime Player can be used to cut and
paste parts of video; iPhoto allows a number of
photo editing operations, and so on. Conversely, in
most cases “media development” (or “content
creation”) software such as Word or PowerPoint is
the same software commonly used to both develop
and access content. (This co-existence of authoring
and access functions is itself an important
distinguishing feature of software culture). If we are
visit web sites of popular makes of these software
applications such as Adobe and Autodesk, we will
find that these companies may break their products
by market (web, broadcast, architecture, and so on)
or use sub-categories such as “consumer” and “pro.”
This is as good as it commonly gets – another reason
why we should focus our theoretical tools on
interrogating cultural software.
In this book my focus will be on these applications
for media development (or “content creation”) – but
cultural software also includes other types of
programs and IT elements. One important category
is the tools for social communication and sharing of
media, information, and knowledge such as web
browsers, email clients, instant messaging clients,
wikis, social bookmarking, social citation tools,
virtual worlds, and so on- in short, social software7
(Note that such use of the term “social software”
partly overlaps with but is not equivalent with the
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 13
way this term started to be used during 200s to refer
to Web 2.0 platforms such as Wikipedia, Flickr,
YouTube, and so on.) Another category is the tools
for personal information management such as
address books, project management applications,
and desktop search engines. (These categories shift
over time: for instance, during 2000s the boundary
between “personal information” and “public
information” has started to dissolve disappeared as
people started to routinely place their media on
social networking sites and their calendars online.
Similarly, Google’s search engine shows you the
results both on your local machine and the web –
thus conceptually and practically erasing the
boundary between “self” and the “world.”) Since
creation of interactive media often involves at least
some original programming and scripting besides
what is possible within media development
applications such as Dreamweaver or Flash, the
programming environments also can be considered
under cultural software. Moreover, the media
interfaces themselves – icons, folders, sounds,
animations, and user interactions - are also cultural
software, since these interface mediate people’s
interactions with media and other people. (While the
older term Graphical User Interface, or GUI,
continues to be widely used, the newer term “media
interface” is usually more appropriate since many
interfaces today – including interfaces of Windows,
MAC OS, game consoles, mobile phones and
interactive store or museums displays such as
Nanika projects for Nokia and Diesel or installations
at Nobel Peace Center in Oslo – use all types of
media besides graphics to communicate with the
users.8
) I will stop here but this list can easily be
extended to include additional categories of software
as well.
Any definition is likely to delight some people and to
annoy others. Therefore, before going forward I
would like to meet one likely objection to the way I
defined “cultural software.” Of course, the term
“culture” is not reducible to separate media and
design “objects” which may exist as files on a
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 14
computer and/or as executable software programs or
scripts. It includes symbols, meanings, values,
language, habits, beliefs, ideologies, rituals, religion,
dress and behavior codes, and many other material
and immaterial elements and dimensions.
Consequently, cultural anthropologists, linguists,
sociologists, and many humanists may be annoyed
at what may appear as an uncritical reduction of all
these dimensions to a set of media-creating tools.
Am I saying that today “culture” is equated with
particular subset of application software and the
cultural objects can be created with their help? Of
course not. However, what I am saying - and what I
hope this book explicates in more detail – is that in
the end of the 20th
century humans have added a
fundamentally new dimension to their culture. This
dimension is software in general, and application
software for creating and accessing content in
particular.
I feel that the metaphor of a new dimension added
to a space is quite appropriate here. That is, “cultural
software” is not simply a new object – no matter
how large and important – which has been dropped
into the space which we call “culture.” In other
words, it would be imprecise to think of software as
simply another term which we can add to the set
which includes music, visual design, built spaces,
dress codes, languages, food, club cultures,
corporate norms, and so on. So while we can
certainly study “the culture of software” – look at
things such as programming practices, values and
ideologies of programmers and software companies,
the cultures of Silicon Valley and Bangalore, etc.- if
we only do this, we will miss the real importance of
software. Like alphabet, mathematics, printing press,
combustion engine, electricity, and integrated
circuits, software re-adjusts and re-shapes
everything it is applied to – or at least, it has a
potential to do this. In other word, just as adding a
new dimension of space adds a new coordinate to
every element in this space, “adding” software to
culture changes the identity of everything which a
culture is made from.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 15
In other words, our contemporary society can be
characterized as a software society and our culture
can be justifiably called a software culture – because
today software plays a central role in shaping both
the material elements and many of the immaterial
structures which together make up “culture.”
As just one example of how the use of software
reshapes even most basic social and cultural
practices and makes us rethink the concepts and
theories we developed to describe them, consider
the “atom” of cultural creation, transmission, and
memory: a “document” (or a “work”), i.e. some
content stored in some media. In a software culture,
we no longer deal with “documents,” ”works,”
“messages” or “media” in a 20th
century terms.
Instead of fixed documents whose contents and
meaning could be full determined by examining their
structure (which is what the majority of twentieth
century theories of culture were doing) we now
interact with dynamic “software performances.” I use
the word “performance” because what we are
experiencing is constructed by software in real time.
So whether we are browsing a web site, use Gmail,
play a video game, or use a GPS-enabled mobile
phone to locate particular places or friends nearby,
we are engaging not with pre-defined static
documents but with the dynamic outputs of a realtime
computation. Computer programs can use a
variety of components to create these “outputs”:
design templates, files stored on a local machine,
media pulled out from the databases on the network
server, the input from a mouse, touch screen, or
another interface component, and other sources.
Thus, although some static documents may be
involved, the final media experience constructed by
software can’t be reduced to any single document
stored in some media. In other words, in contrast to
paintings, works of literature, music scores, films, or
buildings, a critic can’t simply consult a single “file”
containing all of work’s content.
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“Reading the code” – i.e., examining the listing of a
computer program – also would not help us. First, in
the case of any real-life interactive media project,
the program code will simply be too long and
complex to allow a meaningful reading - plus you will
have to examine all the code libraries it may use.
And if we are dealing with a web application
(referred to as “webware”) or a dynamic web site,
they often use multitier software architecture where
a number of separate software modules interact
together (for example, a web client, application
server, and a database.9
) (In the case of large-scale
commercial dynamic web site such as amazon.com,
what the user experiences as a single web page may
involve interactions between more than sixty
separate software processes.)
Second, even if a program is relatively short and a
critic understands exactly what the program is
supposed to do by examining the code, this
understanding of the logical structure of the program
can’t be translated into envisioning the actual user
experience. (If it could, the process of extensive
testing with the actual users which all software or
media company goes through before they release
new products – anything from a new software
application to a new game – would not be required.)
In short, I am suggesting “software studies” should
not be confused with “code studies.” And while
another approach - comparing computer code to a
music score which gets interpreted during the
performance (which suggests that music theory can
be used to understand software culture) – appears
more promising, is also very limited since it can’t
address the most fundamental dimension of
software-driven media experience – interactivity.
Even in such seemingly simple cases such as viewing
a single PDF document or opening an photo in a
media player, we are still dealing with “software
performances” - since it is software which defines
the options for navigating, editing and sharing the
document, rather than the document itself.
Therefore examining the PDF file or a JPEG file the
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 17
way twentieth century critics would examine a novel,
a movie, or a TV show will only tell us some things
about the experience that we would get when we
interact with this document via software. While the
content’s of the file obviously forms a part of this
experience, it is also shaped b the interface and the
tools provided by software. This is why the
examination of the assumptions, concepts, and the
history of culture software – including the theories of
its designers - is essential if we are to make sense of
“contemporary culture.”
The shift in the nature of what constitutes a cultural
“object” also calls into questions even most well
established cultural theories. Consider what has
probably been one of the most popular paradigms
since the 1950s – “transmission” view of culture
developed in Communication Studies. This paradigm
describes mass communication (and sometimes
culture in general) as a communication process
between the authors who create “messages” and
audiences that “receive” them. These messages are
not always fully decoded by the audiences for
technical reasons (noise in transmission) or semantic
reasons (they misunderstood the intended
meanings.) Classical communication theory and
media industries consider such partial reception a
problem; in contrast, from the 1970s Stuart Hall,
Dick Hebdige and other critics which later came to be
associated with Cultural Studies argued that the
same phenomenon is positive – the audiences
construct their own meanings from the information
they receive. But in both cases theorists implicitly
assumed that the message was something complete
and definite – regardless of whether it was stored in
some media or constructed in “real time” (like in live
TV programs). Thus, the audience member would
read all of advertising copy, see a whole movie, or
listen to the whole song and only after that s/he
would interpret it, misinterpret it, assign her own
meanings, remix it, and so on.
While this assumption has already been challenged
by the introduction of timeshifting technologies and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 18
DVR (digital video recorders), it is just does not
apply to “born digital” interactive software media.
When a user interacts with a software application
that presents cultural content, this content often
does not have definite finite boundaries. For
instance, a user of Google Earth is likely to find
somewhat different information every time she is
accessing the application. Google could have updated
some of the satellite photographs or added new
Street Views; new 3D building models were
developed; new layers and new information on
already existing layers could have become available.
Moreover, at any time a user can load more
geospatial data created by others users and
companies by either clicking on Add Content in the
Places panel, or directly opening a KLM file. Google
Earth is an example of a new interactive “document”
which does not have its content all predefined. Its
content changes and grows over time.
But even in the case of a document that does
correspond to a single computer file, which is fully
predefined and which does not allow changes (for
instance, a read-only PDF file), the user’s experience
is still only partly defined by the file’s content. The
user is free to navigate the document, choosing both
what information to see and the sequence in which
she is seeing it. In other words, the “message” which
the user “receives” is not just actively “constructed”
by her (through a cognitive interpretation) but also
actively “managed” (defining what information she is
receiving and how.)
Why the History of Cultural Software Does not
Exist
“Всякое описание мира сильно отстает от его
развития.”
(Translation from Russian: “Every description of the
world seriously lags behind its actual development.”)
Тая Катюша, VJ on MTV.ru.10
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 19
We live in a software culture - that is, a culture
where the production, distribution, and reception of
most content - and increasingly, experiences - is
mediated by software. And yet, most creative
professionals do not know anything about the
intellectual history of software they use daily - be it
Photoshop, GIMP, Final Cut, After Effects, Blender,
Flash, Maya, or MAX.
Where does contemporary cultural software came
from? How did its metaphors and techniques were
arrived yet? And why was it developed in the first
place? We don’t really know. Despite the common
statements that digital revolution is at least as
important as the invention of a printing press, we are
largely ignorant of how the key part of this
revolution - i.e., cultural software - was invented.
Then you think about this, it is unbelievable.
Everybody in the business of culture knows about
Guttenberg (printing press), Brunelleschi
(perspective), The Lumiere Brothers, Griffith and
Eisenstein (cinema), Le Corbusier (modern
architecture), Isadora Duncan (modern dance), and
Saul Bass (motion graphics). (Well, if you happen
not to know one of these names, I am sure that you
have other cultural friends who do). And yet, a few
people heard about J.C. Liicklider, Ivan Sutherland,
Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Nicholas
Negroponte and their colloborators who, between
approximately 1960 and 1978, have gradually turned
computer into a cultural machine it is today.
Remarkably, history of cultural software does not yet
exist. What we have are a few largely biographical
books about some of the key individual figures and
research labs such as Xerox PARC or Media Lab - but
no comprehensive synthesis that would trace the
genealogical tree of cultural software.11
And we also
don’t have any detailed studies that would relate the
history of cultural software to history of media,
media theory, or history of visual culture.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 20
Modern art institutions - museums such as MOMA
and Tate, art book publishers such as Phaidon and
Rizzoli, etc. – promote the history of modern art.
Hollywood is similarly proud of its own history – the
stars, the directors, the cinematographers, and the
classical films. So how can we understand the
neglect of the history of cultural computing by our
cultural institutions and computer industry itself?
Why, for instance, Silicon Valley does not a museum
for cultural software? (The Computer History
museum in Mountain View, California has an
extensive permanent exhibition, which is focused on
hardware, operating systems and programming
languages – but not on the history of cultural
software12
).
I believe that the major reason has to do with
economics. Originally misunderstood and ridiculed,
modern art has eventually became a legitimate
investment category – in fact, by middle of 2000s,
the paintings of a number of twentieth century
artists were selling for more than the most famous
classical artists. Similarly, Hollywood continues to rip
profits from old movies as these continue to be
reissued in new formats. What about IT industry? It
does not derive any profits from the old software –
and therefore, it does nothing to promote its history.
Of course, contemporary versions of Microsoft Word,
Adobe Photoshop, AutoDesk’s AutoCAD, and many
other popular cultural applications build up on the
first versions which often date from the 1980s, and
the companies continue to benefit from the patents
they filed for new technologies used in these original
versions – but, in contrast to the video games from
the 1980s, these early software versions are not
treated as a separate products which can be reissued
today. (In principle, I can imagine software
industry creating a whole new market for old
software versions or applications which at some
point were quite important but no longer exist today
– for instance, Aldus PageMaker. In fact, given that
consumer culture systematically exploits nostalgia of
adults for the cultural experiences of their teenage
years and youth by making these experiences into
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 21
new products, it is actually surprising that early
software versions were not turned into a market yet.
If I used daily MacWrite and MacPaint in the middle
of the 1980s, or Photoshop 1.0 and 2.0 in 1990-
1993, I think these experiences were as much part
of my “cultural genealogy” as the movies and art I
saw at the same time. Although I am not necessary
advocating creating yet another category of
commercial products, if early software was widely
available in simulation, it would catalyze cultural
interest in software similar to the way in which wide
availability of early computer games fuels the field of
video game studies. )
Since most theorists so far have not considered
cultural software as a subject of its own, distinct
from “new media,” media art,” “internet,”
“cyberspace,” “cyberculture” and “code,” we lack not
only a conceptual history of media editing software
but also systematic investigations of its roles in
cultural production. For instance, how did the use of
the popular animation and compositing application
After Effects has reshaped the language of moving
images? How did the adoption of Alias, Maya and
other 3D packages by architectural students and
young architects in the 1990s has similarly
influenced the language of architecture? What about
the co-evolution of Web design tools and the
aesthetics of web sites – from the bare-bones HTML
in 1994 to visually rich Flash-driven sites five years
later? You will find frequent mentions and short
discussions of these and similar questions in articles
and conference discussions, but as far as I know,
there have been no book-length study about any of
these subjects. Often, books on architecture, motion
graphics, graphic design and other design fields will
briefly discuss the importance of software tools in
facilitating new possibilities and opportunities, but
these discussions usually are not further developed.
Summary of the book’s argument and chapters
Between early 1990s and middle of the 2000s,
cultural software has replaced most other media
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 22
technologies that emerged in the 19th and 20th
century. Most of today's culture is created and
accessed via cultural software - and yet, surprisingly,
few people know about its history. What was the
thinking and motivations of people who between
1960 and late 1970s created concepts and practical
techniques which underlie today's cultural software?
How does the shift to software-based production
methods in the 1990s change our concepts of
"media"? How do interfaces and the tools of content
development software have reshaped and continue
to shape the aesthetics and visual languages we see
employed in contemporary design and media?
Finally, how does a new category cultural software
that emerged in the 2000s – “social software” (or
“social media”) – redefined the functioning of media
and its identity once again? These are the questions
that I take up in this book.
My aim is not provide a comprehensive history of
cultural software in general, or media authoring
software in particular. Nor do I aim to discuss all new
creative techniques it enables across different
cultural fields. Instead, I will trace a particular path
through this history that will take us from 1960 to
today and which will pass through some of its most
crucial points.
While new media theorists have spend considerable
efforts in trying to understand the relationships
between digital media and older physical and
electronic media, the important sources – the writing
and projects by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas
Englebardt, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and other
pioneers of cultural software working in the 1960s
and 1970s – still remain largely unexamined. What
were their reasons for inventing the concepts and
techniques that today make it possible for computers
to represent, or “remediate” other media? Why did
these people and their colleagues have worked to
systematically turn a computer into a machine for
media creation and manipulation? These are the
questions that I take in part 1, which explores them
by focusing on the ideas and work of the key
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 23
protagonist of “cultural software movement” – Alan
Kay.
I suggest that Kay and others aimed to create a
particular kind of new media – rather than merely
simulating the appearances of old ones. These new
media use already existing representational formats
as their building blocks, while adding many new
previously nonexistent properties. At the same time,
as envisioned by Kay, these media are expandable –
that is, users themselves should be able to easily
add new properties, as well as to invent new media.
Accordingly, Kay calls computers the first
“metamedium” whose content is “a wide range of
already-existing and not-yet-invented media.”
The foundations necessary for the existence of such
metamedium were established between 1960s and
late 1980s. During this period, most previously
available physical and electronic media were
systematically simulated in software, and a number
of new media were also invented. This development
takes us from the very interactive design program –
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (1962) - to the
commercial desktop applications that made
software-based media authoring and design widely
available to members of different creative
professions and, eventually, media consumers as
well – Word (1984), PageMaker (1985), Illustrator
(1987), Photoshop (1989), After Effects (1993), and
others.
So what happens next? Do Kay’s theoretical
formulations as articulated in 1977 accurately predict
the developments of the next thirty years, or have
there been new developments which his concept of
“metamedium” did not account for? Today we indeed
use variety of previously existing media simulated in
software as well as new previously non-existent
media. Both are been continuously extended with
new properties. Do these processes of invention and
amplification take place at random, or do they follow
particular paths? In other words, what are the key
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 24
mechanisms responsible for the extension of the
computer metamedium?
In part 2 I look at the next stage in the
development of media authoring software which
historically can be centered on the 1990s. While I
don’t discuss all the different mechanisms
responsible for the continuous development and
expansion of computer metamedium, I do analyze in
detail a number of them. What are they? At the first
approximation, we can think of these mechanisms as
forms of remix. This should not be surprising. In the
1990s, remix has gradually emerged as the
dominant aesthetics of the era of globalization,
affecting and re-shaping everything from music and
cinema to food and fashion. (If Fredric Jameson once
referred to post-modernism as “the cultural logic of
late capitalism,” we can perhaps call remix the
cultural logic of global capitalism.) Given remix’s
cultural dominance, we may also expect to find
remix logics in cultural software. But if we state this,
we are not yet finished. There is still plenty of work
that remains to be done. Since we don’t have any
detailed theories of remix culture (with the possible
exception of the history and uses of remix in music),
calling something a "remix" simultaneously requires
development of this theory. In other words, if we
simply labell some cultural phenomenon a remix, this
is not by itself an explanation. So what are remix
operations that are at work in cultural software? Are
they different from remix operations in other cultural
areas?
My arguments which are developed in part 2 in the
book can be summarized as follows. In the process
of the translation from physical and electronic media
technologies to software, all individual techniques
and tools that were previously unique to different
media “met” within the same software environment.
This meeting had most fundamental consequences
for human cultural development and for the media
evolution. It disrupted and transformed the whole
landscape of media technologies, the creative
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 25
professions that use them, and the very concept of
“media” itself.
To describe how previously separate media work
together in a common software-based environment,
I coin a new term “deep remixability.” Although
“deep remixability” has a connection with “remix” as
it is usually understood, it has its own distinct
mechanisms. Software production environment
allows designers to remix not only the content of
different media, but also their fundamental
techniques, working methods, and ways of
representation and expression.
Once they were simulated in a computer, previously
non-compatible techniques of different media begin
to be combined in endless new ways, leading to new
media hybrids, or, to use a biological metaphor, new
“media species.” As just one example among
countless others think, for instance, of popular
Google Earth application that combines techniques of
traditional mapping, the field of Geographical
Information Systems (GIS), 3D computer graphics
and animation, social software, search, and other
elements and functions. In my view, this ability to
combine previously separate media techniques
represents a fundamentally new stage in the history
of human media, human semiosis, and human
communication, enabled by its “softwarization.”
While today “deep remixability” can be found at work
in all areas of culture where software is used, I focus
on particular areas to demonstrate how it functions
in detail. The first area is motion graphics – a
dynamic part of cotemporary culture, which, as far
as I know, has not yet been theoretically analyzed in
detail anywhere. Although selected precedents for
contemporary motion graphics can already be found
in the 1950s and 1960s in the works by Saul Bass
and Pablo Ferro, its exponential growth from the
middle of 1990s is directly related to adoption of
software for moving image design – specifically,
After Effects software released by Adobe in 1993.
Deep remixability is central to the aesthetics of
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 26
motion graphics. That is, the larger proportion of
motion graphics projects done today around the
world derive their aesthetic effects from combining
different techniques and media traditions –
animation, drawing, typography photography, 3D
graphics, video, etc – in new ways. As a part of my
analysis, I look at how the typical software-based
production workflow in a contemporary design studio
– the ways in which a project moves from one
software application to another – shapes the
aesthetics of motion graphics, and visual design in
general.
Why did I select motion graphics as my central case
study, as opposed to any other area of contemporary
culture which has either been similarly affected by
the switch to a software-based production processes,
or is native to computers? The examples of the
former area sometimes called “going digital” are
architecture, graphic design, product design,
information design, and music; the examples of the
later area (refered to as “born digital”) are game
design, interaction design, user experience design,
user interface design, web design, and interactive
information visualization. Certainly, most of the new
design areas which have a word “interaction” or
“information” as part of their titles and which
emerged since middle of the 1990s have been as
ignored by cultural critics as motion graphics, and
therefore they demand as much attention.
My reason has to do with the richness of new forms
– visual, spatial, and temporal - that developed in
motion graphics field since it started to rapidly grow
after the introduction of After Effects (1993-). If we
approach motion graphics in terms of these forms
and techniques (rather than only their content), we
will realize that they represent a significant turning
point in the history of human communication
techniques. Maps, pictograms, hieroglyphs,
ideographs, various scripts, alphabet, graphs,
projection systems, information graphics,
photography, modern language of abstract forms
(developed first in European painting and since 1920
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 27
adopted in graphic design, product design and
architecture), the techniques of 20th
century
cinematography, 3D computer graphics, and of
course, variety of “born digital” visual effects –
practically all communication techniques developed
by humans until now are routinely get combined in
motion graphics projects. Although we may still need
to figure out how to fully use this new semiotic
metalanguage, the importance of its emergence is
hard to overestimate.
I continue discussion of “deep remixability” by
looking at another area of media design - visual
effects in feature films. Films such as Larry and Andy
Wachowski’s Matrix series (1999–2003), Robert
Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005), and Zack Snyder’s 300
(2007) are a part of a growing trend to shoot a large
portion or the whole film using a “digital backlot”
(green screen).13
These films combine multiple media
techniques to create various stylized aesthetics that
cannot be reduced to the look of twentieth century
live-action cinematography or 3D computer
animation. As a case study, I analyze in detail the
production methods called Total Capture and Virtual
Cinematography. They were originally developed for
Matrix films and since then has used in other feature
films and video games such as EA SPORT Tiger
Woods 2007. These methods combine multiple
media techniques in a particularly intricate way, thus
providing us one of the most extreme examples of
“deep remixability.”
If the development of media authoring software in
the 1990s has transformed most professional media
and design fields, the developments of 2000s – the
move from desktop applications to webware
(applications running on the web), social media sites,
easy-to-use blogging and media editing tools such as
Blogger, iPhoto and iMovie, combined with the
continuously increasing speed of processors, the
decreasing cost of noteboos, netbooks, and storage,
and the addition of full media capabilities to mobile
phones – have transformed how ordinary people use
media. The exponential explosion of the number of
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 28
people who are creating and sharing media content,
the mind-boggling numbers of photos and videos
they upload, the ease with which these photos and
videos move between people, devices, web sites,
and blogs, the wider availability of faster networks –
all these factors contribute to a whole new “media
ecology.” And while its technical, economic, and
social dimensions have already been analyzed in
substantial details – I am thinking, for instance, of
detailed studies of the economics of “long tail”
phenomena, discussions of fan cultures14
, work on
web-based social production and collaboration15
, or
the research within a new paradigm of “web science”
– its media theoretical and media aesthetics
dimensions have not been yet discussed much at the
time I am writing this.
Accordingly, Part 3 focuses on the new stage in the
history of cultural software - shifting the focus from
professional media authoring to the social web and
consumer media. The new software categories
include
social networking websites (MySpace, Facebook,
etc.), media sharing web sites (Flickr, Photobucket,
YouTube, Vimeo, etc.); consumer-level software for
media organization and light editing (for example,
iPhoto); blog editors (Blogger, Wordpress); RSS
Readers and personalized home pages (Google
Reader, iGoogle, netvibes, etc). (Keep in mind that
software – especially webware designed for
consumers – continuously evolves, so some of the
categories above, their popularity, and the identity of
particular applications and web sites may change
may change by the time your are reading this. One
graphic example is the shift in the identity of
Facebook. Suring 2007, it moved from being yet
another social media application competing with
MySpace to becoming “social OS” aimed to combine
the functionality of previously different applications
in one place – replacing, for instance, stand-alone
email software for many users.)
This part of the book also offers additional
perspective on how to study cultural software in
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 29
society. None of the software programs and web
sites mentioned in the previous paragraph function
in isolation. Instead, they participate in larger
ecology which includes search engines, RSS feeds,
and other web technologies; inexpensive consumer
electronic devices for capturing and accessing media
(digital cameras, mobile phones, music players,
video players, digital photo frames); and the
technologies which enable transfer of media between
devices, people, and the web (storage devices,
wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and WiMax,
communication standards such as Firewire, USB and
3G). Without this ecology social software would not
be possible. Therefore, this whole ecology needs to
be taken into account in any discussion of social
software, as well as consumer-level content access /
media development software designed to work with
web-based media sharing sites. And while the
particular elements and their relationship in this
ecology are likely to change over time – for instance,
most media content may eventually be available on
the network; communication between devices may
similarly become fully transparent; and the very rigid
physical separation between people, devices they
control, and “non-smart” passive space may become
blurred – the very idea of a technological ecology
consisting of many interacting parts which include
software is not unlikely to go away anytime soon.
One example of how the 3rd
part of this book begins
to use this new perspective is the discussion of
“media mobility” – an example of a new concept
which can allow to us to talk about the new technosocial
ecology as a whole, as opposed to its elements
in separation.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 30
PART 1: Inventing Cultural Software
Chapter 1. Alan Kay’s Universal Media Machine
Medium:
8.
a. A specific kind of artistic technique or means of
expression as determined by the materials used or the
creative methods involved: the medium of lithography.
b. The materials used in a specific artistic technique: oils
as a medium.
American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition (Houghton
Mifflin, 2000).
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay
Appearance versus Function
Between its invention in mid 1940s and arrival of PC
in middle of 1980s, a digital computer was mostly
used for military, scientific and business calculations
and data processing. It was not interactive. It was
not designed to be used by a single person. In short,
it was hardly suited for cultural creation.
As a result of a number of developments of the
1980s and 1990s – the rise of personal computer
industry, adoption of Graphical User Interfaces
(GUI), the expansion of computer networks and
World Wide Web – computers moved into the
cultural mainstream. Software replaced many other
tools and technologies for the creative professionals.
It has also given hundreds of millions of people the
abilities to create, manipulate, sequence and share
media – but has this lead to the invention of
fundamentally new forms of culture? Today media
companies are busy inventing e-books and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 31
interactive television; the consumers are happily
purchasing music albums and feature films
distributed in digital form, as well making
photographs and video with their digital cameras and
cell phones; office workers are reading PDF
documents which imitate paper. (And even at the
futuristic edge of digital culture - smart
objects/ambient intelligence – traditional forms
persist: Philips showcases “smart” household mirror
which can hold electronic notes and videos, while its
director of research dreams about a normal looking
vase which can hold digital photographs.16
)
In short, it appears that the revolution in means of
production, distribution, and access of media has not
been accompanied by a similar revolution in syntax
and semantics of media. Who shall we blame for
this? Shall we put the blame on the pioneers of
cultural computing – J.C. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland,
Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Seymour Paper,
Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and others? Or, as
Nelson and Kay themselves are eager to point out,
the problem lies with the way the industry
implemented their ideas?
Before we blame the industry for bad implementation
– we can always pursue this argument later if
necessary – let us look into the thinking of the
inventors of cultural computing themselves. For
instance, what about the person who guided the
development of a prototype of a modern person
computer - Alan Kay?
Between 1970 and 1981 Alan Kay was working at
Xerox PARC – a research center established by Xerox
in Palo Alto. Building on the previous work of
Sutherland, Nelson, Englebart, Licklider, Seymour
Papert, and others, the Learning Research Group at
Xerox PARC headed by Kay systematically articulated
the paradigm and the technologies of vernacular
media computing, as it exists today.17
Although selected artists, filmmakers, musicians, and
architects were already using computers since the
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 32
1950s, often developing their software in
collaboration with computer scientists working in
research labs (Bell Labs, IBM Watson Research
Center, etc.) most of this software was aimed at
producing only particular kind of images, animations
or music congruent with the ideas of their authors.
In addition, each program was designed to run on a
particular machine. Therefore, these software
programs could not function as general-purpose
tools easily usable by others.
It is well known most of the key ingredients of
personal computers as they exist today came out
from Xerox PARC: Graphical User Interface with
overlapping windows and icons, bitmapped display,
color graphics, networking via Ethernet, mouse, laser
printer, and WYIWYG (“what you see is what you
get”) printing. But what is equally important is that
Kay and his colleagues also developed a range of
applications for media manipulation and creation
which all used a graphical interface. They included a
word processor, a file system, a drawing and
painting program, an animation program, a music
editing program, etc. Both the general user interface
and the media manipulation programs were written
in the same programming language Smalltalk. While
some the applications were programmed by
members of Kay’s group, others were programmed
by the users that included seventh-grade high-school
students.18
(This was consistent with the essence of
Kay’s vision: to provide users with a programming
environment, examples of programs, and alreadywritten
general tools so the users will be able to
make their own creative tools.)
When Apple introduced first Macintosh computer in
1984, it brought the vision developed at Xerox PARC
to consumers (the new computer was priced at
US$2,495). The original Macintosh 128K included a
word processing and a drawing application (MacWrite
and MacDraw, respectively). Within a few years they
were joined by other software for creating and
editing different media: Word, PageMaker and
VideoWorks (1985)19
, SoundEdit (1986), Freehand
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 33
and Illustrator (1987), Photoshop (1990), Premiere
(1991), After Effects (1993), and so on. In the early
1990s, similar functionality became available on PCs
running Microsoft Windows.20
And while MACs and
PCs were at first not fast enough to offer a true
competition for traditional media tools and
technologies (with the exception of word
processing), other computer systems specifically
optimized for media processing started to replace
these technologies already in the 1980s. (The
examples are Next workstation, produced between
1989 and 1996; Amiga, produced between 1985 and
1994; and Paintbox, was first released in 1981.)
By around 1991, the new identity of a computer as a
personal media editor was firmly established. (This
year Apple released QuickTime that brought video to
the desktop; the same year saw the release of James
Cameron’s Terminator II, which featured pioneering
computer-generated special effects). The vision
developed at Xerox PARC became a reality – or
rather, one important part of this vision in which
computer was turned into a personal machine for
display, authoring and editing content in different
media. And while in most cases Alan Kay and his
collaborators were not the first to develop particular
kinds of media applications – for instance, paint
programs and animation programs were already
written in the second part of the 1960s21
- by
implementing all of them on a single machine and
giving them consistent appearance and behavior,
Xerox PARC researchers established a new paradigm
of media computing.
I think that I have made my case. The evidence is
overwhelming. It is Alan Kay and his collaborators at
PARC that we must call to task for making digital
computers imitate older media. By developing easy
to use GUI-based software to create and edit familiar
media types, Kay and others appear to have locked
the computer into being a simulation machine for
“old media.” Or, to put this in terms of Jay Bolter
and Richard Grusin’s influential book Remediation:
Understanding New Media (2000), we can say that
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 34
GUI-based software turned a digital computer into a
“remediation machine:” a machine that expertly
represents a range of earlier media. (Other
technologies developed at PARC such as bitmapped
color display used as the main computer screen,
laser printing, and the first Page Description
Language which eventually lead to Postscript were
similarly conceived to support computer’s new role
as a machine for simulation of physical media.)
Bolter and Grusin define remediation as “the
representation of one medium in another.”22
According to their argument, new media always
remediate the old ones and therefore we should not
expect that computers would function any
differently. This perspective emphasizes the
continuity between computational media and earlier
media. Rather than being separated by different
logics, all media including computers follow the same
logic of remediation. The only difference between
computers and other media lies in how and what
they remediate. As Bolter and Grusin put this in the
first chapter of their book, “What is new about digital
media lies in their particular strategies for
remediating television, film, photography, and
painting.” In another place in the same chapter they
make an equally strong statement that leaves no
ambiguity about their position: “We will argue that
remediation is a defining characteristic of the new
digital media.”
It we consider today all the digital media created by
both consumers and by professionals – digital
photography and video shot with inexpensive
cameras and cell phones, the contents of personal
blogs and online journals, illustrations created in
Photoshop, feature films cut on AVID, etc. – in terms
of its appearance digital media indeed often looks
exactly the same way as it did before it became
digital. Thus, if we limit ourselves at looking at the
media surfaces, remediation argument accurately
describes much of computational media. But rather
than accepting this condition as an inevitable
consequence of the universal logic of remediation,
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 35
we should ask why this is the case. In other words, if
contemporary computational media imitates other
media, how did this become possible? There was
definitely nothing in the original theoretical
formulations of digital computers by Turing or Von
Neumann about computers imitating other media
such as books, photography, or film.
The conceptual and technical gap which separates
first room size computers used by military to
calculate the shooting tables for anti-aircraft guns
and crack German communication codes and
contemporary small desktops and laptops used by
ordinary people to hold, edit and share media is
vast. The contemporary identity of a computer as a
media processor took about forty years to emerge –
if we count from 1949 when MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory
started to work on first interactive computers to
1989 when first commercial version of Photoshop
was released. It took generations of brilliant and
creative thinkers to invent the multitude of concepts
and techniques that today make possible for
computers to “remediate” other media so well. What
were their reasons for doing this? What was their
thinking? In short, why did these people dedicate
their careers to inventing the ultimate “remediation
machine”?
While media theorists have spend considerable
efforts in trying to understand the relationships
between digital media and older physical and
electronic media, the important sources – the writing
and projects by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas
Englebardt, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and other
pioneers working in the 1960s and 1970s – remained
largely unexamined. This book does not aim to
provide a comprehensive intellectual history of the
invention of media computing. Thus, I am not going
to consider the thinking of all the key figures in the
history of media computing (to do this right would
require more than one book.) Rather, my concern is
with the present and the future. Specifically, I want
to understand some of the dramatic transformations
in what media is, what it can do, and how we use –
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 36
the transformations that are clearly connected to the
shift from previous media technologies to software.
Some of these transformations have already taken
place in the 1990s but were not much discussed at
the time (for instance, the emergence of a new
language of moving images and visual design in
general). Others have not even been named yet. Still
others – such as remix and mash-up culture – are
being referred to all the time, and yet the analysis of
how they were made possible by the evolution of
media software so far was not attempted.
In short, I want to understand what is “media after
software” – that is, what happened to the
techniques, languages, and the concepts of twentieth
century media as a result of their computerization.
Or, more precisely, what has happened to media
after they have been software-ized. (And since in the
space of a single book I can only consider some of
these techniques, languages and concepts, I will
focus on those that, in my opinion, have not been
yet discussed by others). To do this, I will trace a
particular path through the conceptual history of
media computing from the early 1960s until today.
To do this most efficiently, in this chapter we will
take a closer look at one place where the identity of
a computer as a “remediation machine” was largely
put in place – Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group at
Xerox PARC that was in operation during the 1970s.
We can ask two questions: first, what exactly Kay
wanted to do, and second, how he and his colleagues
went about achieving it. The brief answer – which
will be expanded below - is that Kay wanted to turn
computers into a “personal dynamic media” which
can be used for learning, discovery, and artistic
creation. His group achieved this by systematically
simulating most existing media within a computer
while simultaneously adding many new properties to
these media. Kay and his collaborators also
developed a new type of programming language
that, at least in theory, would allow the users to
quickly invent new types of media using the set of
general tools already provided for them. All these
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 37
tools and simulations of already existing media were
given a unified user interface designed to activate
multiple mentalities and ways of learning kinesthetic,
iconic, and symbolic.
Kay conceived of “personal dynamic media” as a
fundamentally new kind of media with a number of
historically unprecedented properties such as the
ability to hold all of user’s information, simulate all
types media within a single machine, and “involve
learner in a two-way conversation.”23
These
properties enable new relationships between the user
and the media she may be creating, editing, or
viewing on a computer. And this is essential if we
want to understand the relationships between
computers and earlier media. Briefly put, while
visually computational media may closely mimic
other media, these media now function in different
ways.
For instance, consider digital photography that often
does imitate in appearance traditional photography.
For Bolter and Grusin, this is example of how digital
media ‘remediates” its predecessors. But rather than
only paying attention to their appearance, let us
think about how digital photographs can function. If
a digital photograph is turned into a physical object
in the world – an illustration in a magazine, a poster
on the wall, a print on a t-shirt – it functions in the
same ways as its predecessor.24
But if we leave the
same photograph inside its native computer
environment – which may be a laptop, a network
storage system, or any computer-enabled media
device such as a cell phone which allows its user to
edit this photograph and move it to other devices
and the Internet – it can function in ways which, in
my view, make it radically different from its
traditional equivalent. To use a different term, we
can say that a digital photograph offers its users
many affordances that its non-digital predecessor did
not. For example, a digital photograph can be quickly
modified in numerous ways and equally quickly
combined with other images; instantly moved
around the world and shared with other people; and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 38
inserted into a text document, or an architectural
design. Furthermore, we can automatically (i.e., by
running the appropriate algorithms) improve its
contrast, make it sharper, and even in some
situations remove blur.
Note that only some of these new properties are
specific to a particular media – in our example, a
digital photograph, i.e. an array of pixels
represented as numbers. Other properties are shared
by a larger class of media species – for instance, at
the current stage of digital culture all types of media
files can be attached to an email message. Still
others are even more general features of a computer
environment within the current GUI paradigm as
developed thirty years ago at PARC: for instance, the
fast response of computer to user’s actions which
assures “no discernable pause between cause and
effect.”25
Still others are enabled by network
protocols such as TCP-IP that allows all kinds of
computers and other devices to be connected to the
same network. In summary, we can say that only
some of the “new DNAs” of a digital photograph are
due its particular place of birth, i.e., inside a digital
camera. Many others are the result of current
paradigm of network computing in general.
Before diving further into Kay’s ideas, I should more
fully disclose my reasons why I chose to focus on
him as opposed to somebody else. The story I will
present could also be told differently. It is possible to
put Sutherland’ work on Sketchpad in the center of
computational media history; or Englebart and his
Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect
which throughout the 1960s developed hypertext
(independently of Nelson), the mouse, the window,
the word processor, mixed text/graphics displays,
and a number of other “firsts.” Or we can shift focus
to the work of Architecture Machine Group at The
MIT, which since 1967 was headed by Nicholas
Negroponte (In 1985 this group became The Media
Lab). We also need to recall that by the time Kay’s
Learning Research Group at PARC flashed out the
details of GUI and programmed various media
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 39
editors in Smalltalk (a paint program, an illustration
program, an animation program, etc.), artists,
filmmakers and architects were already using
computers for more than a decade and a number of
large-scale exhibitions of computer art were put in
major museums around the world such as the
Institute of Contemporary Art, London, The Jewish
Museum, New York, and Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. And certainly, in terms of advancing
computer techniques for visual representation
enabled by computers, other groups of computer
scientists were already ahead. For instance, at
University of Utah, which became the main place for
computer graphics research during the first part of
the 1970s, scientists were producing 3D computer
graphics much superior to the simple images that
could be created on computers being build at PARC.
Next to University of Utah a company called Evans
and Sutherland (headed by the same Ivan
Sutherland who was also teaching at University of
Utah) was already using 3D graphics for flight
simulators – essentially pioneering the type of new
media that can be called “navigable 3D virtual
space.”26
While the practical work accomplished at Xerox PARC
to establish a computer as a comprehensive media
machine is one of my reasons, it is not the only one.
The key reason I decided to focus on Kay is his
theoretical formulations that place computers in
relation to other media and media history. While
Vannevar Bush, J.C. Lindlicker and Douglas
Englebart were primary concerned with
augmentation of intellectual and in particular
scientific work, Kay was equally interested in
computers as “a medium of expression through
drawing, painting, animating pictures, and
composing and generating music.”27
Therefore if we
really want to understand how and why computers
were redefined as a cultural media, and how the new
computational media is different from earlier physical
and electronic media, I think that Kay provides us
with the best theoretical perspective.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 40
“Simulation is the central notion of the Dynabook”
While Alan Kay articulated his ideas in a number of
articles and talks, his 1977 article co-authored with
one of his main PARC collaborators, computer
scientist Adele Goldberg, is particularly useful
resource if we want to understand contemporary
computational media. In this article Kay and
Goldberg describes the vision of the Learning
Research Group at PARC in the following way: to
create “a personal dynamic medium the size of a
notebook (the Dynabook) which could be owned by
everyone and could have the power to handle
virtually all of its owner’s information-related
needs.”28
Kay and Goldberg ask the readers to
imagine that this device “had enough power to
outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough
capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of
page-equivalents of reference materials, poems,
letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations,
musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations and
anything else you would like to remember and
change.”29
In my view, “all” in the first statement is important:
it means that the Dynabook – or computational
media environment in general, regardless of the size
of a form of device in which it is implemented –
should support viewing, creating and editing all
possible media which have traditionally were used
for human expression and communication.
Accordingly, while separate programs to create
works in different media were already in existence,
Kay’s group for the first time implemented them all
together within a single machine. In other words,
Kay’s paradigm was not to simply create a new type
of computer-based media which would co-exist with
other physical media. Rather, the goal was to
establish a computer as an umbrella, a platform for
all already existing expressive artistic media. (At the
end of the article Kay and Goldberg give a name for
this platform – “metamedium.”) This paradigm
changes our understanding of what media is. From
Lessing’s Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 41
Poetry (1766) to Nelson Goodman’s Languages of
Art (1968), the modern discourse about media
depends on the assumption that different mediums
have distinct properties and in fact should be
understood in opposition to each other. Putting all
mediums within a single computer environment does
not necessary erases all differences in what various
mediums can represent and how they are perceived
– but it does bring them closer to each other in a
number of ways. Some of these new connections
were already apparent to Kay and his colleagues;
others became visible only decades later when the
new logic of media set in place at PARC unfolded
more fully; some maybe still not visible to us today
because they have not been given practical
realization. One obvious example such connections is
the emergence of multimedia as a standard form of
communication: web pages, PowerPoint
presentations, multimedia artworks, mobile
multimedia messages, media blogs, and other
communication forms which combine few mediums.
Another is the rise of common interface conventions
and tools which we use in working with different
types of media regardless of their origin: for
instance, a virtual camera, a magnifying lens, and of
course the omnipresent copy, cut and paste
commands.30
Yet another is the ability to map one
media into another using appropriate software –
images into sound, sound into images, quantitative
data into a 3D shape or sound, etc. – used widely
today in such areas as DJ/VJ/live cinema
performances and information visualization. All in all,
it is as though different media are actively trying to
reach towards each other, exchanging properties and
letting each other borrow their unique features. (This
situation is the direct opposite of modernist media
paradigm of the early twentieth century which was
focused on discovering a unique language of each
artistic medium.)
Alan Turing theoretically defined a computer as a
machine that can simulate a very large class of other
machines, and it is this simulation ability that is
largely responsible for the proliferation of computers
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 42
in modern society. But as I already mentioned,
neither he nor other theorists and inventors of digital
computers explicitly considered that this simulation
could also include media. It was only Kay and his
generation that extended the idea of simulation to
media – thus turning Universal Turing Machine into a
Universal Media Machine, so to speak.
Accordingly, Kay and Goldberg write: “In a very real
sense, simulation is the central notion of the
Dynabook.”31
When we use computers to simulate
some process in the real world – the behavior of a
weather system, the processing of information in the
brain, the deformation of a car in a crash – our
concern is to correctly model the necessary features
of this process or system. We want to be able to test
how our model would behave in different conditions
with different data, and the last thing we want to do
is for computer to introduce some new properties
into the model that we ourselves did not specify. In
short, when we use computers as a general-purpose
medium for simulation, we want this medium to be
completely “transparent.”
But what happens when we simulate different media
in a computer? In this case, the appearance of new
properties may be welcome as they can extend the
expressive and communication potential of these
media. Appropriately, when Kay and his colleagues
created computer simulations of existing physical
media – i.e. the tools for representing, creating,
editing, and viewing these media – they “added”
many new properties. For instance, in the case of a
book, Kay and Goldberg point out “It need not be
treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new
medium with new properties. A dynamic search may
be made for a particular context. The non-sequential
nature of the file medium and the use of dynamic
manipulation allows a story to have many accessible
points of view.”32
Kay and his colleagues also added
various other properties to the computer simulation
of paper documents. As Kay has referred to this in
another article, his idea was not to simply imitate
paper but rather to create “magical paper.”33
For
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 43
instance, PARC team gave users the ability to modify
the fonts in a document and create new fonts. They
also implemented another important idea that was
already developed by Douglas Englebardt’s team in
the 1960s: the ability to create different views of the
same structure (I will discuss this in more detail
below). And both Englebart and Ted Nelson also
already “added” something else: the ability to
connect different documents or different parts of the
same document through hyperlinking – i.e. what we
now know as hypertext and hypermedia. Englebart’s
group also developed the ability for multiple users to
collaborate on the same document. This list goes on
and on: e-mail in 1965, newsgroups in 1979, World
Wide Web in 1991, etc.
Each of these new properties has far-reaching
consequences. Take search, for instance. Although
the ability to search through a page-long text
document does not sound like a very radical
innovation, as the document gets longer this ability
becomes more and more important. It becomes
absolutely crucial if we have a very large collection of
documents – such as all the web pages on the Web.
Although current search engines are far from being
perfect and new technologies will continue to evolve,
imagine how different the culture of the Web would
be without them.
Or take the capacity to collaborate on the same
document(s) by a number of users connected to the
same network. While it was already widely used by
companies in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not until
early 2000s that the larger public saw the real
cultural potential of this “addition” to print media. By
harvesting the small amounts of labor and expertise
contributed by a large number of volunteers, social
software projects – most famously, Wikipedia –
created vast and dynamically updatable pools of
knowledge which would be impossible to create in
traditional ways. (In a less visible way, every time
we do a search on the Web and then click on some
of the results, we also contribute to a knowledge set
used by everybody else. In deciding in which
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 44
sequence to present the results of a particular
search, Google’s algorithms take into account which
among the results of previous searches for the same
words people found most useful.)
Studying the writings and public presentations of the
people who invented interactive media computing –
Sutherland, Englebart, Nelson, Negroponte, Kay, and
others – makes it clear that they did not come with
new properties of computational media as an afterthought.
On the contrary, they knew that were
turning physical media into new media. In 1968
Englebart gave his famous demo at the Fall Joint
Computer Conference in San Francisco before few
thousand people that included computer scientists,
IBM engineers, people from other companies
involved in computers, and funding officers from
various government agencies.34
Although Englebart
had whole ninety minutes, he had a lot to show.
Over the few previous years, his team at The
Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect
had essentially developed modern office environment
as it exists today (not be confused with modern
media design environment which was developed
later at PARC). Their computer system included word
processing with outlining features, documents
connected through hypertext, online collaboration
(two people at remote locations working on the same
document in real-time), online user manuals, online
project planning system, and other elements of what
is now called “computer-supported collaborative
work.” The team also developed the key elements of
modern user interface that were later refined at
PARC: a mouse and multiple windows.
Paying attention to the sequence of the demo reveals
that while Englebart had to make sure that his
audience would be able to relate the new computer
system to what they already know and use, his focus
was on new features of simulated media never
before available previously. Englebart devotes the
first segment of the demo to word processing, but as
soon as he briefly demonstrated text entry, cut,
paste, insert, naming and saving files – in other
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 45
words, the set of tools which make a computer into a
more versatile typewriter – he then goes on to show
in more length the features of his system which no
writing medium had before: “view control.”35
As
Englebart points out, the new writing medium could
switch at user’s wish between many different views
of the same information. A text file could be sorted
in different ways. It could also be organized as a
hierarchy with a number of levels, like in outline
processors or outlining mode of contemporary word
processors such as Microsoft Word. For example, a
list of items can be organized by categories and
individual categories can be collapsed and expanded.
Englebart next shows another example of view
control, which today, forty years after his demo, is
still not available in popular document management
software. He makes a long “to do” list and organizes
it by locations. He then instructs the computer to
displays these locations as a visual graph (a set of
points connected by lines.) In front of our eyes,
representation in one medium changes into another
medium – text becomes a graph. But this is not all.
The user can control this graph to display different
amounts of information – something that no image
in physical media can do. As Englebart clicks on
different points in a graph corresponding to
particular locations, the graph shows the appropriate
part of his “to do” list. (This ability to interactively
change how much and what information an image
shows is particularly important in today’s information
visualization applications.)
Next Englebart presents “a chain of views” which he
prepared beforehand. He switches between these
views using “links” which may look like hyperlinks
the way they exist on the Web today – but they
actually have a different function. Instead of creating
a path between many different documents a la
Vannevar Bush’s Memex (often seen as the precursor
to modern hypertext), Englebart is using links as a
method for switching between different views of a
single document organized hierarchically. He brings a
line of words displayed in the upper part of the
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 46
screen; when he clicks on these words, more
detailed information is displayed in the lower part of
the screen. This information can in its turn contain
links to other views that show even more detail.
Rather than using links to drift through the textual
universe associatively and “horizontally,” we move
“vertically” between more general and more detailed
information. Appropriately, in Englebart’s paradigm,
we are not “navigating” – we are “switching views.”
We can create many different views of the same
information and switch between these views in
different ways. And this is what Englebart
systematically explains in this first part of his demo.
He demonstrates that you can change views by
issuing commands, by typing numbers that
correspond to different parts of a hierarchy, by
clicking on parts of a picture, or on links in the text.
(In 1967 Ted Nelson articulates a similar idea of a
type of hypertext which would allow a reader to
“obtain a greater detail on a specific subject” which
he calls “stretchtext.”36
Since new media theory and criticism emerged in the
early 1990s, endless texts have been written about
interactivity, hypertext, virtual reality, cyberspace,
cyborgs, and so on. But I have never seen anybody
discuss “view control.” And yet this is one of the
most fundamental and radical new techniques for
working with information and media available to us
today. It is used daily by each of us numerous times.
“View control,” i.e. the abilities to switch between
many different views and kinds of views of the same
information is now implemented in multiple ways not
only in word processors and email clients, but also in
all “media processors” (i.e. media editing software):
AutoCAD, Maya, After Effects, Final Cut, Photoshop,
inDesign, and so on. For instance, in the case of 3D
software, it can usually display the model in at least
half a dozen different ways: in wireframe, fully
rendered, etc. In the case of animation and visual
effects software, since a typical project may contain
dozens of separate objects each having dozens of
parameters, it is often displayed in a way similar to
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 47
how outline processors can show text. In other
words, the user can switch between more and less
information. You can choose to see only those
parameters which you are working on right now. You
can also zoom in and out of the composition. When
you do this, parts of the composition do not simply
get smaller or bigger – they show less or more
information automatically. For instance, at a certain
scale you may only see the names of different
parameters; but when you zoom into the display, the
program may also display the graphs which indicate
how these parameters change over time.
Let us look at another example – Ted Nelson’s
concept of hypertext that he articulated in the early
1960s (independently but parallel to Engelbart).37
In
his 1965 article A File Structure for the Complex, the
Changing, and the Indeterminate, Nelson discusses
the limitations of books and other paper-based
systems for organizing information and then
introduces his new concept:
However, with the computer-driven display and mass
memory, it has become possible to create a new,
readable medium, for education and enjoyment, that
will let the reader find his level, suit his taste, and
find the parts that take on special meaning for him,
as instruction and enjoyment.
Let me introduce the word “hypertext” to mean a
body of written or pictorial material interconnected in
such a complex way that it could not be conveniently
be presented or represented on paper.38
(Emphasis
mine – L.M.)
“A new, readable medium” – these words make it
clear that Nelson was not simply interested in
“patching up” books and other paper documents.
Instead, he wanted to create something distinctively
new. But was not hypertext proposed by Nelson
simply an extension of older textual practices such
as exegesis (extensive interpretations of holy
scriptures such as Bible, Talmud, Qur’ān),
annotations, or footnotes? While such historical
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 48
precedents for hypertext are often proposed, they
mistakenly equate Nelson’s proposal with a very
limited form in which hypertext is experienced by
most people today – i.e., World Wide Web. As Noah
Wardrip-Fruin pointed out, The Web implemented
only one of many types of structures proposed by
Nelson already in 1965 – “chunk style” hypertext –
static links that allow the user to jump from page to
page.”39
Following the Web implementation, most people
today think of hypertext is a body of text connected
through one-directional links. However, the terms
“links” does not even appear in Nelson’s original
definition of hypertext. Instead, Nelson talks about
new complex interconnectivity without specifying any
particular mechanisms that can be employed to
achieve it. A particular system proposed in Nelson’s
1965 article is one way to implement such vision, but
as his definition implicitly suggests, many others are
also possible.
“What kind of structure are possible in hypertext?”
asks Nelson in a research note from 1967. He
answers his own question in a short but very
suggestive answer: “Any.”40 Nelson goes on to
explain: “Ordinary text may be regarded as a special
case – the simple and familiar case – of hypertext,
just as three-dimensional space and the ordinary
cube are the simple and familiar special cases of
hyperspace and hypercube.”41 (In 2007 Nelson has
re-stated this idea in the following way: “’Hypertext’-
a word I coined long ago -- is not technology but
potentially the fullest generalization of documents
and literature.”42)
If hypertex” does not simply means “links,” it also
does not only mean “text.” Although in its later
popular use the word “hypertext” came to refer to
refer to linked text, as can see from the quote
above, Nelson included “pictures” in his definition of
hypertext.43
And In the following paragraph, he
introduces the terms hyperfilm and hypermedia:
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 49
Films, sound recordings, and video recordings are
also linear strings, basically for mechanical reasons.
But these, too, can now be arranged as non-linear
systems – for instance, lattices – for educational
purposes, or for display with different emphasis…The
hyperfilm – a browsable or vari-sequenced movie –
is only one of the possible hypermedia that require
our attention.”44
Where is hyperfim today, almost fifty years after
Nelson has articulated this concept? If we
understand hyperfilm in the same limited sense as
hypertext is understood today – shots connected
through links which a user can click on – it would
seems that hyperfilm never fully took off. A number
of early pioneering projects – Aspen Movie Map
(Architecture Machine Group, 1978-79), Earl King
and Sonata (Grahame Weinbren, 1983-85; 1991-
1993), CD-ROMs by Bob Stein’s Voyager Company,
and Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the
Bees (David Blair, 1993) – have not been followed
up. Similarly, interactive movies and FMV-games
created by video game industry in the first part of
the 1990s soon feel out of favor, to be replaced by
3D games which offered more interactivity.45
But if
instead we think of hyperfilm in a broader sense as it
was conceived by Nelson – any interactive structure
for connecting video or film elements, with a
traditional film being a special case – we realize that
hyperfilm is much more common today than it may
appear. Numerous Interactive Flash sites which use
video, video clips with markers which allow a user
jump to a particular point in a video (for instance,
see videos on ted.com46
), and database cinema47
are
just some of the examples of hyperfilm today.
Decades before hypertext and hypermedia became
the common ways for interacting with information,
Nelson understood well what these ideas meant for
our well-established cultural practices and concepts.
The announcement for his January 5, 1965 lecture at
Vassar College talks about this in terms that are
even more relevant today than they were then: “The
philosophical consequences of all this are very grave.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 50
Our concepts of ‘reading’, ‘writing’, and ‘book’ fall
apart, and we are challenged to design ‘hyperfiles’
and write ‘hypertext’ that may have more teaching
power than anything that could ever be printed on
paper.48
These statements align Nelson’s thinking and work
with artists and theorists who similarly wanted to
destabilize the conventions of cultural
communication. Digital media scholars extensively
discussed similar parallels between Nelson and
French theorists writing the 1960s - Roland Barthes,
Michel Foucault and Jacque Derrida.49
Others have
already pointed our close parallels between the
thinking of Nelson and literary experiments taken
place around the same time, such as works by
Oulipo.50
(We can also note the connection between
Nelson’s hypertext and the non-linear structure of
the films of French filmmakers who set up to
question the classical narrative style: Hiroshima Mon
Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Breathless and
others).
How far shall we take these parallels? In 1987 Jay
Bolter and Michael Joyce wrote that hypertext could
be seen as “a continuation of the modern ‘tradition’
of experimental literature in print” which includes
“modernism, futurism, Dada surrealism, letterism,
the nouveau roman, concrete poetry.”51
Refuting
their claim, Espen J. Aarseth has argued that
hyperext is not a modernist structure per ce,
although it can support modernist poetics if the
author desires this.52
Who is right? Since this book
argues that cultural software turned media into
metamedia – a fundamentally new semiotic and
technological system which includes most previous
media techniques and aesthetics as its elements – I
also think that hypertext is actually quite different
from modernist literary tradition. I agree with
Aarseth that hypertext is indeed much more general
than any particular poetics such as modernist ones.
Indeed, already in 1967 Nelson said that hypertext
could support any structure of information including
that of traditional texts – and presumably, this also
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 51
includes different modernist poetics. (Importantly,
this statement is echoed in Kay and Godberg’s
definition of computer as a “metamedium” whose
content is “a wide range of already-existing and notyet-invented
media.”)
What about the scholars who see the strong
connections between the thinking of Nelson and
modernism? Although Nelson says that hypertext can
support any information structure and that that this
information does not need to be limited to text, his
examples and his style of writing show an
unmistakable aesthetic sensibility – that of literary
modernism. He clearly dislikes “ordinary text.” The
emphasis on complexity and interconnectivity and on
breaking up conventional units for organizing
information such as a page clearly aligns Nelson’s
proposal for hypertext with the early 20th
century
experimental literature – the inventions of Virginia
Wolf, James Joyce, Surrealists, etc. This connection
to literature is not accidental since Nelson’s original
motivation for his research which led to hypertext
was to create a system for handling notes for literary
manuscripts and manuscripts themselves. Nelson
also already knew about the writings of William
Burroughs. The very title of the article - A File
Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the
Indeterminate – would make the perfect title for an
early twentieth century avant-garde manifesto, as
long as we substitute “file structure” with some
“ism.”
Nelson’s modernist sensibility also shows itself in his
thinking about new mediums that can be established
with the help of a computer. However, his work
should not be seen as a simple continuation of
modernist tradition. Rather, both his and Kay’s
research represent the next stage of the avant-garde
project. The early twentieth century avant-garde
artists were primarily interested in questioning
conventions of already established media such as
photography, print, graphic design, cinema, and
architecture. Thus, no matter how unconventional
were the paintings that came out from Futurists,
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 52
Orphism, Suprematism or De Stijl, their manifestos
were still talking about them as paintings - rather
than as a new media. In contrast, Nelson and Kay
explicitly write about creating new media and not
only changing the existing ones. Nelson: “With the
computer-driven display and mass memory, it has
become possible to create a new, readable medium.”
Kay and Goldberg: “It [computer text] need not be
treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new
medium with new properties.”
Another key difference between how modernist
artists and pioneers of cultural software approached
the job of inventing new media and extending
existing ones is captured by the title of Nelson’s
article I have been already quoted from above: “A
File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and
the Indeterminate.” Instead of a particular modernist
“ism,” we get a file structure. Cubism,
Expressionism, Futurism, Orphism, Suprematism,
Surrealism proposed new distinct systems for
organizing information, with each systems fighting
all others for the dominance in the cultural
memesphere. In contrast, Bush, Licklider, Nelson,
Engelbart, Kay, Negroponte, and their colleagues
created meta-systems that can support many kinds
of information structures. Kay called such a system
“a first metamedium,” Nelson referred to it as
hypertext and hypermedia, Engelbart wrote about
“automated external symbol manipulation” and
“bootstraping,” – but behind the differences in their
visions lied the similar understanding on the radically
new potential offered by computers for information
manipulation. The hyphens “meta” and “hyper” used
by Kay and Nelson were the appropriate
characterizations for a system which was more than
another new medium which could remediate other
media in its particular ways. Instead, the new
system would be capable of simulating all these
media with all their remediation strategies – as well
as supporting development of what Kay and
Goldberg referred to as new “not-yet-invented
media.” And of course, this was not all. Equally
important was the role of the interactivity. The new
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 53
meta-systems proposed by Nelson, Kay and others
were to be used interactively to support the
processes of thinking, discovery, decision making,
and creative expression. In contrast, the aesthetics
created by modernist movements could be
understood as “information formatting” systems – to
be used for selecting and organizing information into
fixed presentations that are then distributed to the
users, not unlike PowerPoint slides. Finally, at least
in Kay’s and Nelson’s vision, the task of defining of
new information structures and media manipulation
techniques – and, in fact, whole new media – was
given to the user, rather than being the sole
province of the designers. (As I will discuss below,
this decision had far-reaching consequences for
shaping contemporary culture. Once computers and
programming were democratized enough, more
cultural and creativity started to go into creating
these new structures and techniques energy rather
than using them to make “content.”)
Today a typical article in computer science or
information science will not be talking about
inventing a “new medium” as a justification for
research. Instead, it is likely to refer to previous
work in some field or sub-field of computer science
such as “knowledge discovery,” “data mining,”
“semantic web,” etc. It can also refer to existing
social and and cultural practices and industries – for
instance, “e-learning,” “video game development,”
“collaborative tagging,” or “massively distributed
collaboration.” In either case, the need for new
research is justified by a reference to already
established or, at least, popular practices – academic
paradigms which have been funded, large-scale
industries, and mainstream social routines which do
threaten or question existing social order. This
means that practically all of computer science
research which deals with media – web technologies,
media computing, hypermedia, human-computer
interfaces, computer graphics, and so on – is
oriented towards “mainstream” media usage.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 54
In other words, either computer scientists are trying
to make more efficient the technologies already used
in media industries (video games, web search
engines, film production, etc.) or they are inventing
new technologies that are likely to be used by these
industries in the future. The invention of new
mediums for its own sake is not something which
anybody is likely to pursue, or get funded. From this
perspective, software industry and business in
general is often more innovative than academic
computer science. For instance, social media
applications (Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook,
del.is.ous, Digg, etc.) were not invented in the
academy; nor were Hypercard, QuickTime, HTML,
Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, or Google Earth. This
was no different in previous decades. It is, therefore,
not accidental that the careers of both Ted Nelson
and Alan Kay were spend in the industry and not the
academy: Kay worked for or was a fellow at Xerox
PARC, Atari, Apple and Hewlett-Packard; Nelson was
a consultant or a fellow at Bell Laboratories,
Datapoint Corporation, Autodesk; both also were
associated with Disney.
Why did Nelson and Kay found more support in
industry than in academy for their quest to invent
new computer media? And why does the industry
(by which I simply mean any entity which creates
the products which can be sold in large quantities, or
monetized in other ways, regardless of whether this
entity is a large multinational company or a small
start-up) – is more interested in innovative media
technologies, applications, and content than
computer science? The systematic answer to this
question will require its own investigation. Also, what
kinds of innovations each modern institution can
support changes over with time. But here is one brief
answer. Modern business thrives on creating new
markets, new products, and new product categories.
Although the actual creating of such new markets
and products is always risky, it is also very
profitable. This was already the case in the previous
decades when Nelson and Kay were supported by
Xerox, Atari, Apple, Bell Labs, Disney, etc. In 2000s,
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 55
following the globalization of the 1990s, all areas of
business have embraced innovation to an
unprecedented degree; this pace quickened around
2005 as the companies fully focused on competing
for new consumers in China, India, and other
formerly “emerging” economies. Around the same
time, we see a similar increase in the number of
innovative products in IT industry: open APIs of
leading Web 2.0 sites, daily announcements of new
webware services53
, locative media applications, new
innovative products such as iPhone and Microsoft
Surface, new paradigms in imaging such as HDR and
non-destructive editing, the beginnings of a “long
tail” for hardware, and so on.
As we can see from the examples we have analyzed,
the aim of the inventors of computational media –
Englebart, Nelson, Kay and people who worked with
them – was not to simply create accurate
simulations of physical media. Instead, in every case
the goal was to create “a new medium with new
properties” which would allow people to
communicate, learn, and create in new ways. So
while today the content of these new media may
often look the same as with its predecessors, we
should not be fooled by this similarity. The newness
lies not in the content but in software tools used to
create, edit, view, distribute and share this content.
Therefore, rather than only looking at the “output” of
software-based cultural practices, we need to
consider software itself – since it allows people to
work with media in of a number of historically
unprecedented ways. So while on the level of
appearance computational media indeed often
remediate (i.e. represents) previous media, the
software environment in which this media “lives” is
very different.
Let me add to the examples above two more. One is
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (1962). Created by
Sutherland as a part of his PhD thesis at MIT,
Sketchpad deeply influenced all subsequent work in
computational media (including that of Kay) not only
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 56
because it was the first interactive media authoring
program but also because it made it clear that
computer simulations of physical media can add
many exiting new properties to media being
simulated. Sketchpad was the first software that
allowed its users to interactively create and modify
line drawings. As Noah Wardrip-Fruin points out, it
“moved beyond paper by allowing the user to work
at any of 2000 levels of magnification – enabling the
creation of projects that, in physical media, would
either be unwieldy large or require detail work at an
impractically small size.”54
Sketchpad similarly
redefined graphical elements of a design as objects
which “can be manipulated, constrained,
instantiated, represented ironically, copied, and
recursively operated upon, even recursively
merged.’55
For instance, if the designer defined new
graphical elements as instances of a master element
and later made a change to the master, all these
instances would also change automatically.
Another new property, which perhaps demonstrated
most dramatically how computer-aided drafting and
drawing were different from their physical
counterparts, was Sketchpad’s use of constraints. In
Sutherland’s own words, “The major feature which
distinguishes a Sketchpad drawing from a paper and
pencil drawing is the user’s ability to specify to
Sketchpad mathematical conditions on already drawn
parts of his drawing which will be automatically
satisfied by the computer to make the drawing take
the exact shape desired.”56
For instance, if a user
drew a few lines, and then gave the appropriate
command, Sketchpad automatically moved these
lines until they were parallel to each other. If a user
gave a different command and selected a particular
line, Sketchpad moved the lines in such a way so
they would parallel to each other and perpendicular
to the selected line.
Although we have not exhausted the list of new
properties that Sutherland built into Sketchpad, it
should be clear that this first interactive graphical
editor was not only simulating existing media.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 57
Appropriately, Sutherland’s 1963 paper on
Sketchpad repeatedly emphasizes the new graphical
capacities of his system, marveling how it opens new
fields of “graphical manipulation that has never been
available before.”57
The very title given by
Sutherland to his PhD thesis foregrounds the novelty
of his work: Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical
communication system. Rather than conceiving of
Sketchpad as simply another media, Sutherland
presents it as something else - a communication
system between two entities: a human and an
intelligent machine. Kay and Goldberg will later also
foreground this communication dimension referring
to it as “a two-way conversation” and calling the new
“metamedium” “active.”58
(We can also think of
Sketchpad as a practical demonstration of the idea of
“man-machine symbiosis” by J.C. Licklider applied to
image making and design.59
My last example comes from the software
development that at first sight may appear to
contradict my argument: paint software. Surely, the
applications which simulate in detail the range of
effects made possible with various physical brushes,
paint knifes, canvases, and papers are driven by the
desire to recreate the experience of working with in a
existing medium rather than the desire to create a
new one? Wrong. In 1997 an important computer
graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote a memo
Digital Paint Systems: Historical Overview.60
In this
text Smith (who himself had background in art)
makes an important distinction between digital paint
programs and digital paint systems. In his definition,
“A digital paint program does essentially no more
than implement a digital simulation of classic
painting with a brush on a canvas. A digital paint
system will take the notion much farther, using the
“simulation of painting” as a familiar metaphor to
seduce the artist into the new digital, and perhaps
forbidding, domain.” (Emphasis in the original).
According to Smith’s history, most commercial
painting applications, including Photoshop, fall into
paint system category. His genealogy of paint
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 58
systems begins with Richard Shoup’s SuperPaint
developed at Xerox PARC in 1972-1973.61
While
SuperPaint allowed the user to paint with a variety of
brushes in different colors, it also included many
techniques not possible with traditional painting or
drawing tools. For instance, as described by Shoup in
one of his articles on SuperPaint, “Objects or areas in
the picture may be scaled up or down in size,
moved, copied, overlaid, combined or changed in
color, and saved on disk for future use or erased.”62
Most important, however, was the ability to grab
frames from video. Once loaded into the system,
such a frame could be treated as any other images –
that is, an artist could use all of SuperPaint drawing
and manipulation tools, add text, combine it with
other images etc. The system could also translate
what it appeared on its canvas back into a video
signal. Accordingly, Shoup is clear that his system
was much more than a way to draw and paint with a
computer. In a 1979 article, he refers to SuperPaint
as a new “videographic medium.”63
In another article
published a year later, he refines this claim: “From a
larger perspective, we realized that the development
of SuperPaint signaled the beginning of the synergy
of two of the most powerful and pervasive
technologies ever invented: digital computing and
video or television.”64
This statement is amazing perceptive. When Shoup
was writing this in 1980, computer graphics were
used in TV just a hand-full of times. And while in the
next decade their use became more common, only in
the middle of the 1990s the synergy Shoup predicted
truly became visible. As we will see in the chapter on
After Effects below, the result was a dramatic
reconfiguration not just of visual languages of
television but of all visual techniques invented by
humans up to that point. In other words, what begun
as a new “videographic medium” in 1973 had
eventually changed all visual media.
But even if we forget about SuperPaint’s
revolutionary ability to combine graphics and video,
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and discount its new tools such resizing, moving,
copying, etc., we are still dealing with a new creative
medium (Smith’s term). As Smith pointed out, this
medium is the digital frame buffer,65
a special kind of
computer memory designed to hold images
represented as an array of pixels (today a more
common name is graphics card). An artist using a
paint system is actually modifying pixel values in a
frame buffer – regardless of what particular
operation or tool she is employing at the moment.
This opens up a door to all kinds of new image
creation and modification operations, which follow
different logic than physical painting. The telling
examples of this can be found in paint system called
simply Paint developed by Smith in 1975-1976. In
Smith’s own words, “Instead of just simulating
painting a stroke of constant color, I extended the
notion to mean ‘perform any image manipulation you
want under the pixels of the paintbrush.”66
Beginning
with this conceptual generalization, Smith added a
number of effects which sill used a paintbrush tool
but actually no longer referred to painting in a
physical world. For instance, in Paint “any image of
any shape could be used as a brush.” In another
example, Smith added “ ‘not paint’ that reversed the
color of every pixel under the paintbrush to its color
complement.” He also defined ‘smear paint’ that
averaged the colors in the neighborhood of each
pixel under the brush and wrote the result back into
the pixel.” And so on. Thus, the instances where the
paintbrush tool behaved more like a real physical
paintbrush were just particular cases of a much
larger universe of new behaviors made possible in a
new medium.
The Permanent Extendibility
As we saw, Sutherland, Nelson, Englebart, Kay and
other pioneers of computational media have added
many previously non-existent properties to media
they have simulated in a computer. The subsequent
generations of computer scientists, hackers, and
designers added many more properties – but this
process is far from finished. And there is no logical or
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 60
material reason why it will ever be finished. It is the
“nature” of computational media that it is openended
and new techniques are continuously being
invented.
To add new properties to physical media requires
modifying its physical substance. But since
computational media exists as software, we can add
new properties or even invent new types of media by
simply changing existing or writing new software. Or
by adding plug-ins and extensions, as programmers
have been doing it with Photoshop and Firefox,
respectively. Or by putting existing software
together. (For instance, at the moment of this
writing – 2006 - people are daily extending
capacities of mapping media by creating software
mashups which combining the services and data
provided by Goggle Maps, Flickr, Amazon, other
sites, and media uploaded by users.)
In short, “new media” is “new” because new
properties (i.e., new software techniques) can
always be easily added to it. Put differently, in
industrial, i.e. mass-produced media technologies,
“hardware” and “software” were one and the same
thing. For example, the book pages were bound in a
particular way that fixed the order of pages. The
reader could not change nether this order nor the
level of detail being displayed a la Englebart’s “view
control.” Similarly, the film projector combined
hardware and what we now call a “media player”
software into a single machine. In the same way, the
controls built into a twentieth-century massproduced
camera could not be modified at user’s will.
And although today the user of a digital camera
similarly cannot easily modify the hardware of her
camera, as soon as transfers the pictures into a
computer she has access to endless number of
controls and options for modifying her pictures via
software.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century there were
two types of situations when a normally fixed
industrial media was more fluid. The first type of
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 61
situation is when a new media was being first
developed: for instance, the invention of
photography in the 1820s-1840s. The second type of
situation is when artists would systematically
experiment with and “open up” already industrialized
media – such as the experiments with film and video
during the 1960s, which came to be called
“Expanded Cinema.”
What used to be separate moments of
experimentations with media during the industrial
era became the norm in a software society. In other
words, computer legitimizes experimentation with
media. Why this is so? What differentiates a modern
digital computer from any other machine – including
industrial media machines for capturing and playing
media – is separation of hardware and software. It is
because endless number of different programs
performing different tasks can be written to run on
the same type of machine, this machine – i.e. a
digital computer - is used so widely today.
Consequently, the constant invention of new and
modification of existing media software is simply one
example of this general principle. In other words,
experimentation is a default feature of computational
media. In its very structure it is “avant-garde” since
it is constantly being extended and thus redefined.
If in modern culture “experimental” and “avantgarde”
were opposed to normalized and stable, this
opposition largely disappears in software culture.
And the role of the media avant-garde is performed
no longer by individual artists in their studios but by
a variety of players, from very big to very small from
companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple
to independent programmers, hackers, and
designers.
But this process of continual invention of new
algorithms does not just move in any direction. If we
look at contemporary media software – CAD,
computer drawing and painting, image editing, word
processors – we will see that most of their
fundamental principles were already developed by
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the generation of Sutherland and Kay. In fact the
very first interactive graphical editor – Sketchpad –
already contains most of the genes, so to speak, of
contemporary graphics applications. As new
techniques continue to be invented they are layered
over the foundations that were gradually put in place
by Sutherland, Englebart, Kay and others in the
1960s and 1970s.
Of course we not dealing here only with the history
of ideas. Various social and economic factors – such
as the dominance of the media software market by a
handful of companies or the wide adoption of
particular file formats –– also constrain possible
directions of software evolution. Put differently,
today software development is an industry and as
such it is constantly balances between stability and
innovation, standardization and exploration of new
possibilities. But it is not just any industry. New
programs can be written and existing programs can
be extended and modified (if the source code is
available) by anybody who has programming skills
and access to a computer, a programming language
and a compiler. In other words, today software is
fundamentally “fabbable” in a way that physical
industrially produced objects usually are not.
Although Turing and Von Neumann already
formulated this fundamental extendibility of software
in theory, its contemporary practice – hundreds of
thousands of people daily involved in extending the
capabilities of computational media - is a result of a
long historical development. This development took
us from the few early room-size computers, which
were not easy to reprogram to a wide availability of
cheap computers and programming tools decades
later. This democratization of software development
was at the core of Kay’s vision. Kay was particularly
concerned with how to structure programming tools
in such a way that would make development of
media software possible for ordinary users. For
instance, at the end of the 1977 article I have been
already extensively quoting, he and Goldberg write:
“We must also provide enough already-written
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 63
general tools so that a user need not start from
scratch for most things she or he may wish to do.”
Comparing the process of continuous media
innovation via new software to history of earlier, precomputational
media reveals a new logic at work.
According to a commonplace idea, when a new
medium is invented, it first closely imitates already
existing media before discovering its own language
and aesthetics. Indeed, first printed bibles by
Guttenberg closely imitated the look of the
handwritten manuscripts; early films produced in the
1890s and 1900s mimicked the presentational
format of theatre by positioning the actors on the
invisible shallow stage and having them face the
audience. Slowly printed books developed a different
way of presenting information; similarly cinema also
developed its own original concept of narrative
space. Through repetitive shifts in points of view
presented in subsequent shots, the viewers were
placed inside this space – thus literally finding
themselves inside the story.
Can this logic apply to the history of computer
media? As theorized by Turing and Von Neuman,
computer is a general-purpose simulation machine.
This is its uniqueness and its difference from all
other machines and previous media. This means that
the idea that a new medium gradually finds its own
language cannot apply to computer media. If this
was true it would go against the very definition of a
modern digital computer. This theoretical argument
is supported by practice. The history of computer
media so far has been not about arriving at some
standardized language – the way this, for instance,
happened with cinema – but rather about the
gradual expansion of uses, techniques, and
possibilities. Rather than arriving at a particular
language, we are gradually discovering that the
computer can speak more and more languages.
If we are to look more closely at the early history of
computer media – for instance, the way we have
been looking at Kay’s ideas and work in this text –
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 64
we will discover another reason why the idea of a
new medium gradually discovering its own language
does not apply to computer media. The systematic
practical work on making a computer simulate and
extend existing media (Sutherland’s Sketchpad, first
interactive word processor developed by Englebart’s
group, etc.) came after computers were already put
to multiple uses – performing different types of
calculations, solving mathematical problems,
controlling other machines in real time, running
mathematical simulations, simulating some aspects
of human intelligence, and so on. (We should also
mention the work on SAGE by MIT Lincoln
Laboratory which by the middle of the 1950s already
established the idea of interactive communication
between a human and a computer via a screen with
a graphical display and a pointing device. In fact,
Sutherland developed Sketchpad on TX-2 that was
the new version of a larger computer MIT
constructed for SAGE.) Therefore, when the
generation of Sutherland, Nelson and Kay started to
create “new media,” they built it on top, so to speak,
of what computers were already known to be
capable off. Consequently they added new properties
into physical media they were simulating right away.
This can be very clearly seen in the case of
Sketchpad. Understanding that one of the roles a
computer can play is that of a problem solver,
Sutherland built in a powerful new feature that never
before existed in a graphical medium – satisfaction
of constraints. To rephrase this example in more
general terms, we can say that rather than moving
from an imitation of older media to finding its own
language, computational media was from the very
beginning speaking a new language.
In other words, the pioneers of computational media
did not have the goal of making the computer into a
‘remediation machine” which would simply represent
older media in new ways. Instead, knowing well new
capabilities provided by digital computers, they set
out to create fundamentally new kinds of media for
expression and communication. These new media
would use as their raw “content” the older media
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 65
which already served humans well for hundreds and
thousands of years – written language, sound, line
drawings and design plans, and continuous tone
images, i.e. paintings and photographs. But this does
not compromise the newness of new media. For
computational media uses these traditional human
media simply as building blocks to create previously
unimaginable representational and information
structures, creative and thinking tools, and
communication options.
Although Sutherland, Engelbart, Nelson, Kay, and
others developed computational media on top of
already existing developments in computational
theory, programming languages, and computer
engineering, it will be incorrect to conceive the
history of such influences as only going in one
direction – from already existing and more general
computing principles to particular techniques of
computational media. The inventors of computational
media had to question many, if not most, already
established ideas about computing. They have
defined many new fundamental concepts and
techniques of how both software and hardware thus
making important contributions to hardware and
software engineering. A good example is Kay’s
development of Smalltalk, which for the first time
systematically established a paradigm of objectoriented
programming. Kay’s rationale to develop
this new programming language was to give a
unified appearance to all applications and the
interface of PARC system and, even more
importantly, to enable its users to quickly program
their own media tools. (According to Kay, an objectoriented
illustration program written in Smalltalk by
a particularly talented 12-year old girl was only a
page long.67
) Subsequently object-oriented
programming paradigm became very popular and
object-oriented features have been added to most
popular languages such as C.
Looking at the history of computer media and
examining the thinking of its inventors makes it clear
that we are dealing with the opposite of technological
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 66
determinism. When Sutherland designed Sketchpad,
Nelson conceived hypertext, Kay programmed a
paint program, and so on, each new property of
computer media had to be imagined, implemented,
tested, and refined. In other words, these
characteristics did not simply come as an inevitable
result of a meeting between digital computers and
modern media. Computational media had to be
invented, step-by-step. And it was invented by
people who were looking for inspiration in modern
art, literature, cognitive and education psychology,
and theory of media as much as technology. For
example, Kay recalls that reading McLuhan’s
Understanding Media led him to a realization that
computer can be a medium rather than only a tool.68
Accordingly, the opening section of Kay and
Goldberg’ article is called “Humans and Media,” and
it does read like media theory. But this is not a
typical theory which only describes the word as it
currently exists. Like in Marxism, the analysis is used
to create a plan for action for building a new world in
this case, enabling people to create new media.)
So far I have talked about the history of
computational media as series of consecutive
“additions.” However this history is not only a
process of accumulation of more and more options.
Although in general we have more techniques at our
disposal today when twenty of thirty years ago, it is
also important to remember that many
fundamentally new techniques which were conceived
were never given commercial implementation. Or
they were poorly implemented and did not become
popular. Or they were not marketed properly.
Sometimes the company making the software would
go out of business. At other times the company that
created the software was purchased by another
company that “shelved” the software so it would not
compete with its own products. And so on. In short,
the reasons why many of new techniques did not
become commonplace are multiple, and are not
reducible to a single principle such as “the most easy
to use techniques become most popular.”
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For instance, one of the ideas developed at PARC
was “project views.” Each view “holds all the tools
and materials for a particular project and is
automatically suspended when you leave it.”69
Thirty
years later none of the popular operating system had
ths feature.70
The same holds true for the
contemporary World Wide Web implementation of
hyperlinks. The links on the Web are static and onedirectional.
Ted Nelson who is credited with inventing
hypertext around 1964 conceived it from the
beginning to have a variety of other link types. In
fact, when Tim Berners-Lee submitted his paper
about the Web to ACM Hypertext 1991 conference,
his paper was only accepted for a poster session
rather than the main conference program. The
reviewers saw his system as being inferior to many
other hypertext systems that were already
developed in academic world over previous two
decades.71
Computer as a Metamedium
As we have established, the development of
computational media runs contrary to previous
media history. But in a certain sense, the idea of a
new media gradually discovering its own language
actually does apply to the history of computational
media after all. And just as it was the case with
printed books and cinema, this process took a few
decades. When first computers were built in the
middle of the 1940s, they could not be used as
media for cultural representation, expression and
communication. Slowly, through the work of
Sutherland, Englebart, Nelson, Papert and others in
the 1960s, the ideas and techniques were developed
which made computers into a “cultural machine.”
One could create and edit text, made drawings,
move around a virtual object, etc. And finally, when
Kay and his colleagues at PARC systematized and
refined these techniques and put them under the
umbrella of GUI that made computers accessible to
multitudes, a digital computer finally was given its
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own language - in cultural terms. In short, only when
a computer became a cultural medium – rather than
only a versatile machine.
Or rather, it became something that no other media
has been before. For what has emerged was not yet
another media, but, as Kay and Goldberg insist in
their article, something qualitatively different and
historically unprecedented. To mark this difference,
they introduce a new term – “metamedium.”
This metamedium is unique in a number of different
ways. One of them we already discussed in detail – it
could represent most other media while augmenting
them with many new properties. Kay and Goldberg
also name other properties that are equally crucial.
The new metamedium is “active – it can respond to
queries and experiments – so that the messages
may involve the learner in a two way conversation.”
For Kay who was strongly interested in children and
learning, this property was particularly important
since, as he puts it, it “has never been available
before except through the medium of an individual
teacher.” 72
Further, the new metamedium can
handle “virtually all of its owner’s information-related
needs.” (I have already discussed the consequence
of this property above.) It can also “serve as “a
programming and problem solving tool,” and “an
interactive memory for the storage and manipulation
of data.”73
But the property that is the most
important from the point of view of media history is
that computer metamedium is simultaneously a set
of different media and a system for generating new
media tools and new types of media. In other words,
a computer can be used to create new tools for
working in the media it already provides as well as to
develop new not-yet-invented media.
Using the analogy with print literacy, Kay’s motivates
this property in this way: “The ability to ‘read’ a
medium means you can access materials and tools
generated by others. The ability to write in a medium
means you can generate materials and tools for
others. You must have both to be literate.”74
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Accordingly, Kay’s key effort at PARC was the
development of Smalltalk programming language. All
media editing applications and GUI itself were
written in Smalltalk. This made all the interfaces of
all applications consistent facilitating quick learning
of new programs. Even more importantly, according
to Kay’s vision, Smalltalk language would allow even
the beginning users write their own tools and define
their own media. In other words, all media editing
applications, which would be provided with a
computer, were to serve also as examples inspiring
users to modify them and to write their own
applications.
Accordingly, the large part of Kay and Goldberg’s
paper is devoted to description of software
developed by the users of their system: “an
animation system programmed by animators”; “a
drawing and painting system programmed by a
child,” “a hospital simulation programmed by a
decision-theorist,” “an audio animation system
programmed by musicians”; “a musical score capture
system programmed by a musician”; “electronic
circuit design by a high school student.” As can be
seen from this list that corresponds to the sequence
of examples in the article, Kay and Goldberg
deliberately juxtapose different types of users professionals,
high school students, and children – in
order to show that everybody can develop new tools
using Smalltalk programming environment.
The sequence of examples also strategically
juxtaposes media simulations with other kinds of
simulations in order to emphasize that simulation of
media is only a particular case of computer’s general
ability to simulate all kinds of processes and
systems. This juxtaposition of examples gives us an
interesting way to think about computational media.
Just as a scientist may use simulation to test
different conditions and play different what/if
scenarios, a designer, writer, a musician, a
filmmaker, or an architect working with computer
media can quickly “test” different creative directions
in which the project can be developed as well as see
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how modifications of various “parameters” affect the
project. The later is particularly easy today since the
interfaces of most media editing software not only
explicitly present these parameters but also
simultaneously give the user the controls for their
modification. For instance, when the Formatting
Palette in Microsoft Word shows the font used by the
currently selected text, it is displayed in column next
to all other fonts available. Trying different font is as
easy as scrolling down and selecting the name of a
new font.
To give users the ability to write their own programs
was a crucial part of Kay’s vision for the new
“metamedium” he was inventing at PARC. According
to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Englebart research program
was focused on a similar goal: “Englebart envisioned
users creating tools, sharing tools, and altering the
tools of others.”75
Unfortunately, when in 1984 Apple
shipped Macintosh, which was to become the first
commercially successful personal computer modeled
after PARC system, it did not have easy-to-use
programming environment. HyperCard written for
Macintosh in 1987 by Bill Atkinson (who was one of
PARC alumni) gave users the ability to quickly create
certain kinds of applications – but it did not have the
versatility and breadth envisioned by Kay. Only
recently, as the general computer literacy has widen
and many scripting languages became available –
Perl, PHP, Python, ActionScript, Vbscript, JavaScript,
etc. – more people started to create their own tools
by writing software. A good example of a
contemporary programming environment, which is
currently very popular among artists and designers
and which, in my view, is close to Kay’s vision is
Processing.76
Build on top of Java programming
language, Processing features a simplified
programming style and an extensive library of
graphical and media functions. It can be used to
develop complex media programs and also to quickly
test ideas. Appropriately, the official name for
Processing projects is sketches.77
In the words of
Processing initiators and main developers Ben Fry
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and Casey Reas, the language’s focus “on the
‘process’ of creation rather than end results.”78
Another popular programming environment that
similarly enables quick development of media
projects is MAX/MSP and its successor PD developed
by Miller Puckette.
Conclusion
At the end of the 1977 article that served as the
basis for our discussion, he and Goldberg summarize
their arguments in the phrase, which in my view is a
best formulation we have so far of what
computational media is artistically and culturally.
They call computer “a metamedium” whose content
is “a wide range of already-existing and not-yetinvented
media.” In another article published in 1984
Kay unfolds this definition. As a way of conclusion, I
would like to quote this longer definition which is as
accurate and inspiring today as it was when Kay
wrote it:
It [a computer] is a medium that can dynamically
simulate the details of any other medium, including
media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool,
though it can act like many tools. It is the first
metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom
for representation and expression never before
encountered and as yet barely investigated.79
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Chapter 2. Understanding Metamedia
Metamedia vs. Multimedia
“The first metamedium” envisioned by Kay in 1977
has gradually become a reality. Most already existing
physical and electronic media were simulated as
algorithms and a variety of new properties were
added to them. A number of brand new media types
were invented (for instance, navigable virtual space
and hypermedia, pioneered by Ivan Sutherland and
Ted Nelson, accordingly). New media-specific and
general (i.e., media-agnostic) data management
techniques were introduced; and, most importantly,
by the middle of the 1990s computers became fast
enough to “run” all these media. So what happens
next? What is the next stage in the metamedium
evolution? (I am using the word “stage” in a logical
rather than a historical sense - although it is also
true that the developments I will be now describing
manifests themselves now more prominently than
thirty years). This is something that, as far as I can
see, the inventors of computational media –
Sutherland, Nelson, Engelbradt, Kay and all the
people who worked with them – did not write about.
However, since they setup all the conditions for it,
they are indirectly responsible for it.
I believe that we are now living through a second
stage in the evolution of a computer metamedium,
which follows the first stage of its invention and
implementation. This new stage is about media
hybridization. Once computer became a comfortable
home for a large number of simulated and new
media, it is only logical to expect that they would
start creating hybrids. And this is exactly what is
taking place at this new stage in media evolution.
Both the simulated and new media types - text,
hypertext, still photographs, digital video, 2D
animation, 3D animation, navigable 3D spaces,
maps, location information – now function as
building blocks for new mediums. For instance,
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Google Earth combines aerial photography, satellite
imagery, 3D computer graphics, still photography
and other media to create a new hybrid
representation which Google engineers called “3D
interface to the planet.” A motion graphics sequence
may combine content and techniques from different
media such as live action video, 3D computer
animation, 2D animation, painting and drawing.
(Motion graphics are animated visuals that surround
us every day; the examples are film and television
titles, TV graphics, the graphics for mobile media
content, and non-figurative parts of commercials and
music videos.) A web site design may blends photos,
typography, vector graphics, interactive elements,
and Flash animation. Physical installations integrated
into cultural and commercial spaces – such as Nobel
Field at Nobel Peace Center in Oslo by Small Design,
interactive store displays for Nokia and Diesel by
Nanika, or the lobby at the 8th
floor of Puerta
America hotel in Madrid by Karen Finlay and Jason
Bruges – combine animations, video, computer
control, and various interfaces from sensors to touch
to create interactive spatial media environments.80
It is important to make it clear that I am not talking
about something that already has a name “computer
multimedia,” or simply “multimedia.” This
term became popular in the 1990s to describe
applications and electronic documents in which
different media exist next to each other. Often these
media types - which may include text, graphics,
photographs, video, 3D scenes, and sound - are
situated within what looks visually as a twodimensional
space. Thus a typical Web page is an
example of multimedia; so is a typical PowerPoint
presentation. Today, at least, this is the most
common way of structuring multimedia documents.
In fact, it is built-in into the workings of most
multimedia authoring application such as
presentation software or web design software. When
a user of Word, PowerPoint or Dreamweaver creates
a “new document,” she is presented with a white
page ready to be typed into; other media types have
to be “inserted” into this page via special commands.
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But interfaces for creating multimedia do not
necessary have to follow this convention. Another
common paradigm for adding media together used in
email and mobile devices is “attachments.” Thus, a
user of a mobile phone which supports MMS
(“Multimedia Media Surface”) can send text
messages with attachments that can include picture,
sound, and video files. Yet another paradigm
persistent in digital culture – from Aspen Movie Map
(1978) to VRML (1994-) to Second Life (2003- ) –
uses 3D space as the default platform with other
media such as video attached to or directly inserted
into this space.
“Multimedia” was an important term when interactive
cultural applications, which featured a few media
types, started to appear in numbers in the early
1990s. The development of these applications was
facilitated by the introduction of the appropriate
storage media, i.e. recordable CD-ROMs (i.e. CD-R)
in 1991, computer architectures and filer formats
designed to support multiple media file formats
(QuickTime, 1991-) and multimedia authoring
software (a version of Macromedia Director with
Lingo scripting language was introduced in 1987). By
the middle of the 1990s digital art exhibitions
featured a variety of multimedia projects; digital art
curricula begun to feature courses in “multimedia
narrative”; and art museums started to publish
multimedia CD-ROMs offering tours of their
collections. In the second part of the decade
multimedia took over the Web as more and more
web sites begun to incorporate different types of
media. By the end of the decade, “multimedia”
became the default in interactive computer
applications. Multimedia CD-ROMs, multimedia Web
sites, interactive kisks, and multimedia
communication via mobile devices became so
commonplace and taken for granted that the term
lost its relevance. So while today we daily encounter
and use computer multimedia, we no longer wonder
at the amazing ability of computers and computerenabled
consumer electronics devices to show
multiple media at once.
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Seen from the point of view of media history,
“computer multimedia” is certainly a development of
fundamental importance. Previously “multimedia
documents” combining multiple media were static
and/or not interactive: for instance, medieval
illustrated manuscripts, sacred architecture, or
twentieth century cinema, which combined live
action, music, voice and titles. But co-existence of
multiple media types within a single document or an
application is only one of the new developments
enabled by simulation of all these media in a
computer. In putting forward the term hybrid media
I want to draw attention to another, equally
fundamental development that, in contrast to
“multimedia,” so far did not receive a name.
It is possible to conceive of “multimedia” as a
particular case of “hybrid media.” However, I prefer
to think of them as overlapping but ultimately two
different phenomena. While some of classical
multimedia applications of the 1990s would qualify
as media hybrids, most will not. Conversely,
although media hybrids often feature content in
different media, this is only one aspect of their
make-up. So what is the difference between the
two? In multimedia documents and interactive
applications, content in multiple media appears next
to each other. In a web page, images and video
appear next to text; a blog post may similarly show
text, followed by images and more text, a 3D world
may contain a flat screen object used to display
video. In contrast, in the case of media hybrids,
interfaces, techniques, and ultimately the most
fundamental assumptions of different media forms
and traditions are brought together resulting in new
species of media. To use a biological metaphor, we
can say that media hybridity involves the coming
together of the DNAs of different media to form new
offsprings and species.
Put differently, media hybridity is a more
fundamental reconfiguration of media universe than
multimedia. In both cases we see “coming together”
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of multiple media. But, as I see it, multimedia does
not threaten the autonomy of different media. They
retain their own languages, i.e. ways of organizing
media data and accessing this data. The typical use
of multiple media on the Web or in PowerPoint
presentations illustrates this well. Imagine a typical
HTML page which consists from text and a video clip
inserted somewhere on the page. Both text and
video remain separate on every level. Their media
languages do not spill into each other. Each media
type continues to offer us its own interface. With
text, we can scroll up and down; we can change its
font, color and size, or number of columns, and so
on. With video, we can play it, pause or rewind it,
loop a part, and change sound volume. In this
example, different media are positioned next to each
other but their interfaces and techniques do not
interact. This, for me, is a typical multimedia.
In contrast, in hybrid media the languages of
previously distinct media come together. They
exchange properties, create new structures, and
interact on the deepest level. For instance, in motion
graphics text takes on many properties which were
previously unique to cinema, animation, or graphic
design. To put this differently, while retaining its old
typographic dimensions such as font size or line
spacing, text also acquires cinematographic and
computer animation dimensions. It can now move in
a virtual space as any other 3D computer graphics
object. Its proportions will change depending on
what virtual lens the designer has selected. The
individual letters, which make up a text string can be
exploded into many small particles. As a word moves
closer to us, it can appear out of focus; and so on. In
short, in the process of hybridization, the language
of typography does not stay “as is.” Instead we end
up with a new metalanguage that combines the
techniques of all previously distinct languages,
including that of typography.
Another way to distinguish between “multimedia”
and “hybrid media” is by noting whether the
conventional structure of media data is affected or
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not when different media types are combined. For
example, when video appears in multimedia
documents such as MMS messages, emails in HTML
format, web pages or PowerPoint presentations, the
structure of video data does not change in any way.
Just as with twentieth century film and video
technology, a digital video file is a sequence of
individual frames, which have the same size,
proportions, and color depth. Accordingly, the
standards methods for interacting with this data also
do not challenge our idea of what video is. Like with
VCR media players of the twentieth century, when
the user selects “play,” the frames quickly replace
each other producing the effect of motion. Video, in
short, remains video.
This is typical of multimedia. An example of how
same media structure can be reconfigured – the
capacity that I take as one of the identifying features
of media hybrids – is provided by Invisible Shape of
Things Past, a digital “cultural heritage” project
created by Berlin-based media design company
Art+Com (1995-2007).81
In this project a film clip
becomes a solid object positioned in a virtual space.
This object is made from individual frames situated
behind each other in space. The angles between
frames and the sizes of individual frames are
determined by the parameters of the camera that
originally shot the film. While we now interact with
this film object as any other object in a 3d space, it
is still possible to “see the movie,” that is, access the
film data in a conventional way. But even this
operation of access has been rethought. When a user
clicks on the front most frame, the subsequent
frames positioned behind one another are quickly
deleted. You simultaneously see the illusion of
movement and the virtual object shrinking at the
same time.
In summary, in this example of media restructuring
the elements which make up the original film
structure – individual frames – have been placed in a
new configuration. The old structure has been
mapped into a new structure. This new structure
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retains original data and their relationship – film
frames organized into a sequence. But it also has
new dimensions – size of frames and their angles.
I hope that this discussion makes it clear why hybrid
media is not multimedia, and why we need this new
term. The term “multimedia” captured the
phenomenon of coming together of content of
different media coming together – but not of their
languages. Similarly, we cannot use another term
that has been frequently used in discussions of
computational media – “convergence.” The
dictionary meanings of “convergence” include “to
reach the same point” and “to become gradually less
different and eventually the same.” But this is not
what happens with media languages as they
hybridize. Instead, they acquire new properties becoming
richer as a result. For instance, in motion
graphics, text acquires the properties of computer
animation and cinematography. In 3D computer
graphics, rendering of 3D objects can take on all the
techniques of painting. In virtual globes such as
Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth,
representational possibilities and interfaces for
working with maps, satellite imagery, 3D building
and photographs are combined to create new richer
hybrid representations and new richer interfaces.
In short, “softwarization” of previous media did not
led to their convergence. Instead, after
representational formats of older media types, the
techniques for creating content in these media and
the interfaces for accessing them were unbundled
from their physical bases and translated into
software, these elements start interacting producing
new hybrids.
This, for me, is the essence of the new stage of a
computer metamedium in which we are living today.
The previously unique properties and techniques of
different media became the elements that can be
combined together in previously impossible ways.
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Consequently, if in 1977 Kay and Goldberg
speculated that the new computer metamedium
would contain “a wide range of already existing and
not-yet-invented media,” we now describe one of the
key mechanisms responsible for the invention of
these new media. This mechanism is hybridization.
The techniques and representational formats of
previous physical and electronic media forms, and
the new information manipulation techniques and
data formats unique to a computer are brought
together in new combinations.
The Evolution of a Computer Metamedium
To continue with the biological metaphor I already
invoked, imagine that the process of the computer
metamedium development is like a biological
evolution, and the new combinations of media
elements are like new biological species.82
Some of
these combinations may appear only once or twice.
For instance, a computer science paper may propose
a new interface design; a designer may create a
unique media hybrid for a particular design project;
a film may combine media techniques in a novel
way. Imagine that in each case, a new hybrid is
never replicated. This happens quite often.
Thus, some hybrids that emerge in the course of
media evolution will not be “selected” and will not
“replicate.” Other hybrids, on the other hand, may
“survive” and successfully “replicate.” (I am using
quote marks to remind that for now I am using
biological model only as a metaphor, and I am not
making any claims that the actual mechanisms of
media evolution are indeed like the mechanisms of
biological evolution.) Eventually such successful
hybrids may become the common conventions in
media design; built-in features of media
development/access applications; commonly used
features in social media sites; widely used design
patterns; and so on. In other words, they become
new basic building blocks of the computer
metamedium that can now be combined with other
blocks.
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An example of such a successful combination of
media “genes” is an “image map” technique. This
technique emerged in the middle of the 1990s and
quickly become commonly used in numerous
interactive media projects, games, and web sites.
How does it work? A continuous raster image–
photograph, a drawing, a white background, or any
other part of a screen - is divided into a few invisible
parts. When a user clicks inside one of the parts, this
activates a hyperlink connected to this part.
As a hybrid, “image map” combines the technique of
hyperlinking with all the techniques for creating and
editing still images. Previously, hyperlinks were only
attached to a word or a phrase of text and they were
usually explicitly marked in some way to make them
visible – for instance, by underlying them. When
designers start attaching hyperlinks to parts of
continuous images or whole surfaces and hiding
them, a new “species” of media is born. As a new
species, it defines new types of user behavior and it
generates a new experience of media. Rather than
immediately being presented with clearly marked,
ready to be acted upon hyperlinks, a user now has to
explore the screen, mousing over and clicking until
she comes across a hyperlinked part. Rather than
thinking of hyperlinks as discrete locations inside a
“dead” screen, a user comes to think of the whole
screen as a “live” interactive surface. Rather than
imagining a hyperlink as something which is either
present or absent, a user may now experience it as a
continuous dimension, with some parts of a surface
being “more” strongly hyperlinked than others.
As we will see in detail in the next chapter, the new
language of visual design (graphic design, web
design, motion graphics, design cinema and so on)
that emerged in the second part of the 1990s offers
a particularly striking example of media hybridization
that follows its “softwarization.” Working in a
software environment, a designer has access to any
of the techniques of graphic design, typography,
painting, cinematography, animation, computer
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animation, vector drawing, and 3D modeling. She
also can use many new algorithmic techniques for
generating new visuals (such as particle systems or
procedural modeling) and transforming them (for
instance, image processing), which do not have
direct equivalent in physical or electronic media. All
these techniques are easily available within a small
number of media authoring programs (Photoshop,
Illustrator, Flash, Maya, Final Cut, After Effects, etc.)
and they can be easily combined within a single
design. This new “media condition” is directly
reflected in the new design language used today
around the world. The new “global aesthetics”
celebrates media hybridity and uses it to create
emotional impacts, drive narratives, and create user
experiences. In other words, it is all about hybridity.
To put this differently, it is the ability to combine
previously non-compatible techniques of different
media which is the single common feature of millions
of designs being created yearly by professionals and
students alike and seen on the web, in print, on big
and small screens, in built environments, and so on.
Like post-modernism of the 1980s and the web of
the 1990s, the process of transfer from physical
media to software has flattened history – in this
case, the history of modern media. That is, while the
historical origins of all building blocks that make up a
computer metamedium – or a particular hybrid maybe
still important in some cases, they play no
role in other cases. Clearly, for a media historian the
historical origins of all techniques now available in
media authoring software are important. They also
may be made important for the media users - if a
designer chooses to do this. For instance, in the logo
sequence for DC Comics created by Imaginary Forces
(2005), designers used exaggerated artifacts of print
and film to evoke particular historical periods in the
1920s century. But when we consider the actual
process of design – the ways in which designers
work to go from a sketch or a storyboard or an idea
in their head to a finished product – these historicals
origins no longer matter. When a designer opens her
computer and starts working, all this is
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incosequential. It does not matter if the technique
was originally developed as a part of the simulation
of physical or eletronic media, or not. Thus, a
camera pan, an aerial perspective, splines and
polygonal meshes, blur and sharpen filters, particle
systems – all of these have equal status as the
building blocks for new hybrids.
To summarize: thirty years after Kay and Goldberg
predicted that the new computer metamedium would
contain “a wide range of already existing and notyet-invented
media,” we can see clearly that their
prediction was correct. A computer metamedium has
indeed been systematically expanding. However, this
expansion should not be understood as simple
addition of more and more new media types.
Following the first stage where most already existing
media were simulated in software and a number of
new computer techniques for generating and editing
of media were invented – the stage that conceptually
and practically has been largely completed by the
late 1980s – we enter a new period governed by
hybridization. The already simulated media start
exchanging properties and techniques. As a result,
the computer metamedium is becoming to be filled
with endless new hybrids. In parallel, we do indeed
see a continuous process of the invention of the new
– but what is being invented are not whole new
media types but rather new elements and
constellations of elements which. As soon as they are
invented, these new elements and constellations
start interact with other already existing elements
and constellations. Thus, the processes of invention
and hybridization are closely linked and work
together.
This, in my view, is the key mechanism responsible
for evolution and expansion of the computer
metamedium from the late 1980s until now – and
right now I don’t see any reason why it would
change in the future. And while at the time when
Kay and Goldberg were writing their article the
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process of hybridization just barely started – the first
truly significant media hybrid being Aspen Movie Map
created at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in
1978-1979 – today it is what media design is all
about. Thus, from the point of view of today, the
computer metamedium is indeed an umbrella for
many things – but rather than containing a set of
separate media, it instead contains of a larger set of
smaller building blocks. These building blocks include
algorithms for media creation and editing, interface
metaphors, navigation techniques, physical
interaction techniques, data formats, and so on.
Over time, new elements are being invented and
placed inside the computer metamedium’s umbrella,
so to speak. Periodically people figure out new ways
in which some of the elements available can work
together, producing new hybrids. Some of these
hybrids may survive. Some may become new
conventions which are so omnipresent that they are
not perceived anymore as combinations of elements
which can be taken apart. Still others are forgotten only
to be sometimes reinvented again later.
Clearly, the building blocks, which together form a
computer metamedium, do not all have equal
importance and equal “linking” possibilities. Some
are used more frequently than others, entering in
many more combinations. (For example, currently a
virtual 3D camera is used much more widely than a
“tag cloud.”) In fact, some of the new elements may
become so important and influential that it seems no
longer appropriate to think of them as normal
elements. Instead, they may be more appropriately
called new “media dimensions” or “media platforms.”
3D virtual space, World Wide Web and geo media
(media which includes GPS coordinates) are three
examples of such new media dimensions or
platforms (popularized in the 1980s, 1990s, and
2000s, respectively). These media platforms do no
simply mix with other elements enabling new hybrids
– although they do it also. They fundamentally
reconfigure how all media is understood and how it
can be used. Thus, when we add spatial coordinates
to media objects (geo media), place these objects
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within a networked environment (the web), or when
we start using 3D space as a new platform to design
these objects, the identity of what we think of as
“media” changes in very fundamental ways. In fact,
some would say that these changes have been as
fundamental as the effects of media “softwarization”
in the first place.
But is it? There is no easy way to resolve this
question. Ultimately, it is a matter of perspective. If
we look at contemporary visual and spatial
aesthetics, in my view simulation of existing media
in software and the subsequent period of media
hybridization so far had much more substantial
effects on these aesthetics than the web. Similarly, if
we think about the histories of representation,
human semiosis, and visual communication, I do
think that the universal adoption of software
throughout global culture industries is at least as
importance as the invention of print, photography or
cinema. But if we are to focus on social and political
aspects of contemporary media culture and ignore
the questions of how media looks and what it can
represent – asking instead about who gets to create
and distribute media, how people understand
themselves and the world through media, etc. – we
may want to put networks (be it web of the 1990s,
social media of the 2000s, or whatever will come in
the future) in the center of discussions.
And yet, it is important to remember that without
software contemporary networks would not exist.
Logically and practically, software lies underneath
everything that comes later. If I disconnect my
laptop from Wi-Fi right now, I can still continue using
all applications on my laptop, including Word to write
this sentence. I can also edit images and video,
create a computer animation, design a fully
functional web site, and compose blog posts. But if
somebody disables software running the network, it
will go dead.83
In other words, without the underlying software
layers The Internet Galaxy (to quote the title of 2001
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book by Manual Castells) would not exist. Software is
what allows for media to exist on the web in the first
place: images and video embedded in web pages
and blogs, Flickr and YouTube, aerial photography
and 3D buildings in Google Earth, etc. Similarly, the
use of 3D virtual space as a platform for media
design (which will be discussed in the next chapter)
really means using a number of algorithms which
control virtual camera, position the objects in space
and calculate how they look in perspective, simulate
the spatial diffusion of light, and so on.
Hybrids Everywhere
The examples of media hybrids are all around us:
they can be found in user interfaces, web
applications, visual design, interactive design, visual
effects, locative media, digital art, interactive
environments, and other areas of digital culture.
Here are a few more examples that I have
deliberately drawn from different areas. Created in
2005 by Stamen Design, Mappr! was one the first
popular web mashups. It combined a geographic
map and photos from the popular photo sharing site
Flickr.84
Using information enterted by Flickr uses,
the application guessed geographical locations where
photos where taken and displays them on the map.
Since May 2007, Google Maps has offered Street
Views that add panoramic photo-based views of city
streets to other media types already used in Google
Maps.85
An interesting hybrid between photography
and interfaces for space navigation, Street Views
allow user can navigate though a space on a street
level using the arrows that appear in the views.86
Japanese media artist Masaki Fujihata created a
series of projects called Field Studies.87
These
projects place video recordings made in particular
places within highly abstracted 3D virtual spaces
representing these places. For instance, in Alsase
(2000) Fujihata recorded a number of video
interviews with the people living in and passing
through the area around the border between France
and Germany. Fujihata started to work on Field
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Studies already in 1990s - a decade before the term
“locative media” made its appearance. As cameras
with built in GPS did not yet commercially exist at
that time, the artist made a special video camera
which captured geographical coordinates of each
interview location along with the camera direction
and angle while he was video taping the interview. In
Alsase rectangles corresponding to video interviews
were placed within an empty 3D space that
contained only a handful of white lines corresponding
to artist’s movement through the geographical area
of the project. The user of the installation could
navigate through this space and when she would
click on one of the rectangles, it would play a video
interview. Each rectangle was positioned at a unique
angle that corresponded to the angle of the handheld
video camera during the interview.
In my view, Alsase represents a particularly
interesting media hybrid. It fuses photography (still
images which appear inside rectangles), video
documentary (video playing once a user clicks inside
a rectangle), the locative media (the movement
trajectories recorded by GPS) and 3D virtual space.
In addition, Alsace uses a new media technique
developed by Fujihata – the recording not just of the
2D location but also of the 3D orientation of the
camera.
The result is a new way to represent collective
experiences using 3D space as an overall coordinate
system - rather than, for instance, a narrative or a
database. At the same time, Fujihata found a simple
and elegant way to render the subjective and unique
nature of each video interview – situating each
rectangle at a particular angle that actually reflects
where camera was during the interview. Additionally,
by defining 3D space as an empty void containing
only trajectories of Fujihata’s movement through the
region, the artist introduced additional dimension of
subjectivity. Even today after Google Earth has made
3D navigation of space containing photos and video a
common experience, Alsace and other projects by
Fujihata continue to stand out. They show that to
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create a new kind of representation it is not enough
to simply “add” different media formats and
techniques together. Rather, it may be necessary to
systematically question the conventions of different
media types that make up a hybrid, changing their
structure in the process.
A well-known project I already mentioned - Invisible
Shape of Things Past by Joachim Sauter and his
company Art+Com - also uses 3D space as an
umbrella that contains other media types. As I
already discussed, the project maps historical film
clips of Berlin recorded throughout the 20th
century
into new spatial forms that are integrated into a 3D
navigable reconstruction of the city.88
The forms are
constructed by placing subsequent film frames one
behind another. In addition to being able to move
around the space and play the films, the user can
mix and match parts of Berlin by choosing from a
number of maps of Berlin, which represent city
development in different periods of the twentieth
century. Like Alsace, Invisible Shape combines a
number of common media types while changing their
structure. A video clip becomes a 3D object with a
unique shape. Rather than representing a territory as
it existed in a particular time, a map can mix parts of
the city as they existed in different times.
Another pioneering media hybrid created by Sauter
and Art+Com is Interactive Generative Stage (2002)
– a virtual set whose parameters are interactively
controlled by actors during the opera.89
During the
opera performance, computer reads the body
movements and gestures of the actors and uses this
information to control the generation of a virtual set
projected on a screen behind the stage. The
positions of a human body are mapped into various
parameters of a virtual architecture such as the
layout, texture, color, and light.
Sauter felt that it was important to preserve the
constraints of the traditional opera format – actors
foregrounded by lighting with the set behind them –
while carefully adding new dimensions to it.90
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Therefore, following the conventions of traditional
opera the virtual set appears as a backdrop behind
the actors – except now it not a static picture but a
dynamic architectural construction that changes
throughout the opera. As a result, the identity of a
theatrical space changes from that of a backdrop to
a main actor – and a very versatile actor at that
since throughout the opera it adopts different
personalities and continues to surprise the audience
with new behaviors. This kind of fundamental
redefinition of an element making a new hybrid is
rare, but when a designer is able to achieve this, the
result is very powerful.
Not every hybrid is necessary elegant, convincing, or
forward-looking. Some of the interfaces of popular
software applications for media creation and access
look like the work of an aspiring DJ who mixes
operations from the old interfaces of various media
with new GUI principles in somewhat erratic and
unpredictable ways. In my view, a striking example
of such a problematic hybrid is the interface of
Adobe Acrobat Reader. (Note that since the
interfaces of all commercial software applications
typically change from version to version, this
example refers to the versions of Adobe Acrobat
current at the time when this book was written.)
Acrobat UI combines interfaces metaphors from
variety of media traditions and technologies in a way
that, at least to me, does not always seem to be
logical. Within a single interface, we get 1) the
interface elements from analog media
recorders/players of the 20th
century, i.e. VCR-style
arrow buttons; 2) the interface element from image
editing software, i.e. a zoom tool; 3) the interface
elements which have strong association with print
tradition - although they never existed in print (page
icons also controlling the zoom factor); (4) the
elements which have existed in books (the
bookmarks window); (5) the standard elements of
GUI such as search, filter, multiple windows. It
seems that Acrobat designers wanted to give users
variety of ways to navigate though documents.
However, I personally find the co-presence of
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navigation techniques, which are normally used with
media other than print confusing. For instance, given
that Acrobat was designed to closely simulate the
experience with print documents, it is not clear to
me why I am asked to move through the pages by
clicking on forward and backward arrow – an
interface convention which is normally used for
moving image media.
The hybrids also do not necessary have to involve a
“deep” reconfiguration of previously separate media
languages and/or the common structures of media
objects – the way, for example, The Invisible Shape
reconfigures the structure of a film object. Consider
web mashups which “combine data elements from
multiple sources, hiding this behind a simple unified
graphical interface.91
For example, a popular
flickrvision 3D (David Troy, 2007) uses data provided
by Flickr and the virtual globe from Poly 9 FreeEarth
to create a mashup which continually shows the new
photos uploaded to Flickr attached to the virtual
globe in the places where photos’ are taken. Another
popular mashup LivePlazma (2005) uses Amazon
services and data to offer a “discovery engine.”
When a user selects an actor, a movie director, a
movie title, or a band name, LivePlazma generates
an interactive map that shows related actors, movie
directors, etc. related to the chosen item/name in
terms of style, epoch, influences, popularity, and
other dimensions.92
Although LivePlazma suggests
that the purpose of these maps is to lead you to
discover the items that you are also likely to like (so
you purchase them on amazon.com), these maps are
valuable in themselves. They use newly available
rich data about people’s cultural preferences and
behavior collected by Web 2.0 site such as Amazon
to do something that was not possible until 2000s.
That is, rather than mapping cultural relationships
based on the ideas of a single person or a group of
experts, they reveal how these relationships are
understood by the actual cultural consumers.
Visually, many mashups may appear as typical
multimedia documents – but they are more than
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that. As Wikipedia article on “mashup (web
application hybrid)” explains, “A site that allows a
user to embed a YouTube video for instance, is not a
mashup site… the site should itself access 3rd party
data using an API, and process that data in some
way to increase its value to the site’s users.”
(Emphasis mine – L.M.) Although the terms used by
the authors - processing data to increase its value –
may appear to be strictly and business like, they
actually capture the difference between multimedia
and hybrid media quite accurately. Paraphrasing the
article’s authors, we can say that in the case of a
truly successful artistic hybrids such as The invisible
Shape or Alsase, separate representational formats
(video, photography, 2D map, 3D virtual globe) and
media navigation techniques (playing a video,
zooming into a 2D document, moving around a space
using a virtual camera) are brought together in ways
which increase the value offered by each of the
media type used. However, in contrast to the web
mashups which started to appear in mass in 2006
when Amazon, Flickr, Google and other major web
companies offered public API (i.e., they made it
possible for others to use their services and some of
the data – for instance, using Google Maps as a part
of a mashup), these projects also use their own data
which the artists carefully selected or created
themselves. As a result, the artists have much more
control over the aesthetic experience and the
“personality” projected by their works than an author
of a mashup, which relies on both data and the
interfaces provided by other companies. (I am not
trying to criticize the web mashup phenomenon - I
only want to suggest that if an artist goal is to come
up with a really different representation model and a
really different aesthetic experiences, choosing from
the same set of web sources and data sources
available to everybody else may be not the right
solution. And the argument that web mashup author
acts as a DJ who creates by mixing what already
exists also does not work here – since a DJ has both
more control over the parameters of the mix, and
many more recordings to choose from.)
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Representation and Interface
As we see, media hybrids can be structured in
different ways and they can serve different functions.
But behind this diversity we can find a smaller
number of common goals shared by many if not
most hybrids. Firstly, hybrids may combine and/or
reconfigure familiar media formats and media
interfaces to offer new representations. For instance,
Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth combine
different media and interface techniques to provide
more comprehensive information about places when
either media can do by itself. The ambition behind
Alsase and Invisible Shape is different – not to
provide more information by combining existing
media formats but rather to reconfigure these
formats in order to create new representations of
human collective and individual experiences which
fuse objective and subjective dimensions. But in both
cases, we can say that the overall goal is to
represent something differently from the ways it was
represented differently.
Secondly, the hybrids may aim to provide new ways
of navigation and working with existing media
formats – in other words, i.e. new interfaces and
tools. For example, in UI of Acrobat Reader the
interface techniques which previously belonged to
specific physical, electronic, and digital media are
combined to offer the user more ways to navigate
and work with the electronic documents (i.e., PDF
files). Mappr! exemplifies a different version of this
strategy: using one media format as an interface to
another. In this case, a map serves as an interface
to a media collection, i.e. photos uploaded on Flickr.
(It also exemplifies a new trend within metamedium
evolution which has been becoming increasingly
important from the early 2000s onwards: a joining
between text, image, and video and spatial
representations such as GPS coordinates, maps, and
satellite photography – a trend which a German
media historian and theorist Tristan Thielmann called
“a spatial turn.”) LivePlazma offers yet another
version of this strategy: it uses techniques of
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interactive visualization to offer a new visual
interface to the amazon.com’s wealth of data.
You may notice that the distinction between a
“representation” (or a “media format”) and an
“interface/tool” corresponds to the two fundamental
components of all modern software: data structures
and algorithms. This is not accidental. Each tool
offered by a media authoring or media access
application is essentially an algorithm that either
processes in some way data in particular format or
generates new data in this format. Thus, “working
with media” using application software essentially
means running different algorithms over the data.
However, the experience of users is actually
different. Since today the majority of media
application users don’t know how to program, so
they never encounter the data structures directly.
Instead, they always work with data it a context of
some application that comes with its interface and
tools. Which means that as experienced by a user of
interactive application, “representation” consists
from two interlinked parts: media structured in
particular ways and the interfaces/tools provided to
navigate and work with this media. For example, a
“3D virtual space” as it defined in 3D computer
animation and CAD applications, computer games,
and virtual globes is not only a set of coordinates
that make up 3D objects and a perspective
transformation but also a set of navigation methods
– i.e. a virtual camera model. LivePlazma’s
interactive culture maps are not only relationships
between the items on the map which we can see but
also the tools provided to construct and navigate
these maps. And so on.
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PART 2: Software Takes Command
Chapter 3. After Effects, or How Cinema
Became Design
First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us - McLuhan, 1964.
Introduction
Having explored the logic of media hybridity using
examples drawn from different areas of digital
culture, I now want to test its true usefulness by
looking at a single area in depth. This area is moving
image design. A radically new visual language of
moving images emerged during the period of 1993-
1998 – which is the same period when filmmakers
and designers started systematically using media
authoring and editing software running on PCs.
Today this language dominates our visual culture.
We see it daily in commercials, music videos, motion
graphics, TV graphics, design cinema, interactive
interfaces of mobile phone and other devices, the
web, etc. Below we will look at what I perceive to be
some of its defining features: variable continuously
changing forms, use of 3D space as a common
platform for media design, and systematic
integration of previously non-compatible media
techniques.
How did this language come about? I believe that
looking at software involved in the production of
moving images goes a long way towards explaining
why they now look the way they do. Without such
analysis we will never be able to move beyond the
commonplace generalities about contemporary
culture – post-modern, global, remix, etc. – to
actually describe the particular languages of different
design areas, to understand the causes behind them
and their evolution over time. In other words, I think
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that “software theory” which this book aims to define
and put in practice is not a luxury but a necessity.
In this chapter I will analyze design and use of
particular software application that played the key
role in the emergence of this new visual language –
After Effects. Introduced in 1993, After Effects was
the first software designed to do animation,
compositing, and special effects on MAC and PC. Its
broad effect on moving image production can be
compared to the effects of Photoshop and Illustrator
on photography, illustration, and graphic design. As I
will show, After Effects’s UI and tools bring together
fundamental techniques, working methods, and
assumptions of previously separate fields of
filmmaking, animation and graphic design. This
hybrid production environment encapsulated in a
single software application finds a direct reflection in
the new visual language it enables - specifically, is
focus on exploring aesthetic, narrative, and affective
possibilities of hybridization.
The shift to software-based tools in the 1990s
affected not only moving image culture but also all
other areas of design. All of them adopted the same
type of production workflow. (When the project is big
and involves lots of people working on lots of files,
the production workflow is called “pipeline”). A
production process now typically involves either
combining elements created in different software
application, or moving the whole project from one
application to the next to take advantage of their
particular functions. And while each design field also
uses its own specialized applications (for instance,
web designers use Dreamweaver while architects use
Revit), they also all use a number of common
applications. They are Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash,
Final Cut, After Effects, Maya, and a few others. (If
you use open source software like Gimp and
Cinepaint instead of these commercial applications,
your list will be different but the principles would not
change).
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This adoption of this production environment that
consists from a small number of compatible
applications in all areas of creative industries had
many fundamental effects. The professional
boundaries between different design fields became
less important. A single designer or a small studio
may work on a music video today, a product design
tomorrow, an architectural project or a web site
design the day after, and so on. Another previously
fundamental distinction - scale of a project – also
now matters less, and sometimes not at al. Today
we can expect to find exactly the same shapes and
forms in very small objects (like jewelry), small and
medium size objects (table ware, furniture), large
buildings and even urban designs. (Zaha Hadid’s
lifestyle objects, furniure and architectual and urban
design illustrate this well.)
While a comprehensive discussions of these and
many other effects will take more than one book, in
this chapter I wil analyze one them – the effect of
which software-based workflow on contemporary
visual aesthetics. As we will see, this workflow
shapes contemporary visual culture in a number of
ways. On the one hand, never before in the history
of human visual communication have we witnessed
such a variety of forms as today. On the other hand,
exactly the same techniques, compositions and
iconography can now appear in any media. To
envoke the metaphor of biological evolution, we can
say that despite seemingly infinite diversity of
contemporary media, visual, and spatial “species,”
they all share some common DNAs. Besides these,
many of these species also share a basic design
principle: integration of previously non-compatible
techniques of media design – a process which in the
case of moving images I am going to name “deep
remixability.” Thus, a consideration of media
authoring software and its usage in production would
allow us to begin constructing a map of our current
media/design universe, seeing how its species are
related to each other and revealing the mechanisms
behind their evolution.
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The invisible revolution
During the heyday of post-modern debates, at least
one critic in America noticed the connection between
post-modern pastiche and computerization. In his
book After the Great Divide (1986), Andreas
Huyssen writes: “All modern and avantgardist
techniques, forms and images are now stored for
instant recall in the computerized memory banks of
our culture. But the same memory also stores all of
pre-modernist art as well as the genres, codes, and
image worlds of popular cultures and modern mass
culture.” 93
His analysis is accurate – except that
these “computerized memory banks” did not really
became commonplace for another fifteen years. Only
when the Web absorbed enough of the media
archives it became this universal cultural memory
bank accessible to all cultural producers. But even
for the professionals, the ability to easily integrate
multiple media sources within the same project –
multiple layers of video, scanned still images,
animation, graphics, and typography – only came
towards the end of the 1990s.
In 1985 when Huyssen book was in preparation for
publication I was working for one of the few
computer animation companies in the world called
Digital Effects.94
Each computer animator had his
own interactive graphics terminal that could show 3D
models but only in wireframe and in monochrome; to
see them fully rendered in color, we had to take
turns as the company had only one color raster
display which we all shared. The data was stored on
bulky magnetic tapes about a feet in diameter; to
find the data from an old job was a cumbersome
process which involved locating the right tape in tape
library, putting it on a tape drive and then searching
for the right part of the tape. We did not had a color
scanner, so getting “all modern and avantgardist
techniques, forms and images” into the computer
was far from trivial. And even if we had one, there
was no way to store, recall and modify these images.
The machine that could do that – Quantel Paintbox –
cost over USD 160,000, which we could not afford.
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And when in 1986 Quantel introduced Harry, the first
commercial non-linear editing system which allowed
for digital compositing of multiple layers of video and
special effects, its cost similarly made it prohibitive
for everybody expect network television stations and
a few production houses. Harry could record only
eighty seconds of broadcast quality video. In the
realm of still images, things were not much better:
for instance, digital still store Picturebox released by
Quantel in 1990 could hold only 500 broadcast
quality images and it cost was similarly very high.
In short, in the middle of the 1980s neither we nor
other production companies had anything
approachable “computerized memory banks”
imagined by Huyssen. And of course, the same was
true for the visual artists that were when associated
with post-modernism and the ideas of pastiche,
collage and appropriation. In 1986 BBC produced
documentary Painting with Light for which half a
dozen well-known painters including Richard
Hamilton and David Hockney were invited to work
with Quantel Paintbox. The resulting images were
not so different from the normal paintings that these
artists were producing without a computer. And
while some artists were making references to
“modern and avantgardist techniques, forms and
images,” these references were painted rather than
being directly loaded from “computerized memory
banks.” Only about ten years later, when relatively
inexpensive graphics workstations and personal
computers running image editing, animation,
compositing and illustration software became
commonplace and affordable for freelance graphic
designers, illustrators, and small post-production and
animation studious, the situation described by
Huyssen started to become a reality.
The results were dramatic. Within the space of less
than five years, modern visual culture was
fundamentally transformed. Visuals which previously
were specific to differenly media - live action
cinematography, graphics, still photography,
animation, 3D computer animation, and typography
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– started to be combined in numerous ways. By the
end of the decade, the “pure” moving image media
became an exception and hybrid media became the
norm. However, in contrast to other computer
revolutions such as the rise of World Wide Web
around the same time, this revolution was not
acknowledged by popular media or by cultural critics.
What received attention were the developments that
affected narrative filmmaking – the use of computerproduced
special effects in Hollywood feature films or
the inexpensive digital video and editing tools
outside of it. But another process which happened on
a larger scale - the transformation of the visual
language used by all forms of moving images outside
of narrative films – has not been critically analyzed.
In fact, while the results of these transformations
have become fully visible by about 1998, at the time
of this writing (2008) I am not aware of a single
theoretical article discussing them.
One of the reasons is that in this revolution no new
media per se were created. Just as ten years ago,
the designers were making still images and moving
images. But the aesthetics of these images was now
very different. In fact, it was so new that, in
retrospect, the post-modern imagery of just ten
years ago that at the time looked strikingly different
now appears as a barely noticeable blip on the radar
of cultural history.
Visual Hybridity
The new hybrid visual language of moving images
emerged during the period of 1993-1998. Today it is
everywhere. While narrative features still mostly use
live-action footage, and videos shot by “consumers”
and “prosumers” with commercial video cameras and
cell phones are similarly usually left as is (at least,
for now), almost everything else is hybrid. This
includes commercials, music videos, TV graphics,
film tites, dynamic menus, animated Flash web
pages, graphics for mobile media content, and other
types of animated, short non-narrative films and
moving-image sequences being produced around the
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world today by media professionals, including
companies, individual designers and artists, and
students. I believe that at least 80 percent of such
moving image sequences, animated interfaces and
short films follow the aesthetics of hybridity.
Of course, I could have picked the different dates,
for instance starting a few years earlier - but since
After Effects software which will play the key role in
my account was released in 1993, I decided to pick
this year as my first date. And while my second date
also could have been different, I believe that by
1998 the broad changes in the aesthetics of moving
image became visible. If you want to quickly see this
for yourself, simply compare demo reels from the
same visual effects companies made in early 1990s
and late 1990s (a number of them are available
online – look for instance at the work of Pacific Data
Images.95
) In the work from the beginning of the
decade, computer imagery in most cases appears by
itself – that is, we see whole commercials and
promotional videos done in 3D computer animation,
and the novelty of this new media is foregrounded.
By the end of the 1990s, computer animation
becomes just one element integrated in the media
mix that also includes live action, typography, and
design.
Although these transformations happened only
recently, the ubiquity of the new hybrid visual
language today is such that it takes an effort to
recall how different things looked before. Similarly,
the changes in production processes and equipment
that made this language possible also quickly fade
from both the public and professional memory. As a
way to quick evoke these changes as seen from the
professional perspective, I am going to quote from
2004 interview with Mindi Lipschultz who has worked
as an editor, producer and director in Los Angeles
since 1979:
If you wanted to be more creative [in the 1980s],
you couldn’t just add more software to your system.
You had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
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and buy a paintbox. If you wanted to do something
graphic – an open to a TV show with a lot of layers –
you had to go to an editing house and spend over a
thousand dollars an hour to do the exact same thing
you do now by buying an inexpensive computer and
several software programs. Now with Adobe After
Effects and Photoshop, you can do everything in one
sweep. You can edit, design, animate. You can do 3D
or 2D all on your desktop computer at home or in a
small office.96
In the 1989 former Soviet satellites of Central and
Eastern Europe have peacefully liberated themselves
from the Soviet Union. In the case of
Czechoslovakia, this event came to be referred as
Velvet Revolution – to contrast it to typical
revolutions in modern history that were always
accompanied by bloodshed. To emphasize the
gradual, almost invisible pace of the transformations
which occurred in moving image aesthetics between
approximately 1993 and 1998, I am going to
appropriate the term Velvet Revolution to refer to
these transformations.
Although the Velvet Revolution I will be discussing
involved many technological and social developments
– hardware, software, production practices, new job
titles and new professional fields – it is appropriate
to highlight one software package as being in the
center of the events. This software is After Effects.
Introduced in 1993, After Effects was the first
software designed to do animation, compositing, and
special effects on the personal computer.97
Its broad
effect on moving image production can be compared
to the effects of Photoshop and Illustrator on
photography, illustration, and graphic design.
Although today (2008) media design and postproduction
companies still continue to rely on more
expensive “high-end” software such as Flame,
Inferno or Paintbox that run on specialized graphics
workstations, because of its affordability and length
of time on the market After Effects is the most
popular and well-known application in this area.
Consequently, After Effects will be given a privileged
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 101
role in this account as both the symbol and the key
material foundation which made Velvet Revolution in
moving image culture possible – even though today
other programs in the similar price category such as
Apple’s Motion, Autodesk’s Combustion, and Adobe’s
Flash have challenged After Effects dominance.
Finally, before proceeding I should explain my use of
examples. The visual language I am analyzing is all
around us today (this may explain why academics
have remained blind to it). After globalization, this
language is spoken by communication professionals
in dozens of countries around the world. You can see
for yourself all the examples of various aesthetics I
will be mentioning below by simply watching
television and paying attention to graphics, or going
to a club to see a VJ performance, or visiting the web
sites of motion graphics designers and visual effects
companies, or opening any book on contemporary
design. Nevertheless, below I have included titles of
particular projects so the reader can see exactly
what I am referring to.98
But since my goal is to
describe the new cultural language that by now has
become practically universal, I want to emphasize
that each of these examples can be substituted by
numerous others.
Examples
The use of After Effects is closely identified with a
particular type of moving images which became
commonplace to a large part because of this
software – “motion graphics.” Concisely defined by
2003 Matt Frantz in his Master Thesis as “designed
non-narrative, non-figurative based visuals that
change over time,”99
motion graphics include film
and television titles, TV graphics, dynamic menus,
the graphics for mobile media content, and other
animated sequences. Typically motion graphics
appear as parts of longer pieces: commercials, music
videos, training videos, narrative and documentary
films, interactive projects. Or at least, this is how it
was in 1993; since that time the boundary between
motion graphics and everything else has
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progressively become harder to define. Thus, in
2008 version of the Wikipedia article about motion
graphics, the authors already wrote that “The term
"motion graphics" has the potential for less
ambiguity than the use of the term film to describe
moving pictures in the 21st century.”100
)
One of the key identifying features of motion
graphics in the 1990s that used to clearly separate it
from other forms of moving image was a central role
played by dynamic typography. The term “motion
graphics” has been used at least since 1960 when a
pioneer of computer filmmaking John Whitney
named his new company Motion Graphics. However
until Velvet Revolution only a handful of people and
companies have systematically explored the art of
animated typography: Norman McLaren, Saul Blass,
Pablo Ferro, R/Greenberg, and a few others.101
But in
the middle of the 1990s moving image sequences or
short films dominated by moving animated type and
abstract graphical elements rather than by live
action started to be produced in large numbers. The
material cause for motion graphics take off? After
Effects and other related software running on PCs or
relatively inexpensive graphics workstations became
affordable to smaller design, visual effects, postproduction
houses, and soon individual designers.
Almost overnight, the term “motion graphics”
became well known. (As Wikipedia article about this
term points out, “The term "Motion Graphics" was
popularized by Trish and Chris Meyer's book about
the use of Adobe After Effects titled "Creating Motion
Graphics.”102
) The five hundred year old Guttenberg
universe came into motion.
Along with typography, the whole language of
twentieth graphical century design was “imported”
into moving image design. This development did not
receive a name of its own which would become as
popular, but it is obviously at least as important.
(Although the term “design cinema” has been used,
it never achieved anything comparable to the
popularity of “motion graphics.”) So while motion
graphics were for years limited to film titles and
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therefore focused on typography, today the term
“motion graphics” is often used to moving image
sequences that are dominated by typography and/or
design. But we should recall that while in the
twentieth century typography was indeed often used
in combination with other design elements, for five
hundred years it formed its own word. Therefore I
think it is important to consider the two kinds of
“import” operations that took place during Velvet
Revolution – typography and twentieth century
graphic design – as two distinct historical
developments.
While motion graphics definitely exemplify the
changes that took place during Velvet Revolution,
these changes are more broad. Simply put, the
result of Velvet Revolution is a new hybrid visual
language of moving images in general. This language
is not confined to particular media forms. And while
today it manifests itself most clearly in non-narrative
forms, it is also often present in narrative and
figurative sequences and films.
Here are a few examples. A music video may use live
action while also employing typography and a variety
of transitions done with computer graphics (video for
“Go” by Common, directed by Convert/MK12/Kanye
West, 2005). Another music video may embed the
singer within an animated painterly space (video for
Sheryl Crow’s “Good Is Good,” directed by Psyop,
2005). A short film may mix typography, stylized 3D
graphics, moving design elements, and video (Itsu
for Plaid, directed by the Pleix collective, 2002103
).
(Sometimes, a term “design cinema” I already
mentioned is used to differentiate such short
independent films organized around design,
typography and computer animation rather than live
action from similar “motion graphics” works
produced for commercial clients.)
In some cases, the juxtaposition of different media is
clearly visible (video for “Don’t Panic” by Coldplay,
2001; main title for the television show The Inside
by Imaginary Forces, 2005). In other cases, a
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sequence may move between different media so
quickly that the shifts are barely noticeable (GMC
Denali “Holes” commercial by Imaginary Forces,
2005). Yet in other cases, a commercial or a movie
title may feature continuous action shot on video or
film, with the image periodically changing from a
more natural to a highly stylized look.
Such media hybridity does not necessary manifest
itself in a collage-like aesthetics that foregrounds the
juxtaposition of different media and different media
techniques. As a very different example of what
media hybridity can result in, consider a more subtle
aesthetics well captured by the name of the software
that to a large extent made the hybrid visual
language possible: After Effects. This name has
anticipated the changes in visual effects which only
took place a number of years later. in the 1990s
computers were used to create highly spectacular
special effects or “invisible effects,”104
toward the
end of that decade we see something else emerging:
a new visual aesthetics that goes “beyond effects.”
In this aesthetics, the whole project—whether a
music video, a TV commercial, a short film, or a
large segment of a feature film—displays a hyperreal
look in which the enhancement of live-action
material is not completely invisible but at the same
time it does not call attention to itself the way
special effects usually tended to do (examples:
Reebok I-Pump “Basketball Black” commercial and
The Legend of Zorro main title, both by Imaginary
Forces, 2005).
Although the particular aesthetic solutions vary from
one video to the next and from one designer to
another, they all share the same logic: the
simultaneous appearance of multiple media within
the same frame. Whether these media are openly
juxtaposed or almost seamlessly blended together is
less important than the fact of this co-presence
itself. (Again, note that each of the examples above
can be substituted by numerous others.)
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Hybrid visual language is also now common to a
large proportion of short “experimental” and
“independent” (i.e., not commissioned by
commercial clients) videos being produced for media
festivals, the web, mobile media devices, and other
distribution platforms.105
Many visuals created by VJs
and “live cinema” artists are also hybrid, combining
video, layers of 2D imagery, animation, and abstract
imagery generated in real time.106
And as the
animations of artists Jeremy Blake, Ann Lislegaard,
and Takeshi Murata that I will discuss below
demonstrate, at least some of the works created
explicitly for art-world distribution similarly choose to
use the same language of hybridity.
Today, narrative features rarely mix different
graphical styles within the same frame. However, a
gradually growing number of films do feature the
kind of highly stylized aesthetics that would have
previously been identified with illustration rather
than filmmaking: Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Matrix
series (1999–2003), Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City
(2005), and Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007). These
feature films are a part of a growing trend to shoot a
large portion of the film using a “digital backlot”
(green screen).107
Consequently, most or all shots in
such films are created by composing the footage of
actors with computer-generated sets and other
visuals.
These films do not juxtapose their different media in
as dramatic a way as what we commonly see in
motion graphics. Nor do they strive for the seamless
integration of CGI (computer-generated imagery)
visuals and live action that characterized the earlier
special-effects features of the 1990s, such as
Terminator 2 (1991) and Titanic (1997) (both by
James Cameron). Instead, they explore the space in
between juxtaposition and complete integration.
Matrix, Sin City, 300, and other films shot on a
digital backlot combine multiple media to create a
new stylized aesthetics that cannot be reduced to the
already familiar look of live-action cinematography or
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3D computer animation. Such films display exactly
the same logic as short motion graphics works,
which at first sight might appear to be very different.
This logic is also the same one we observe in the
creation of new hybrids in biology. That is, the result
of the hybridization process is not simply a
mechanical sum of the previously existing parts but
a new “species”—a new kind of visual aesthetics that
did not exist previously.
Media Hybridity in Sodium Fox and Untitled (Pink
Dot)
Blake’s Sodium Fox and Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot)
(both 2005) offer excellent examples of the new
hybrid visual language that currently dominates
moving-image culture. Among the many well-known
artists working with moving images today, Blake was
the earliest and most successful in developing his
own style of hybrid media. His video Sodium Fox is a
sophisticated blend of drawings, paintings, 2D
animation, photography, and effects available in
software. Using a strategy commonly employed by
artists in relation to commercial media in the
twentieth century, Blake slows down the fast-paced
rhythm of motion graphics as they are usually
practiced today. However, despite the seemingly
slow pace of his film, it is as informationally dense as
the most frantically changing motion graphics such
as one may find in clubs, music videos, television
station IDs, and so on. Sodium Fox creates this
density by exploring in an original way the basic
feature of the software-based production
environment in general and programs such as After
Effects in particular, namely, the construction of an
image from potentially numerous layers. Of course,
traditional cel animation as practiced in the twentieth
century also involved building up an image from a
number of superimposed transparent cells, with each
one containing some of the elements that together
make up the whole image. For instance, one cel
could contain a face, another lips, a third hair, yet
another a car, and so on.
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With computer software, however, designers can
precisely control the transparency of each layer;
they can also add different visual effects, such as
blur, between layers. As a result, rather than
creating a visual narrative based on the motion of
visual elements through space (as was common in
twentieth-century animation, both commercial and
experimental), designers now have many new ways
to create visual changes. Exploring these
possibilities, Blake crafts his own visual language in
which visual elements positioned on different layers
are continuously and gradually “written over” each
other. If we connect this new language to twentiethcentury
cinema rather than to cel animation, we can
say that rather than fading in a new frame as a
whole, Blake continuously fades in separate parts of
an image. The result is an aesthetics that balances
visual continuity with a constant rhythm of visual
rewriting, erasing, and gradual superimposition.
Like Sodium Fox, Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot) also
develops its own language within the general
paradigm of media hybridity. Murata creates a
pulsating and breathing image that has a distinctly
biological feel to it. In the last decade, many
designers and artists have used biologically inspired
algorithms and techniques to create animal-like
movements in their generative animations and
interactives. However, in the case of Untitled (Pink
Dot), the image as a whole seems to come to life.
To create this pulsating, breathing-like rhythm,
Murata transforms live-action footage (scenes from
one of the Rambo films) into a flow of abstract color
patches (sometimes they look like oversize pixels,
and at other times they may be taken for artifacts of
heavy image compression). But this transformation
never settles into a final state. Instead, Murata
constantly adjusts its degree. (In terms of the
interfaces of media software, this would correspond
to animating a setting of a filter or an effect). One
moment we see almost unprocessed live imagery;
the next moment it becomes a completely abstract
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pattern; the following moment parts of the live
image again become visible, and so on.
In Untitled (Pink Dot) the general condition of media
hybridity is realized as a permanent metamorphosis.
True, we still see some echoes of movement through
space, which was the core method of pre-digital
animation. (Here this is the movement of the figures
in the live footage from Rambo.) But now the real
change that matters is the one between different
media aesthetics: between the texture of a film and
the pulsating abstract patterns of flowing patches of
color, between the original “liveness” of human
figures in action as captured on film and the highly
exaggerated artificial liveness they generate when
processed by a machine.
Visually, Untitled (Pink Dot) and Sodium Fox do not
have much in common. However, as we can see,
both films share the same strategy: creating a visual
narrative through continuous transformations of
image layers, as opposed to discrete movements of
graphical marks or characters, which was common to
both the classic commercial animation of Disney and
the experimental classics of Norman McLaren, Oskar
Fischinger, and others. Although we can assume that
neither Blake nor Murata has aimed to achieve this
consciously, in different ways each artist stages for
us the key technical and conceptual change that
defines the new era of media hybridity. Media
software allows the designer to combine any number
of visual elements regardless of their original media
and to control each element in the process. This
basic ability can be explored through numerous
visual aesthetics. The films of Blake and Murata, with
their different temporal rhythms and different logics
of media combination, exemplify this diversity. Blake
layers over various still graphics, text, animation,
and effects, dissolving elements in and out. Murata
processes live footage to create a constant image
flow in which the two layers—live footage and its
processed result—seem to constantly push each
other out.
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Deep Remixability
I believe that “media hybridity” constitutes a new
fundamental stage in the history of media. It
manifests itself in different areas of culture and not
only moving images – although the later does offer a
particularly striking example of this new cultural logic
at work. Here media authoring software environment
became a kind of Petri dish where the techniques
and tools of computer animation, live
cinematography, graphic design, 2D animation,
typography, painting and drawing can interact,
generating new hybrids. And as the examples above
demonstrate, the result of this process of hybridity
are new aesthetics and new “media species” which
cannot be reduced to the sum of media that went
into them.
Can we understand the new hybrid language of
moving image as a type of remix? I believe so—if we
make one crucial distinction. Typical remix combines
content within the same media or content from
different media. For instance, a music remix may
combine music elements from any number of artists;
anime music videos may combine parts of anime
films and music taken from a music video.
Professionally produced motion graphics and other
moving-image projects also routinely mix together
content in the same media and/or from different
media. For example, in the beginning of the “Go”
music video, the video rapidly switches between liveaction
footage of a room and a 3D model of the
same room. Later, the live-action shots also
incorporate a computer-generated plant and a still
photographic image of mountain landscape. Shots of
a female dancer are combined with elaborate
animated typography. The human characters are
transformed into abstract animated patterns. And so
on.
Such remixes of content from different media are
definitely common today in moving-image culture. In
fact, I begun discussing the new visual language by
pointing out that in the case of short forms such
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 110
remixes now constitute a rule rather than exception.
But this type of remix is only one aspect of “hybrid
revolution” For me, its essence lies in something
else. Let’s call it “deep remixability.” For what gets
remixed today is not only content from different
media but also their fundamental techniques,
working methods, and ways of representation and
expression. United within the common software
environment, the languages of cinematography,
animation, computer animation, special effects,
graphic design, and typography have come to form a
new metalanguage. A work produced in this new
metalanguage can use all the techniques, or any
subset of these techniques, that were previously
unique to these different media.
We may think of this new metalanguage of moving
images as a large library of all previously known
techniques for creating and modifying moving
images. A designer of moving images selects
techniques from this library and combines them in a
single sequence or a single frame. But this clear
picture is deceptive. How exactly she combines these
techniques? When you remix content, it is easy to
imagine: different texts, audio samples, visual
elements, or data streams are positioned side by
side. Imagine a typical 20th
century collage except
that it is now moves and changes over time. But how
do you remix the techniques?
In the cases of hybrid media interfaces which we
have already analyzed (such as Acrobat interface),
“remix” means simple combination. Different
techniques literally appear next to each in application
UI. Thus, in Acrobat, a forward and backward
buttons, a zoom button, a “find” tool and others are
positioned one after another on a toolbar above the
open document. Other techniques appear as tools
listed in vertical pull-down menus: spell, search,
email, print, and so on. We find the same principles
in interfaces of all media authoring and access
applications. The techniques borrowed from various
media and the new born-digital techniques are
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 111
presented side-by-side using tool bars, pull-down
menus, toolboxes and other conventions of UI.
Such “addition of techniques” which exist in a single
space side by side without any deep interactions is
also indirectly present in remixes of content well
familiar to us, be it fashion designs, architecture,
collages, or motion graphics. Consider a hypothetical
example of a visual design which combines drawn
elements, photos, and 3D computer graphics forms.
Each of these visual elements is a result of the use of
particular media techniques of drawing, photography
and computer graphics. Thus, while we may refer to
such cultural objects as remixes of content, we are
also justified in thinking about them as remixes of
techniques. This applies equally well to pre-digital
design when designer would use separate physical
tools or machines, and to contemporary softwaredriven
design where she has access to all these tools
in a few compatible software applications.
As long as the pieces of content, interface buttons,
or techniques are simply added rather than
integrated, we don’t need a special term such as
“deep remix. This, for me, is still “remix” the way
this term is used commonly used. But in the case of
moving image aesthetics we also encounter
something like. Rather than a simple addition, we
also find interactions between previously separate
techniques of cell animation, cinematography, 3D
animation, design, and so on – interactions which
were unthinkable before. (The same argument can
be made in relation to other types of cultural objects
and experiences created with media authoring
software such as visual designs and music.)
I believe that this is something that neither pioneers
of computer media of the 1960s-1970s nor the
designers of first media authoring applications that
started to appear in the 1980s were planning.
However, once all media techniques met within the
same software environment—and this was gradually
accomplished throughout the 1990s—they started
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interacting in ways that could never have been
predicted or even imagined previously.
For instance, while particular media techniques
continue to be used in relation to their original
media, they can also be applied to other media. Here
are a few examples of this “crossover effect.” Type is
choreographed to move in 3D space; motion blur is
applied to 3D computer graphics; algorithmically
generated fields of particles are blended with liveaction
footage to give it an enhanced look; a virtual
camera is made to move around a virtual space filled
with 2D drawings. In each of these examples, the
technique that was originally associated with a
particular medium—cinema, cel animation,
photorealistic computer graphics, typography,
graphic design—is now applied to a different media
type. Today a typical short film or a sequence may
combine many of such pairings within the same
frame. The result is a hybrid, intricate, complex, and
rich media language – or rather, numerous
languages that share the logic of deep remixabilty.
In fact, such interactions among virtualized media
techniques define the aesthetics of contemporary
moving image culture. This is why I have decided to
introduce a special term—deep remixability. I wanted
to differentiate more complex forms of interactions
between techniques (such as cross-over) from the
simple remix (i.e. addition) of media content and
media techniques with which we are all familiar, be it
music remixes, anime video remixes, 1980s
postmodern art and architecture, and so on.
For concrete examples of the “crossover effect,”
which exemplifies deep remixability, we can return to
the same “Go” video and look at it again, but now
from a new perspective. Previously I have pointed
the ways in which this video – typical for short
format moving images works today – combines
visual elements of different media types: live action
video, still photographs, procedurally generated
elements, typography, etc. However, exactly the
same shots also contain rich examples of the
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interactions between techniques, which are only
possible in a software-driven design environment.
As the video begins, a structure made up from
perpendicular monochrome blocks and panels
simultaneously rapidly grows in space and rotates to
settle into a position which allows us to recognize it
as a room (00:07 – 00:11). As this move is being
completed, the room is transformed from an abstract
geometric structure into a photorealistically rendered
once: furniture pops in, wood texture roils over the
floor plane, and a photograph of a mountain view
fills a window. Although such different styles of CG
rendering have been available in animation software
since the 1980s, a particular way in which this video
opens with a visually striking abstract monochrome
3D structure is a clear example of deep remixability.
When in the middle of the 1990s graphic designers
started to use computer animation software, they
brought their training, techniques and sensibilities to
computer animation that until that time was used in
the service of photorealism. The strong diagonal
compositions, the deliberate flat rendering, and the
choice of colors in the opening of “Go” video
subordinates CG photorealistic techniques to a visual
discipline specific to modern graphic design. The
animated 3D structure references suprematism of
Malevich and Lissitzky that played a key role in
shaping the grammar of modern design – and which,
in our example, has become a conceptual “filter”
which transformed CG field.
After a momentary stop to let us take in the room,
which is now largely completed, a camera suddenly
rotates 900
(00:15 – 00:17). This physically
impossible camera move is another example of deep
remixability. While animation software implements
the standard grammar of 20th
century
cinematography – a pan, a zoon, a dolly, etc. – the
software, of course, does not have the limitations of
a physical world. Consequently a camera can move
in arbitrary direction, follow any imaginable curve
and do this at any speed. Such impossible camera
moves become standard tools of contemporary
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media design and 21st
century cinematography,
appearing with increased frequency in feature films
since the middle of 2000s. Just as Photoshop filters
which can be applied to any visual composition,
virtual camera moves can also be superimposed, so
to speak, on any visual scene regardless of whether
it was constructed in 3D, procedurally generated,
captured on video, photographed, or drawn - or, as
in the example of the room from “Go” video, is a
combination of these different media.
Playing video forward (00:15 – 00:22), we notice yet
another previously impossible interaction between
media techniques. The interaction in question is a
lens reflection, which is slowly moving across the
whole scene. Originally an artifact of a camera
technology, lens reflection was turned into a filter –
i.e., a technique which can now be “drawn” over any
image constructed with all other techniques available
to a designer. (This important type of software
techniques which originated as artifacts of physical
or electronic media technologies will be discussed in
more details in the concluding section of this
chapter.) If you wanted more proof that we are
dealing here with a visual technique, note that this
“lens reflection” is moving while the camera remains
perfectly still (00:17 – 00:22) – a logical
impossibility, which is sacrificed in favor of a more
dynamic visual experience.
Metalanguage and Metamedium
I referred to the new language of moving imaging as
a “metalanguage.” What does that mean? What is
the connection between this term as I am using here
and a “computer metamedium”?
The acceleration of the speed of social, technological
and cultural changes in the second part of the 20th
century has led to the frequent use of meta-, hyper-,
and super- in cultural theory and criticism. From
1960s Superstudio (a conceptual architectural
group), Ted Nelson’s Hypermedia and Alan Kay’s
metamedium to more recent Supermodernism and
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Hypermodernity108
, these terms may be read as
attempts to capture the feeling that we have passed
a point of singularity and are now moving at warp
speed. Like the cosmonauts of the 1960s observing
the Earth from the orbits of their spaceships and
seeing it for the first time as a single object, we are
looking down at human history from a new higher
orbit while moving forward. This connotation seems
to fit Alan Kay’s conceptual and practical redefinition
of a digital computer as a “metamedium” which
contains most of the existing medium technologies
and techniques and also allows invention of many
new ones.
While the term “metalanguage” has precise
meanings in logic, linguistics and computing, here I
am using in a sense similar to Alan Kay’s use of
“meta” in “computer metamedium.” Normally a
“metalanguage” refers to a separate formal system
for describing mediums or cultural languages - the
way a grammar describes how a particular natural
language works. But this not how Kay uses “meta” in
“metamedium.” As he uses it, it stands for gathering
/ including / collecting – in short, bringing previously
separate things together.
Let us imagine this computer metamedium as a large
and continuously expanding set of resources. It
includes all media creation and manipulation
techniques, interaction techniques and data formats
available to programmers and designers in the
current historical moment. Everything from sort and
search algorithms and pull-down menus to hair and
water rendering techniques, video games AI, and
multi-touch interface methods – its all there.
If we look at how these resources are used in
different cultural areas to create particular kinds of
contents and experiences, we will see that each of
them only uses a subset of these resources. For
example, today Graphical interfaces which come with
all popular computer operating systems (Windows,
Lunix, Mac OS) use static icons. In contrast, in some
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consumer electronics interfaces (such as certain
mobile phones) all icons are animated loops.
Moreover, the use of a subset of all existing
elements is not random but follows particular
conventions. Some elements always go together. In
other cases, the use of one element means that we
are unlikely to find some other element. In other
words, not only different forms of digital media use
different subsets from a complete set which makes a
computer metamedium but this use also follows
distinct patterns.
If you notice a parallel with what cultural critics
usually call an “artistic language,” a “style,” or a
“genre,” you are right. Any single work of literature
or works of a particular author or a literary
movement uses only some of the all existing literary
techniques and this use follows some patterns. The
same goes for cinema, music and all other
recognized cultural forms. This allows us to talk
about a style of a particular novel or a film, or a style
of an author as a whole, or a style of a whole artistic
school. (Film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson call this a “stylistic system” which they
define as a “patterned and significant use of
techniques.” They divide these techniques into four
categories: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing,
and sound.109
) When a whole cultural field can be
divided into a small number of distinct groups of
works with each group sharing some patterns, we
usually talk about “genres.” For instance,
theoreticians of Ancient Greek theatre distinguished
between comedies and tragedies and prescribed the
rules each genre should follow, while today
companies use automatic software to classify blogs
into different genres.
If by medium we mean a set of standard
technological resources, be it a physical stage or a
film camera, lights and film stock, we can see that
each medium usually supports multiple artistic
languages / styles / genres. For example, a medium
of 20th
century filmmaking supported Russian
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Montage of the 1920s, Italian Neorealism of the
1940s, French New Wave of the 1960s, Hong Kong
fantasy kong-fu films of the 1980s, Chinese, “fifthgeneration”
films of the 1980s-1990s, etc.
Similarly, a computer metamedium can support
multiple cultural or artistic metalanguages. In other
words, in the theoretical scheme I am proposing,
there is only one metamedium - but many
metalanguages.
So what is a metalanguage? If we define artistic
language as a patterned use of a selected number of
a subset of the techniques available in a given
medium110
, a metalanguage is a patterned use of a
subset of all the techniques available in a computer
metamedium. But not just any subset. It only makes
sense to talk about a metalangauge (as opposed to a
language) if the techniques it uses come from
previously distinct cultural languages. As an
example, consider a metalanguage of popular
commercial virtual globes (Google Earth and
Microsoft Virtual Earth). These applications 1)
systematically combine different types of media
formats and media navigation techniques that
previously existed separately; and 2) these
combinations follow common patterns. Another
example will be a metalanguage common to many
graphical user interface uses (recall my analysis of
Acrobat interface which combines metaphors drawn
from different media traditions).
Since moving images today systematically combine
techniques of different visual media which almost
never met until middle of the 1990s, we are justified
in using the term “metalanguage” in their case.
Visual design today has its own metalanguge, which
is a subset of the metalanguage of moving images.
The reason is that a designer of moving images has
access to all the techniques of a visual designer plus
additional techniques since she is working with
additional dimension of time. These two
metalanguages also largely overlap in patterns that
are common to them – but there are also some
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important differences. For instance, today moving
image works often feature a continuous movement
through a 3D space that may contain various 2D
elements. In contrast, visual designs for print, web,
products or other applications are usually 2D – they
assemble elements either over an imaginary flat
surface. (I think that the main reason for this
insistence on flatness is that these designs often
exist next to large blocks of text that already exist in
2D.)
Layers, Transparency, Compositing
So far I have focused on describing the aesthetics of
moving images that emerged from the Velvet
Revolution. While continuing this investigation, we
will now pay more attention to the analysis of new
software production environment that made this
aesthetics possible. The following sections of this
chapter will look at the tools offered by After Effects
and other media authoring applications, their user
interfaces, and the ways these applications are used
together in production (i.e., design workflow). Rather
than discussing all of tools and interface features, I
will highlight a number of fundamental assumptions
behind them – ways of understanding of what a
moving image project is, which, as we will see, are
quite different from how it was understood during
the 20th
century.
Probably the most dramatic among the changes that
took place during 1993-1998 was the new ability to
combine together multiple levels of imagery with
varying degree of transparency via digital
compositing. If you compare a typical music video or
a TV advertising spot circa 1986 with their
counterparts circa 1996, the differences are striking.
(The same holds for other areas of visual design.) As
I already noted, in 1986 “computerized memory
banks” were very limited in their storage capacity
and prohibitively expensive, and therefore designers
could not quickly and easily cut and paste multiple
image sources. But even when they would assemble
multiple visual references, a designer only could
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place them next to, or on top of each other. She
could not modulate these juxtapositions by precisely
adjusting transparency levels of different images.
Instead, she had to resort to the same photocollage
techniques popularized in the 1920s. In other words,
the lack of transparency restricted the number of
different images sources that can be integrated
within a single composition without it starting to look
like certain photomontages or photocollages of John
Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, or Robert Rauschenberg –
a mosaic of fragments without any strong
dominant.111
Compositing also made trivial another operation that
was very cumbersome previously. Until the 1990s,
different media types such as hand-drawn animation,
lens-based recordings, i.e. film and video, and
typography practically never appeared within the
same frame. Instead, animated commercials,
publicity shorts, industrial films, and some feature
and experimental films that did include multiple
media usually placed them in separate shots. A few
directors have managed to build whole aesthetic
systems out of such temporal juxtapositions – most
notably, Jean-Luc Godard. In his 1960s films such as
Week End (1967) Godard cut bold typographic
compositions in between live action creating what
can be called a “media montage” (as opposed to a
montage of live action shots as dveloped by the
Russians in the 1920s.) In the same 1960s
pioneering motion graphics designer Pablo Ferro who
has appropriately called his company Frame Imagery
created promotional shorts and TV graphics that
played on juxtapositions of different media replacing
each other in a rapid succession.112
In a number of
Ferro’s spots, static images of different letterforms,
line drawings, original hand painted artwork,
photographs, very short clips from newsreels, and
other visuals would come after another with machine
gun speed.
Within cinema, the superimposition of different
media within the same frame were usually limited to
the two media placed on top of each other in a
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standardized manner – i.e., static letters appearing
on top of still or moving lens-based images in feature
film titles. Both Ferro and another motion graphics
pioneer Saul Bass have created a few remarkable
title sequences where visual elements of different
origin were systematically overlaid together – such
as the opening for Hitchcock’s Vertigo designed by
Bass (1958). But I think it is fare to say that such
complex juxtapositions of media within the same
frame (rather than in edited sequence) were rare
exceptions in the overwise “unimedia” universe
where filmed images appeared in feature films and
hand drawn images appeared in animated films. The
only twentieth century feature film director I know of
who has build his unique aesthetics by systematically
combining different media within the same frame is
Czech Karel Zeman. Thus, a typical shot by Zeman
may contain filmed human figures, an old engraving
used for background, and a miniature model.113
The achievements of these directors and designers
are particularly remarkable given the difficulty of
combing different media within the same frame
during film era. To do this required utilizing the
services of a special effects departments or separate
companies which used optical printers. The
techniques that were cheap and more accessible
such as double exposure were limited in their
precision. So while a designer of static images could
at least cut and paste multiple elements within the
same composition to create a photomontage, to
create the equivalent effect with moving images was
far from trivial.
To put this in more general terms, we can say that
before computerization of the 1990s, the designer’s
capacities to access, manipulate, remix, and filter
visual information, whether still of moving, were
quite restricted. In fact, they were practically the
same as hundred years earlier - regardless of
whether filmmakers and designers used in-camera
effects, optical printing, or video keying. In
retrospect, we can see they were at odds with the
flexibility, speed, and precision of data manipulation
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already available to most other professional fields
which by that time were computerized – sciences,
engineering, accounting, management, etc.
Therefore it was only a matter of time before all
image media would be turned into digital data and
illustrators, graphic designers, animators, film
editors, video editors, and motion graphics designers
start manipulating them via software instead of their
traditional tools. But this is only obvious today –
after Velvet Revolution has taken place.
In 1985 Jeff Stein directed a music video for the new
wave band Cars. This video had a big attempt in the
design world, and MTV gave it the first prize in its
first annual music awards.114
Stein managed to
create a surreal world in which a video cutout of the
singing head of the band member was animated over
different video backgrounds. In other words, Stein
took the aesthetics of animated cartoons – 2D
animated characters superimposed over a 2D
background – and recreated it using video imagery.
In addition, simple computer animated elements
were also added in some shots to enhance the
surreal effect. This was shocking because nobody
ever saw such juxtapositions this before. Suddenly,
modernist photomontage came alive. But ten years
later, such moving video collages not only became
commonplace but they also became more complex,
more layered, and more subtle. Instead of two or
three, a composition could now feature hundreds and
even thousands of layers. And each layer could have
its own level of transparency.
In short, digital compositing now allowed the
designers to easily mix any number of visual
elements regardless of the media in which they
originated and to control each element in the
process. Here we can make an analogy between
multitrack audio recording and digital compositing.
In multitrack recording, each sound track can be
manipulated individually to produce the desired
result. Similarly, in digital compositing each visual
element can be independently modulated in a variety
of ways: resized, recolored, animated, etc. Just as
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the music artist can focus on a particular track while
muting all other tracks, a designer often turns of all
visual tracks except the one she is currently
adjusting. Similarly, both a music artist and a
designer can at any time substitute one element of a
composition by another, delete any elements, and
add new ones. Most importantly, just as multitrack
recording redefined the sound of popular music from
the 1970s onward, once digital compositing became
widely available during the 1990s, it fundamentally
changed the visual aesthetics of most moving images
forms.
This brief discussion only scratched the surface of my
subject in this section, i.e. layers and transparency.
For instance, I have not analyzed the actual
techniques of digital compositing and the
fundamental concept of an alpha channel which
deserves a separate and detailed treatment. I have
also did not go into the possible media histories
leading to digital compositing, nor its relationship to
optical printing, video keying and video effects
technology of the 1980s. These histories and
relationships were discussed in “Compositing”
chapter in The Language of New Media but from a
different perspective than the one used here. At that
time (1999) I was looking at compositing from the
point of view of the questions of cinematic realism,
practices of montage, and the construction of special
effects in feature films. Today, however, it is clear to
me that in addition to disrupting the regime of
cinematic realism in favor of other visual aesthetics,
compositing also had another, even more
fundamental effect.
By the end of the 1990s digital compositing has
become the basic operation used in creating all
forms of moving images, and not only big budget
features. So while it was originally developed as a
technique for special effects in the 1970s and early
1980s115
, compositing had a much broader effect on
contemporary visual and media cultures beyond
special effects. Compositing played the key part in
turning digital computer into a kind of experimental
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lab (or a Petri dish) where different media can meet
and there their aesthetics and techniques can be
combined to create new species. In short, digital
compositing was essential in enabling the
development of a new hybrid visual language of
moving images which we see everywhere today.
Defined at first as a particular digital technique
designed to integrate two particular media of live
action film and computer graphics in special effects
sequences, composing later become a “universal
media integrator.” And although compositing was
originally created to support the aesthetics of
cinematic realism, over time it actually had an
opposite effect. Rather that forcing different media to
fuse seamlessly, compositing led to the flourishing of
numerous media hybrids where the juxtapositions
between live and algorithmically generated, two
dimensional and three dimensional, raster and vector
are made deliberately visible rather than being
hidden.
From “Time-based” to a “Composition-based”
My thesis about media hybridity applies both to the
cultural objects and the software used to create
them. Just as the moving image media made by
designers today mix formats, assumptions, and
techniques of different media, the toolboxes and
interfaces of the software they use are also remixes.
Let us see use again After Effects as the case study
to see how its interface remixes previously distinct
working methods of different disciplines.
When moving image designers started to use
compositing / animation software such as After
Effects, its interface encouraged them to think about
moving images in a fundamentally new way. Film
and video editing systems and their computer
simulations that came to be known as non-linear
editors (today exemplified by Avid and Final Cut116
)
have conceptualized a media project as a sequence
of shots organized in time. Consequently, while NLE
(the standard abbreviation for non-linear video
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editing software) gave the editor many tools for
adjusting the edits, they took for granted the
constant of a film language that came from its
industrial organization – that all frames have the
same size and aspect ratio. This is an example of a
larger trend. During the first stage of the
development of cultural software, its pioneers were
exploring the new possibilities of a computer
metamedium going in any direction they were
interested, since commercial use (with a notable
exception of CAD) was not yet an option. However,
beginning in the 1980s new generation of companies
– Aldus, Autodesk, Macromedia, Adobe, and others started
to produce GUI-based software media
authoring software aimed at particular industries: TV
production, graphic design, animation, etc. As a
result, many of the workflow principles, interface
conventions and constraints of media technologies
standard in these industries were already using were
methodically re-created in software – even though
software medium itself has no such limitations. NLE
software is a case in point. In contrast, from the
beginning After Effects interface put forward a new
concept of moving image – as a composition
organized both in time and 2D space.
The center of this interface is a Composition window
conceptualized as a large canvas that can contain
visual elements of arbitrary sizes and proportions.
When I first started using After Effects soon after it
came out, I remember feeling shocked that software
did not automatically resized the graphics I dragged
into Composition window to make them fit the
overall frame. The fundamental assumption of
cinema that accompanied it throughout its whole
history – that film consists from many frames which
all have the same size and aspect ratio – was gone.
In film and video editing paradigms of the twentieth
century, the minimal unit on which the editor works
on is a frame. She can change the length of an edit,
adjusting where one film or video segment ends and
another begins, but she cannot directly modify the
contents of a frame. The frame functions as a kind of
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“black box” that cannot be “opened.” This was the
job for special effects departments and companies.
But in After Effects interface, the basic unit is not a
frame but a visual element placed in the Composition
window. Each element can be individually accessed,
manipulated and animated. In other words, each
element is conceptualized as an independent object.
Consequently, a media composition is understood as
a set of independent objects that can change over
time. The very word “composition” is important in
this context as it references 2D media (drawing,
painting, photography, design) rather than
filmmaking – i.e. space as opposed to time.
Where does After Effects interface came? Given that
this software is commonly used to create animated
graphics and visual effects, it is not surprising that
its interface elements can be traced to three
separate fields: animation, graphic design, and
special effects. And because these elements are
integrated in intricate ways to offer the user a new
experience that can’t be simply reduced to a sum of
working methods already available in separate fields,
it makes sense to think of After Effects UI as an
example of “deep remixability.”
In a 20th
century cell animation practice, an animator
places a number of transparent cells on top of each
other. Each cell contains a different drawing – for
instance, a body of a character on one cell, the head
on another cell, eyes on the third cell. Because the
cells are transparent, the drawings get automatically
“composited” into a single composition. While After
Effects interface does not use the metaphor of a
stack of transparent cells directly, it is based on the
same principle. Each element in the Composition
window is assigned a “virtual depth” relative to all
other elements. Together all elements form a virtual
stack. At any time, the designer can change the
relative position of an element within the stack,
delete it, or add new elements.
We can also see a connection between After Effects
interface and stop motion that was another popular
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twentieth century animation technique – stop
motion. To create stop motion shot, puppets or any
other 3D objects are positioned in front of a film
camera and manually animated one step at a time.
For instance, an animator may be adjusting a head
of character, progressively moving its head left to
right in small discrete steps. After every step, the
animator exposes one frame of film, then makes
another adjustment, exposes another frame, and so
on. (The twentieth century animators and
filmmakers who used this technique with great
inventiveness include Ladyslaw Starewicz, Oscar
Fishinger, Aleksander Ptushko, Jiri Rmka, Jan
Svankmajer, and Brothers Quay.)
Just as both cell and stop-motion animation
practices, After Effects does not make any
assumptions about the size or positions of individual
elements. Instead of dealing with standardized units
of time – i.e. film frames containing fixed visual
content - a designer now works with separate visual
elements. An element can be a digital video frame, a
line of type, an arbitrary geometric shape, etc. The
finished work is the result of a particular
arrangement of these elements in space and time.
Consequently, a designer who uses After Effects can
be compared to a choreographer who creates a
dance by “animating” the bodies of dancers specifying
their entry and exit points, trajectories
through space of the stage, and the movements of
their bodies. (In this respect it is relevant that
although After Effects interface did not evoke this
reference, another equally important 1990s software
that was commonly used to author multimedia Macromedia
Director - did explicitly the metaphor of
the theatre stage in its UI.)
While we can link After Effects interface to traditional
animation methods as used by commercial animation
studios, the working method put forward by software
is more close to graphic design. In commercial
animation studio of the twentieth century all
elements – drawings, sets, characters, etc. – were
prepared beforehand. The filming itself was a
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mechanical process. Of course, we can find
exceptions to this industrial-like separation of labor
in experimental animation practice where a film was
usually produced by one person. This allowed a
filmmaker to invent a film as he went along, rather
than having to plan everything beforehand. A
classical example of this is Oscar Fishinger’s Motion
Painting 1 created in 1949. Fishinger made this
eleven-minute film Motion Painting 1 by continuously
modifying a painting and exposing film one frame at
a time after each modification. This process took 9
months. Because Fishinger was shooting on film, he
had to wait a long time before seeing the results of
his work. As the historian of abstract animation
William Moritz writes, "Fischinger painted every day
for over five months without being able to see how it
was coming out on film, since he wanted to keep all
the conditions, including film stock, absolutely
consistent in order to avoid unexpected variations in
quality of image."117
In other words, in the case of
this project by Fischinger, creating animation and
seeing the result were even more separated than in
a commercial animation process.
In contrast, a graphic designer works in true “in real
time.” As the designer introduces new elements,
adjusts their locations, colors and other properties,
tries different images, changes the size of the type,
and so on, she can immediately see the result of her
work.118
After Effects adopts this working method by
making Composition window the center of its
interface. Like a traditional designer, After Effects
user interactively arranges the elements in this
window and can immediately see the result. In short,
After Effects interface makes filmmaking into a
design process, and a film is re-conceptualized as a
graphic design that can change over time.
As we saw when we looked of the history of cultural
software, when physical or electronic media are
simulated in a computer, we do not simply end with
the same media as before. By adding new properties
and working methods, computer simulation
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fundamentally changes the identity of a given media.
For example, in the case of “electronic paper” such
as a Word document or a PDF file, we can do many
things which were not possible with ordinary paper:
zoom in and out of the document, search for a
particular phrase, change fonts and line spacing, etc.
Similarly, current (2008) online interactive maps
services provided by Mapquest, Yahoo, and Google
augment the traditional paper map in multiple and
amazing ways.
A significant proportion of contemporary software for
creating, editing, and interacting with media was
developed in this way. Already existing media
technology were simulated in a computer and
augmented with new properties. But if we consider
media authoring software such as Maya (3D
modeling and computer animation) or After Effects
(motion graphics, compositing and visual effects),
we encounter a different logic. These software
applications do not simulate any single physical
media that existed previously. Rather, they borrow
from a number of different media combining and
mixing their working methods and specific
techniques. (And, of course, they also add new
capabilities specific to computer – for instance, the
ability to automatically calculate the intermediate
values between a number of keyframes.) For
example, 3D modeling software mixes form making
techniques which previously were “hardwired” to
different physical media: the ability to change the
curvature of a rounded form as though it is made
from clay, the ability to build a complex 3D object
from simple geometric primitives the way buildings
were constructed from identical rectangular bricks,
cylindrical columns, pillars, etc.
Similarly, as we saw, After Effects original interface,
toolkit, and workflow drew on the techniques of
animation and the techniques of graphic design. (We
can also find traces of filmmaking and 3D computer
graphics.) But the result is not simply a mechanical
sum of all elements that came from earlier media.
Rather, as software remixes the techniques and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 129
working methods of various media they simulate, the
result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with
their own distinct logic. In the case of After Effects,
the working method that it puts forward is neither
animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography,
even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new
way to make moving image media. Similarly, the
visual language of media produced with this and
similar software is also different from the languages
of moving images that existed previously.
Consequently, the Velvet Revolution unleashed by
After Effects and other software did not simply made
more commonplace the animated graphics artists
and designers – John and James Whitney, Norman
McLaren, Saul Bass, Robert Abel, Harry Marks,
R/Greenberg, and others – were creating previously
using stop motion animation, optical printing, video
effects hardware of the 1980s, and other custom
techniques and technologies. Instead, it led to the
emergence of numerous new visual aesthetics that
did not exist before. And if the common feature of
these aesthetics is “deep remixability,” it is not hard
to see that it mirrors “deep remixabilty” in After
Effects UI.
Three-dimensional Space as a New Platform for
Media
As I was researching what the users and industry
reviewers has been saying about After Effects, I
came across a somewhat condescending
characterization of this software as “Photoshop with
keyframes.” I think that this characterization is
actually quite useful.119
Think about all the different
ways of manipulating images available in Photoshop
and the degree of control provided by its multiple
tools. Think also about Photoshop’s concept of a
visual composition as a stack of potentially hundreds
of layers each with its transparency setting and
multiple alpha channels. If we are able to animate
such a composition and continue using Photoshop
tools to adjust visual elements over time on all
layers independently, this is indeed constitutes a
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 130
new paradigm for creating moving images. And this
is what After Effects and other animation, visual
effects and compositing software make possible
today.120
And while idea of working with a number of
layers placed on top of each other itself is not new –
consider traditional cell animation, optical printing,
video switchers, photocollage, graphic design, –
going from a few non-transparent layers to hundreds
and even thousands, each with its controls,
fundamentally changes not only how a moving image
looks but also what it can say. From being a special
effect reserved for particular shots, 2D compositing
became a part of the standard animation and video
editing interface.
But innovative as 2D composting paradigm was, by
the beginning of the 2000s already came to be
supplemented by a new one: 3D compositing. If 2D
compositing can be thought as an extension of
already familiar media techniques, the new paradigm
does not come from any previous physical or
electronic media. Instead, it takes the new borndigital
media which was invented in the 1960s and
matured by early 1990s – interactive 3D computer
graphics and animation – and transforms it into a
general platform for moving media design.
The language used in professional production milieu
today reflects an implicit understanding that 3D
graphics is a new medium unique to a computer.
When people use terms “computer visuals,”
“computer imagery,” or “CGI” (which is an
abbreviation for “computer generated imagery”)
everybody understands that they refer to 3D
graphics as opposed to other image source such as
“digital photography.” But what is my own reason for
thinking of 3D computer graphics as a new media –
as opposed to considering it as an extension of
architectural drafting, projection geometry, or set
making? Because it offers a new method for
representing three-dimensional reality - both objects
which already exists and objects which are only
imagined. This method is fundamentally different
from what has been offered by main representational
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media of the industrial era: lens-based capture (still
photography, film recording, video) and audio
recording. With 3D computer graphics, we can
represent three-dimensional structure of the world –
versus capturing only a perspectival image of the
world, as in lens-based recording. We can also
manipulate our representation using various tools
with ease and precision which is qualitatively
different from a much more limited “manipulability”
of a model made from any physical material
(although nanotechnology promises to change this in
the future.) And, as contemporary architectural
aesthetics makes it clear, 3D computer graphics is
not simply a faster way of working with geometric
representations such as plans and cross-sections
used by draftsmen for centuries. When the
generations of young architects and architectural
students started to systematically work with 3D
modeling and animation software such as Alias in the
middle of the 1990s, the ability to directly
manipulate a 3D shape (rather than only dealing
with its projections as in traditional drafting) quickly
led to a whole new language of complex nonrectangular
curved forms. In other words, architects
working with the media of 3D computer graphics
started to imagine different things than their
predecessors who used pencils, rules, and drafting
tables.
When Velvet Revolution of the 1990s made possible
to easily combine multiple media sources in a single
moving image sequence using multi-layer interface
of After Effects, CGI was added to the mix. Today,
3D models are routinely used in media compositions
created in After Effects and similar software, along
with all other media sources. But in order to be a
part of the mix, these models need to be placed on
their own 2D layers and thus treated as 2D images.
This was the original After Effects paradigm: all
image media can meet as long as they are reduced
to 2D.121
In contrast, in 3D compositing paradigm all media
types are placed within a single virtual 3D space.
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One advantage of this representation is that since 3D
space is “native” to 3D computer graphics, 3D
models can stay as they are, i.e. three-dimensional.
An additional advantage is that the designer can now
use all the techniques of virtual cinematography as
developed in 3D computer animation. She can define
different kinds of lights, fly the virtual camera
around and through the image planes at any
trajectory, and use depth of field and motion blur
effects.122
While 3D computer-generated models already “live”
in this space, how do you bring there twodimensional
visual elements – video, digitized film,
typography, drawn images? If 2D compositing
paradigm treated everything as 2D images –
including 3D computer models – 3D compositng
treats everything as 3D. So while
two-dimension elements do not inherently have a 3rd
dimension, it has to be added to enable these
elements enter the three-dimensional space. To do
that, a designer places flat cards in this space in
particular locations, and situates two-dimensional
images on these cards. Now, everything lives in a
common 3D space. This condition enables “deep
remixability” between techniques which I have
illustrated using the example of “Go” video. The
techniques of drawing, photography, cinematography
and typography which go into capturing or creating
two-dimensional visual elements can now “play”
together with all the techniques of 3D computer
animation (virtual camera moves, controllable depth
of field, variable lens, etc.)
3D Compositing, or How Cinema Became Design
In 1995 I published the article What is Digital
Cinema? where I tried to think about how the
changes in moving image production I was
witnessing were changing the concept of “cinema.”
In that article I proposed that the logic of handdrawn
animation, which throughout the twentieth
century was marginal in relation to cinema, became
dominant in a software era. Because software allows
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the designer to manually manipulate any image
regarding of its source as though it was drawn in the
first place, the ontological differences between
different image media become irrelevant. Both
conceptually and practically, they all reduced to
hand-drawn animation.
After Effects and other animation/video editing/2D
compositig software by default treats a moving
image project as a stack of layers. Therefore, I can
extend my original argument and propose that
animation logic moves from the marginal to the
dominant position also in yet another way. The
paradigm of a composition as a stack of separate
visual elements as practiced in cell animation
becomes the default way of working with all images
in a software environment – regardless of their origin
and final output media. In other words, a “moving
image” is now understood as a composite of layers of
imagery – rather than as a still flat picture that only
changes in time, as it was the case for most of the
20th
century. In the word of animation, editing, and
compositing software, such “single layer image”
becomes an exception.
The emergence of 3D compositing paradigm can be
also seen as following this logic of historical reversal.
The new representational structure as developed
within computer graphics field – a 3D virtual space
containing 3D models – has gradually moved from a
marginal to the dominant role. In the 1970s and
1980s computer graphics were used only
occasionally in a dozen of feature films such as Alien
(1979), Tron (1981), The Last Starfighter (1984),
and Abyss (1989), and selected television
commercials and broadcast graphics. But by the
beginning of the 2000s, the representation structure
of computer graphics, i.e. a 3D virtual space, came
to function as an umbrella within can hold all other
image types regardless of their origin. An example of
an application which implements this paradigm is
Flame, enthusiastically described by one user as “a
full 3D compositing environment into which you can
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bring 3D models, create true 3D text and 3D
particles, and distort layers in 3D space.”123
This does not mean that 3D animation itself became
visually dominant in moving image culture, or that
the 3D structure of the space within which media
compositions are now routinely constructed is
necessary made visible (usually it is not.) Rather, the
way 3D computer animation organizes visual data –
as objects positioned in a Cartesian space – became
the way to work with all moving image media. As
already stated above, a designer positions all the
elements which go into a composition – 2D animated
sequences, 3D objects, particle systems, video and
digitized film sequences, still images and
photographs – inside the shared 3D virtual space.
There these elements can be further animated,
transformed, blurred, filtered, etc. So while all
moving image media has been reduced to the status
of hand-drawn animation in terms of their
manipulability, we can also state that all media have
become layers in 3D space. In short, the new media
of 3D computer animation has “eaten up” the
dominant media of the industrial age – lens-based
photo, film and video recording.
Since we just discovered that software has redefined
the concept of a “moving image” as a composite of
multiple layers, this is a good moment to pause and
consider other possible ways software changed this
concept. When cinema in its modern form was born
in the end of the nineteenth century, the new
medium was understood as an extension of already
familiar one – that is, as a photographic image which
is now moving. This understanding can be found in
the press accounts of the day and also in at least one
of the official names given to the new medium “moving
pictures.” On the material level, a film
indeed consisted from separate photographic frames
which when they were quickly replacing each created
the effect of motion for the viewer. So the concept
used to understand cinema indeed fit with the
structure of the medium.
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But is this concept still appropriate today? When we
record video and play it, we are still dealing with the
same structure: a sequence of frames. But for the
professional media designers, the terms have
changed. The importance of these changes is not
just academic and purely theoretical. Because
designers understand their media differently, they
are creating films and sequences that also look very
different from 20th
century cinema or animation.
Consider what I referred to as new paradigms –
essentially, new ways of creating “moving images” –
which we have discussed so far. (Although
theoretically they are not necessary all compatible
with each other, in production practice these
different paradigms are used in a complementary
fashion.) A “moving image” became a hybrid which
can combine all different visual media invented so far
– rather than holding only one kind of data such as
camera recording, hand drawing, etc. Rather than
being understood as a singular flat plane – the result
of light focused by the lens and captured by the
recording surface – it is now understood as a stack
of potentially infinite number of separate layers. And
rather than “time-based,” it becomes “compositionbased,”
or “object oriented.” That of, instead of
being treated as a sequence of frames arranged in
time, a “moving image” is now understood as a twodimensional
composition that consists from a
number of objects that can be manipulated
independently. Alternatively, if a designer uses 3D
compositing, the conceptual shift is even more
dramatic: instead of editing “images,” she is working
in a virtual three-dimensional space that holds both
CGI and lens-recorded flat image sources.
Of course, frame-based representation did not
disappear – but it became simply a recoding and
output format rather than the space where a film is
being put together. And while the term “moving
image” can be still used as an appropriate
description for how the output of a production
process is experienced by the viewers, it is no longer
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captures how the designers think about what they
create. Because their production environment workflow,
interfaces, and the tools – has changed so
much, they are thinking today very differently than
twenty years ago.
If we focus on what the different paradigms
summarized above have in common, we can say that
filmmakers, editors, special effects artists,
animators, and motion graphics designers are
working on a composition in 2D or a 3D space that
consists from a number of separate objects. The
spatial dimension became as important as temporal
dimension. From the concept of a “moving image”
understood as a sequence of static photographs we
have moved to a new concept: a modular media
composition. And while a person who directs a
feature or a short film that is centered around actors
and live action can be still called “filmmaker,” in all
other cases where most of production takes place in
a software environment, it is more appropriate to call
the person a “designer.” This is yet another
fundamental change in the concept of “moving
images”: today more often than not they are not
“captured,” “directed,” or “animated.” Instead, they
are “designed.”
Import/Export: Design Workflow And
Contemporary Aesthetics
In our discussions of After Effects interface and
workflow as well as the newer paradigm of 3D
compositing we have already came across the crucial
aspect of software-based media production process.
Until the arrival of the software-based tools in the
1990s, to combine different types of time-based
media together was either time consuming, or
expensive, or in some cases simply impossible.
Software tools such as After Effects have changed
this situation in a fundamental way. Now a designer
can import different media into her composition with
just a few mouse clicks.
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However, the contemporary software-based design
of moving images – or any other design process, for
that matter – does not simply involve combining
elements from different sources within a single
application. In this section we will look at the whole
workflow typical of contemporary design – be it
design of moving images, still illustrations, 3D
objects and scenes, architecture, music, web sites,
or any other media. (Most of the analysis of
software-based production of moving images which I
already presented also applies to graphic design of
still images and layouts for print, the web,
packaging, physical spaces, mobile devices, etc.
However, in this section I want to make this explicit.
Therefore the examples below will include not only
moving images, but also graphic design.)
Although ”import”/”export” commands appear in
most modern media authoring and editing software
running under GUI, at first sight they do not seem to
be very important for understanding software
culture. When you “import,” you are not authoring
new media or modifying media objects or accessing
information across the globe, as in web browsing.
All these two commands allow you to do is to move
data around between different applications. In other
words, they make data created in one application
compatible with other applications. And that does not
look so glamorous.
Think again. What is the largest part of the economy
of greater Los Angeles area? It is not entertainment.
From movie production to museums and everything
is between only accounts for 15%). It turns out that
the largest part of the economy is import/export
business more than 60%. More generally, one
commonly evoked characteristic of globalization is
greater connectivity – places, systems, countries,
organizations etc. becoming connected in more and
more ways. And connectivity can only happen if you
have certain level of compatibility: between business
codes and procedures, between shipping
technologies, between network protocols, between
computer file formats, and so on.
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Let us take a closer look at import/export
commands. As I will try to show below, these
commands play a crucial role in software culture,
and in particular in media design – regardless of
what kind of project a design is working on.
Before they adopted software tools in the 1990s,
filmmakers, graphic designers, and animators used
completely different technologies. Therefore, as
much as they were influenced by each other or
shared the same aesthetic sensibilities, they
inevitably created differently looking images.
Filmmakers used camera and film technology
designed to capture three-dimensional physical
reality. Graphic designers were working with offset
printing and lithography. Animators were working
with their own technologies: transparent cells and an
animation stand with a stationary film camera
capable of making exposures one frame at a time as
the animator changed cells and/or moved
background.
As a result, twentieth century cinema, graphic design
and animation (I am talking here about standard
animation techniques used by most commercial
studios) developed distinct artistic languages and
vocabularies both in terms of form and content. For
example, graphic designers worked with a two
dimensional space, film directors arranged
compositions in three-dimensional space, and cell
animators worked with a ‘two-and-a-half’
dimensions. This holds for the overwhelming
majority of works produced in each field, although of
course exceptions do exist. For instance, Oscar
Fishinger made one abstract film that consisted from
simple geometric objects moving in an empty space
– but as far as I know, this is the only film in the
whole history of abstract animation, which is taking
place in three-dimensional space.
The differences in technology influenced what kind of
content would appear in different media. Cinema
showed “photorealistic” images of nature, built
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environments and human forms articulated by
special lighting. Graphic designs featured
typography, abstract graphic elements, monochrome
backgrounds and cutout photographs. And cartoons
showed hand-drawn flat characters and objects
animated over hand-drawn but more detailed
backgrounds. The exceptions are rare. For instance,
while architectural spaces frequently appear in films
because directors they could explore their three
dimensionality in staging scenes, they practically
never appear in animated films in any detail – until
animation studios start using 3D computer
animation.
Why was it so difficult to cross boundaries? For
instance, in theory one could imagine making an
animated film in the following way: printing a series
of slightly different graphics designs and then filming
them as though they were a sequence of animated
cells. Or a film where a designer simply made a
series of hand drawings that used the exact
vocabulary of graphic design and then filmed them
one by one. And yet, to the best of my knowledge,
such a film was never made. What we find instead
are many abstract animated films that have certain
connection to various styles of abstract painting. For
example, Oscar Fishinger’s films and paintings share
certain forms. We can also find abstract films and
animated commercials and movie titles that have
certain connection to graphic design aesthetics
popular around the same times. For instance, some
moving image sequences made by motion graphics
pioneer Pablo Ferro around 1960s display
psychedelic aesthetics which can be also found in
posters, record covers, and other works of graphic
design in the same period.
And yet, despite these connections, works in
different media never used exactly the same visual
language. One reason is that projected film could not
adequately show the subtle differences between
typeface sizes, line widths, and grayscale tones
crucial for modern graphic design. Therefore, when
the artists were working on abstract art films or
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commercials that adopted design aesthetics (and
most major 20th abstract animators worked both on
their own films and commercials), they could not
simply expand the language of a printed page into
time dimension. They had to invent essentially a
parallel visual language that used bold contrasts,
more easily readable forms and thick lines – which,
because of their thickness, were in fact no longer
lines but shapes.
Although the limitations in resolution and contrast of
film and television image in comparison to a printed
page contributed to the distance between the
languages used by abstract filmmakers and graphic
designers for the most of the twentieth century,
ultimately I do not think it was the decisive factor.
Today the resolution, contrast and color reproduction
between print, computer screens, television screens,
and the screens of mobile phones are also
substantially different – and yet we often see exactly
the same visual strategies deployed across these
different display media. If you want to be convinced,
leaf through any book or a magazine on
contemporary 2D design (i.e., graphic design for
print, broadcast, and the web). When you look at
pages featuring the works of a particular designer or
a design studio, in most cases its impossible to
identify the origins of the images unless you read the
captions. Only then do you find that which image is a
poster, which one is a still from a music video, and
which one is magazine editorial.
I am going to use Tashen’s Graphic Design for the
21st Century: 100 of the World’s Best Graphic
Designers (2001) for examples. Peter Anderson’s
design showing a line of type against a cloud of
hundred of little letters in various orientations turns
out to be the frames from the title sequence for
Channel Four documentary. His other design which
similarly plays on the contrast between jumping
letters in a larger font against irregularly cut planes
made from densely packed letters in much smaller
fonts turns to be a spread from IT Magazine. Since
the first design was made for broadcast while the
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second was made for print, we would expect that the
first design would employ bolder forms - however,
both designs use the same scale between big and
small fonts, and feature texture fields composed
from hundreds of words in such a small font that
they clear need to be read. A few pages later we
encounter a design by Philippe Apeloig that uses
exactly the same technique and aesthetics as
Anderson. In this case, tiny lines of text positioned
at different angles form a 3D shape floating in space.
On the next page another design by Apeloig creates
a field in perspective - made not from letters but
from hundreds of identical abstract shapes.
These design rely on software’s ability (or on the
designer being influenced by software use and
recreating what she did with software manually) to
treat text as any graphical primitive and to easily
create compositions made from hundreds of similar
or identical elements positioned according to some
pattern. And since an algorithm can easily modify
each element in the pattern, changing its position,
size, color, etc., instead of the completely regular
grids of modernism we see more complex structures
that are made from many variations of the same
element. (This strategy is explored particularly
imaginatively in Zaha Hadid’s designs such as Louis
Vuiiton Icone Bag, 2006, and in urban masterplans
for Singapore and Turkey which use what Hadid
calls a “variable grid.”)
Each designer included in the book was asked to
provide a brief statement to accompany the portfolio
of their work, and Lust studio has put this phrase as
their motto: “Form-follows-process.” So what is the
nature of design process in the software age and
how does it influence the forms we see today around
us?
If you practically involved in design or art today, you
already knows that contemporary designers use the
same small set of software tools to design just about
everything. I have already named them repeatedly,
so you know the list: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash,
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Maya, etc. However, the crucial factor is not the
tools themselves but the workflow process, enabled
by “import” and “export” operations and related
methods (“place,” “insert object,” “subscribe,”
“smart object,” etc.), which ensure coordination
between these tools.
When a particular media project is being put
together, the software used at the final stage
depends on the type of output media and the nature
of the project – After Effects for motion graphics
projects and video compositing, Illustrator or
Freehand for print illustrations, InDesign for graphic
design, Flash for interactive interfaces and web
animations, 3ds Max or Maya for 3D computer
models and animations, and so on. But these
programs are rarely used alone to create a media
design from start to finish. Typically, a designer may
create elements in one program, import them into
another program, add elements created in yet
another program, and so on. This happens
regardless whether the final product is an illustration
for print, a web site, or a motion graphics sequence;
whether it is a still or a moving image, interactive or
non-interactive, etc.
The very names which software companies give to
the products for media design and production refer
to this defining characteristic of software-based
design process. Since 2005, Adobe has been selling
its different applications bundled together into
“Adobe Creative Suite.” The suite collects the most
commonly used media authoring software:
Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, Flash,
Dreamweaver, After Effects, Premiere, etc. Among
the subheadings and phrases used to accompany
this band name, one in particular is highly
meaningful in the context of our discussion: “Design
Across Media.” This phrase accurately describes both
the capabilities of the applications collected in a
suite, and their actual use in the real world. Each of
the key applications collected in the suite –
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash,
Dreamweaver, After Effects, Premiere – has many
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special features geared for producing a design for
particular output media. Illustrator is set up to work
with professional-quality printers; After Effects and
Premiere can output video files in a variety of
standard video formats such as HDTV; Dreamweaver
supports programming and scripting languages to
enable creation of sophisticated and large-scale
dynamic web sites. But while a design project is
finished in one of these applications, most other
applications in Adobe Creative Suite will be used in
the process to create and edit its various elements.
Thus is one of the ways in which Adobe Creative
Suite enables “design across media.” The
compatibility between applications also means that
the elements (called in professional language
“assets”) can be later re-used in new projects. For
instance, a photograph edited in Photoshop can be
first used in a magazine ad and later put in a video,
a web site, etc. Or, the 3D models and characters
created for a feature film are reused for a video
game based on the film. This ability to re-use the
same design elements for very different projects
types is very important because of the widespread
practice in creative industries to create products
across the range of media which share the same
images, designs, characters, narratives, etc. An
advertising campaign often works “across media”
including web ads, TV ads, magazine ads, billboards,
etc. And if turning movies into games and games
into movies has been already popular in Hollywood
for a while, a new trend since approximately middle
of 2000s is to create a movie, a game, a web site or
maybe other media products at the same time – and
have all the products use the same digital assets
both for economic reasons and to assure aesthetic
continuity between these products. Thus, a studio
may create 3D backgrounds and characters and put
them both in a movie and in a game, which will be
released simultaneously. If media authoring
applications were not compatible, such practice
would simply not be possible.
All these examples illustrate the intentional reuse of
design elements “across media.” However, the
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compatibility between media authoring applications
also has a much broader and non-intentional effect
on contemporary aesthetics. Given the production
workflow I just described, we may expect that the
same visual techniques and strategies will also
appear in all types of media projects designed with
software without this being consciously planned for.
We may also expect that this will happen on a much
more basic level. This is indeed the case. The same
software-enabled design strategies, the same
software-based techniques and the same softwaregenerated
iconography are now found across all
types of media, all scales, and all kinds of projects.
We have already encountered a few concrete
examples. For instance, the three designs by Peter
Anderson and Philip Apeloig done for different media
use the same basic computer graphic technique:
automatic generation of a repeating pattern while
varying the parameters which control the
appearance of each element making up the pattern’s
element – its size, position, orientation, curvature,
etc. (The general principle behind this technique can
also be used to generate 3D models, animations,
textures, make plants and landscapes, etc. It is often
referred to as “parametric design,” or “parametric
modeling.”) The same technique is also used by
Hadid’s studio for Louis Vuiiton Icone Bag. In another
example, which will be discussed below, Gregg Lynn
used particle systems technique – which at that time
was normally used to simulate fire, snow, waterfalls,
and other natural phenomena in cinema – to
generate the forms of a building.
To use the biological metaphor, we can say that
compatibility between design applications creates
very favorable conditions for the propagation of
media DNAs between species, families, and classes.
And this propagation happens on all levels: the
whole design, parts of a design, the elements
making up the parts, and the “atoms” which make
up the elements. Consider the following hypothetical
example of propagation on a lower level. A designer
can use Illustrator to create a 2D smooth curve
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(called in computer graphics field called a “spline.”)
This curve becomes a building block that can be used
in any project. It can form a part of an illustration or
a book design. It can be imported into animation
program where it can be set to motion, or imported
into 3D program where it can be extruded in 3D
space to define a solid object.
Over time software manufacturers worked to
developed tighter ways of connecting their
applications to make moving elements from one to
another progressively easier and more useable. Over
the years, it became possible to move a complex
project between applications without loosing
anything (or almost anything). For example, in
describing the integration between Illustrator CS3
and Photoshop CS3, Adobe’s web site states that a
designer can “Preserve layers, layer comps,
transparency, editable files when moving files
between Photoshop and Illustrator.”124
Another
important development has been the concept that
Microsoft Office calls “linked objects.” If you link all
of a part of one file to another file (for instance,
linking an excel document to a PowerPoint
presentation), any time information changes in the
first file, it automatically gets updated in the second
file. Many media applications implement this feature.
To use the same example of Illustrator CS3, a
designer can “Import Illustrator files into Adobe
Premiere Pro software, and then use Edit Original
command to open the artwork in Illustrator, edit it,
and see your changes automatically incorporated
into your video project.”125
Each of the type of programs used by media
designers – 3D graphics, vector drawing, image
editing, animation, compositing – excel at particular
design operations, i.e. particular ways of creating
design elements or modifying already existing
elements. These operations can be compared to the
different types of blocks of a Lego set. You can
create an infinite number of projects by just using
the limited number of block types provided in the
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set. Depending on the project, these block types will
play different functions and appear in different
combinations. For example, a rectangular red block
may become a part of the tabletop, a part of the
head of a robot, etc.
Design workflow that uses a small number of
compatible software programs works in a similar way
– with one important difference. The building blocks
used in contemporary design are not only different
kinds of visual elements one can create – vector
patterns, 3D objects, particle systems, etc. – but
also various ways of modifying these elements: blur,
skew, vectorize, change transparency level,
spherisize, extrude, etc. This difference is crucial. If
media creation and editing software did not include
these and many other modification operations, we
would have seen an altogether different visual
language at work today. We would have seen
“multimedia,” i.e. designs that simply combine
elements from different media. Instead, we see
“deep remixability” – the “deep” interactions
between working methods and techniques of
different media within a single project.
In a “cross-over” use, the techniques which were
previously specific in one media are applied to other
media types (for example, a lens blur filter). This
often can be done within a single application – for
instance, applying After Effects’s blur filter to a
composition which can contain graphic elements,
video, 3D objects, etc. However, being able to move
a whole project or its elements between applications
opens many more possibilities because each
application offers many unique techniques not
available in other applications. As the media data
travels from one application to the next, is being
transformed and enhanced using the operations
offered by each application. For example, a designer
can take her project she has been editing in Adobe
Premiere and import in After Effects where she can
use advanced compositing features of this program.
She can then import the result back into Premiere
and continue editing. Or she can create artwork in
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Photoshop or Illustrator and import into Flash where
it can be animated. This animation can be then
imported into a video editing program and combined
with video. A spline created in Illustrator becomes a
basis for a 3D shape. And so on.
The production workflow specific to the software era
that I just illustrated has two major consequences.
Its first result is the partcular visual aesthetics of
hybridity which dominates contemporary design
universe. The second is the use of the same
techniques and strategies across this universe regardless
of the output media and type of project.
As I already stated more than once, a typical design
today combines techniques coming from multiple
media. We now in a better position to understand
why this is the case. As designer works on a project,
she combines the results of the operations specific to
different software programs that were originally
created to imitate work with different physical media
(Illustrator was created to make illustrations,
Photoshop - to edit digitized photographs, Premiere
– to edit video, etc.) While these operations continue
to be used in relation to their original media, most of
them are now also used as part of the workflow on
any design job.
The essential condition that enables this new design
logic and the resulting aesthetics is compatibility
between files generated by different programs. In
other words, “import,” “export” and related functions
and commands of graphics, animation, video editing,
compositing and modeling software are historically
more important than the individual operations these
programs offer. The ability to combine raster and
vector layers within the same image, to place 3D
elements into a 2D composition and vice versa, and
so on is what enables the production workflow with
its reuse of the same techniques, effects, and
iconography across different media.
The consequences of this compatibility between
software and file formats, which was gradually
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achieved during the 1990s, are hard to overestimate.
Besides the hybridity of modern visual aesthetics and
reappearance of exactly the same design techniques
across all output media, there are also other effects.
For instance, the whole field of motion graphics as it
exists today came into existence to a large extent
because of the integration between vector drawing
software, specifically Illustrator, and
animation/compositing software such as After
Effects. A designer typically defines various
composition elements in Illustrator and then imports
them into After Effects where they are animated.
This compatibility did not exist when the initial
versions of different media authoring and editing
software initially became available in the 1980s. It
was gradually added in particular software releases.
But when it was achieved around the middle of the
1990s126
, within a few years the whole language of
contemporary graphical design was fully imported
into the moving image area – both literally and
metaphorically.
In summary, the compatibility between graphic
design, illustration, animation, video editing, 3D
modeling and animation, and visual effects software
plays the key role in shaping visual and spatial forms
of the software age. On the one hand, never before
have we witnessed such a variety of forms as today.
On the other hand, exactly the same techniques,
compositions and iconography can now appear in
any media.
The Variable Form
As the films of Blake and Murata discussed earlier
illustrate, in contrast to twentieth-century animation,
in contemporary motion graphics the transformations
often affect the frame as a whole. Everything inside
the frame keeps changing: visual elements, their
transparency, the texture of the image, etc. In fact,
if something stays the same for a while, that is an
exception rather than the norm.
Such constant change on many visual dimensions is
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another key feature of motion graphics and design
cinema produced today. Just as we did it in the case
of media hybridity, we can connect this preference
for constant change to the particulars of software
used in media design.
Digital computers allow us to represent any
phenomenon or structure as a set of variables. In
the case of design and animation software, this
means that all possible forms—visual, temporal,
spatial, interactive—are similarly represented as sets
of variables that can change continuously. This new
logic of form is deeply encoded in the interfaces of
software packages and the tools they provide. In 2D
animation/compositing software such as After
Effects, each new object added to the scene by a
designer shows up as a long list of variables—
geometric position, color, transparency, and the like.
Each variable is immediately assigned its own
channel on the timeline used to create animation.127
In this way, the software literally invites the designer
to start animating various dimensions of each object
in the scene. The same logic extends to the
parameters that affect the scene as a whole, such as
the virtual camera and the virtual lighting. If you add
a light to the composition, this immediately creates
half a dozen new animation channels describing the
colors of the lights, their intensity, position,
orientation, and so on.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the general logic of
computer representation—that is, representing
everything as variables that can have different
values—was systematically embedded throughout
the interfaces of media design software. As a result,
although a particular software application does not
directly prescribe to its users what they can and
cannot do, the structure of the interface strongly
influences the designer’s thinking. In the case of
moving image design, the result of having a timeline
interface with multiple channels all just waiting to be
animated is that a designer usually does animate
them. If previous constraints in animation
technology—from the first optical toys in the early
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nineteenth century to the standard cel animation
system in the twentieth century—resulted in an
aesthetics of discrete and limited temporal changes,
the interfaces of computer animation software
quickly led to a new aesthetics: the continuous
transformations of all visual elements appearing in a
frame (or of the singular image filling the frame).
This change in animation aesthetics deriving from
the interface design of animation software was
paralleled by a change in another field—architecture.
In the mid-1990s, when architects started to use
software originally developed for computer animation
and special effects (first Alias and Wavefront; later
Maya and others), the logic of animated form
entered architectural thinking as well. If 2D
animation/compositing software such as After Effects
enables an animator to change any parameter of a
2D object (a video clip, a 2D shapes, type, etc.) over
time, 3D computer animation allows the same for
any 3D shape. An animator can set up keyframes
manually and let a computer calculate how a shape
changes over time. Alternatively, she can direct
algorithms that will not only modify a shape over
time but can also generate new ones. (3D computer
animation tools to do this include particle systems,
physical simulation, behavioral animation, artificial
evolution, L-systems, etc.) Working with 3D
animation software affected architectural imagination
both metaphorically and literally. The shapes, which
started to appear in the projects by young architects
and architecture students in the second part of the
1990s looked as they were in the process of being
animated, captured as they were transforming from
one state to another. The presentations of
architectural projects and research begin to feature
multiple variations of the same shape generated by
varying parameters in software. Finally, in projects
such as Gregg Lynn’s New York Port Authority
Gateway (1995),128
the paths of objects in an
animation were literally turned into an architectural
design. Using a particle system (a part of Wavefront
animation software), which generates a cloud of
points and moves them in space to satisfy a set of
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constraints, Lynn captured these movements and
turned them into a curves making up his proposed
building.
Equally crucial was the exposure of architects to the
new generation of modeling tools in the commercial
animation software of the 1990s. For two decades,
the main technique for 3D modeling was to represent
an object as a collection of flat polygons. But by the
mid-1990s, the faster processing speeds of
computers and the increased size of computer
memory made it practical to offer another technique
on desktop workstations—spline-based modeling.
This new technique for representing form pushed
architectural thinking away from rectangular
modernist geometry and toward the privileging of
smooth and complex forms made from continuous
curves. As a result, since the second part of 1990s,
the aesthetics of “blobs” has come to dominate the
thinking of many architecture students, young
architects, and even already well-established “star”
architects such as Hadid, Eric Moss, and UN Studio.
But this was not the only consequence of the switch
from the standard architectural tools and CAD
software (such as AutoCAD) to animation/special
effects software. Traditionally, architects created
new projects on the basis of existing typology. A
church, a private house, a railroad station all had
their well-known types—the spatial templates
determining the way space was to be organized.
Similarly, when designing the details of a particular
project, an architect would select from the various
standard elements with well-known functions and
forms: columns, doors, windows, etc.129 In the
twentieth century, mass-produced housing only
further embraced this logic, which eventually became
encoded in the interfaces of CAD software.
But when in the early 1990s, Gregg Lynn, the firm
Asymptote, Lars Spuybroek, and other young
architects started to use 3D software that had been
created for other industries—computer animation,
special effects, computer games, and industrial
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design—they found that this software came with
none of the standard architectural templates or
details. In addition, if CAD software for architects
assumed that the basic building blocks of a structure
are rectangular forms, 3D animation software came
without such assumptons. Instead it offered splined
curves and smooth surfaces and shapes constructed
from these surves — which were appropriate for the
creation of animated and game characters and
industrial products. (In fact, splines were originally
introduced into computer graphics in 1962 by Pierre
Bézier for the use in computer-aided car design.)
As a result, rather than being understood as a
composition made up of template-driven
standardized parts, a building could now be imagined
as a single continuous curved form that can vary
infinitely. It could also be imagined as a number of
continuous forms interacting together. In either
case, the shape of each of these forms was not
determined by any kind of a priori typology.
(In retrospect, we can think of this highly productive
“misuse” of 3D animation and modeling software by
architects as another case of media hybridity – in
particular, what I called the “crossover effect” In this
case, it is a crossover between the conventions and
the tools of one design field—character animation
and special effects—and the ways of thinking and
knowledge of another field, namely, architecture.)
Relating this discussion of architecture to the main
subject of this chapter—production of moving
images—we can see now that by the 1990s both
fields were affected computerization in a structurally
similar way. In the case of commercial animation in
the West, previously all temporal changes inside a
frame were limited, discrete, and usually
semantically driven – i.e., connected to the
narrative. When an animated character moved,
walking into a frame, turned his head, or extended
his arm, this was used to advance the story.130
After
the switch to software-based production process,
moving images came to feature constant changes on
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many visual dimensions that were no longer limited
by the semantics. As defined by numerous motiongraphics
sequences and short films of the 2000s,
contemporary temporal visual form constantly
changes, pulsates, and mutates beyond the need to
communicate meanings and narrative. (The films of
Blake and Murata offer striking examples of this new
aesthetics of a variable form; many other examples
can easily be found by surfing websites that collect
works by motion graphics studios and individual
designers.)
A parallel process took place in architectural design.
The differentiations in a traditional architectural form
were connected to the need to communicate
meaning and/or to fulfill the architectural program.
An opening in a wall was either a window or a door;
a wall was a boundary between functionally different
spaces. Thus, just as in animation, the changes in
the form were limited and they were driven by
semantics. But today, the architectural form
designed with modeling software can change
continuously, and these changes no longer have to
be justified by function.
The Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002)
designed by Foreign Office Architects illustrates very
well the aesthetics of variable form in architecture.
The building is a complex and continuous spatial
volume without a single right angle and with no
distinct boundaries that would break the form into
parts or separate it from the ground plane. Visiting
the building in December 2003, I spent four hours
exploring the continuities between the exterior and
the interior spaces and enjoying the constantly
changing curvature of its surfaces. The building can
be compared to a Mobius strip - except that it is
much more complex, less symmetrical, and more
unpredictable. It would be more appropriate to think
of it as a whole set of such strips smoothly
interlinked together.
To summarize this discussion of how the shift to
software-based representations affected the modern
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language of form: All constants were substituted by
variables whose values can change continuously. As
a result, culture went through what we can call the
continuity turn. Both the temporal visual form of
motion graphics and design cinema and the spatial
form of architecture entered the new universe of
continuous change and transformation. (The fields of
product design and space design were similarly
affected.) Previously, such aesthetics of “total
continuity” was imagined by only a few artists. For
instance, in the 1950s, architect Friedrich Kiesler
conceived a project titled Continuous House that, as
the name implies, a single continuously curving
spatial form unconstrained by the usual divisions into
rooms. But when architects started to work with the
3D modeling and animation software in the 1990s,
such thinking became commonplace. Similarly, the
understanding of a moving image as a continuously
changing visual form without any cuts, which
previously could be found only in a small number of
films made by experimental filmmakers throughout
the twentieth century such as Fischinger’s Motion
Painting (1947), now became the norm.
Scaling Up Aesthetics of Variability
Today, there are many successful short films under a
few minutes and small-scale building projects are
based on the aesthetics of continuity – i.e., a single
continuously changing form, but the next challenge
for both motion graphics and architecture is to
discover ways to employ this aesthetics on a larger
scale. How do you scale-up the idea of a single
continuously changing visual or spatial form, without
any cuts (for films) or divisions into distinct parts
(for architecture)?
In architecture, a number of architects have already
begun to successfully address this challenge.
Examples include already realized projects such as
the Yokohama International Port Terminal or the
Kunsthaus in Graz by Peter Cook (2004), as well as
those that have yet to be built, such as Zaha Hadid’s
Performing Arts Centre on Saadiyat Island in Abu
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Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (proposed in 2007). In
fact, given the current construction book in China,
Dubai, Eastern Europe and a number of other
“developing countries,” and their willingness to take
risks and embrace the new, the architectural designs
made from complex continuosly changing curves are
getting build on a larger scale, in more numbers, and
faser than it was possible to imagine even a few yeas
before.
What about motion graphics? So far Blake has been
one of the few artists who have systematically
explored how hybrid visual language can work in
longer pieces. Sodium Fox is 14 minutes; an earlier
piece, Mod Lang (2001), is 16 minutes. The three
films that make up Winchester Trilogy (2001–4) run
for 21, 18, and 12 minutes. None of these films
contain a single cut.
Sodium Fox and Winchester Trilogy use a variety of
visual sources, which include photography, old film
footage, drawings, animation, type, and computer
imagery. All these media are weaved together into a
continuous flow. As I have already pointed out in
relation to Sodium Fox, in contrast to shorter
motion-graphics pieces with their frenzy of
movement and animation, Blake’s films contain very
little animation in a traditional sense. Instead,
various still or moving images gradually fade in on
top of each other. So while each film moves through
a vast terrain of different visuals—color and
monochrome, completely abstract and figurative,
ornamental and representational—it is impossible to
divide the film into temporal units. In fact, even
when I tried, I could not keep track of how the film
got from one kind of image to a very different one
just a couple of minutes later. And yet these changes
were driven by some kind of logic, even if my brain
could not compute it while I was watching each film.
The hypnotic continuity of these films can be partly
explained by the fact that all visual sources in the
films were manipulated via graphics software. In
addition, many images were slightly blurred. As a
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result, regardless of the origin of the images, they all
acquired a certain visual coherence. So although the
films skillfully play on the visual and semantic
differences between live-action footage, drawings,
photographs with animated filters on top of them,
and other media, these differences do not create
juxtaposition or stylistic montage.131 Instead,
various media seem to peacefully coexist, occupying
the same space. In other words, Blake’s films seem
to suggest that media hybridization is not the only
possible result of softwarization.
We have already discussed in detail Alan Kay’s
concept of a computer metamedium. According to
Kay’s proposal made in the 1970s, we should think
of the digital computer as a metamedium containing
all the different “already existing and non-yetinvented
media.”132 What does this imply for the
aesthetics of digital projects? In my view, it does not
imply that the different media necessarily fuse
together, or make up a new single hybrid, or result
in “multimedia,” “intermedia,” “convergence,” or a
totalizing Gesamtskunstwerk. As I have argued,
rather than collapsing into a single entity, different
media (i.e., different techniques, data formats, data
sources and working methods) start interacting
producing a large number of hybrids, or new “media
species.” In other words, just as in biological
evolution, media evolution in a software era leads to
differentiation and increased diversity – more species
rather than less.
In the world dominated by hybrids, Blake’s films are
rare in presenting us with relatively “pure” media
appearances. We can either interpret this as the
slowness of the art world, which is behind the
evolutionary stage of professional media – or as a
clever strategy by Blake to separate himself from the
usual frenzy and over stimulation of motion graphics.
Or we can read his aesthetics as an implicit
statement against the popular idea of “convergence.”
As demonstrated by Blake’s films, while different
media has become compatible, this does not mean
that their distinct identities have collapsed. In
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Sodium Fox and Winchester Trilogy, the visual
elements in different media maintain their defining
characteristics and unique appearances.
Blake’s films also expand our understanding of what
the aesthetics of continuity can encompass. Different
media elements are continuously added on top of
each other, creating the experience of a continuous
flow, which nevertheless preserves their differences.
Danish artist Ann Lislegaard also belongs to the
“continuity generation.” A number of her films
involve continuous navigation or an observation of
imaginary architectural spaces. We may relate these
films to the works of a number of twentieth-century
painters and filmmakers which were concerned with
similar spatial experiences: Giorgio de Chirico,
Balthus, the Surrealists, Alan Resnais (Last Year at
Marienbad), Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker). However,
the sensibility of Lislegaard’s films is unmistakably
that of the early twenty-first century. The spaces are
not clashing together as in, for instance, Last Year at
Marienbad, nor are they made uncanny by the
introduction of figures and objects (a practice of
Réne Magritte and other Surrealists). Instead, like
her fellow artists Blake and Murata, Lislegaard
presents us with forms that continuously change
before our eyes. She offers us yet another version of
the aesthetics of continuity made possible by
software such as After Effects, which, as has already
been noted, translates the general logic of computer
representation—the substitution of all constants with
variables—into concrete interfaces and tools.
The visual changes in Lislegaard’s Crystal World
(after J. G. Ballard) (2006) happen right in front of
us, and yet they are practically impossible to track.
Within the space of a minute, one space is
completely transformed into something very
different. And it is impossible to say how exactly this
happened.
Crystal World creates its own hybrid aesthetics that
combines photorealistic spaces, completely abstract
forms, and a digitized photograph of plants.
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(Although I don’t know the exact software
Lislegaard’s assistant used for this film, it is
unmistaken some 3D computer animation package.)
Since everything is rendered in gray scale, the
differences between media are not loudly
announced. And yet they are there. It is this kind of
subtle and at the same time precisely formulated
distinction between different media that gives this
video its unique beauty. In contrast to twentiethcentury
montage, which created meaning and effect
through dramatic juxtapositions of semantics,
compositions, spaces, and different media,
Lislegaard’s aesthetics is in tune with other cultural
forms. Today, the creators of minimal architecture
and space design, web graphics, generative
animations and interactives, ambient electronic
music, and progressive fashions similarly assume
that a user is intelligent enough to make out and
enjoy subtle distinctions and continuous
modulations.
Lislegaard’s Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany) (2005)
takes the aesthetics of continuity in a different
direction. We are moving through and around what
appears to be a single set of spaces. (Historically,
such continuous movement through a 3D space has
its roots in the early uses of 3D computer animation
first for flight simulators and later in architectural
walk-throughs and first-person shooters.) Though we
pass through the same spaces many times, each
time they are rendered in a different color scheme.
The transparency and reflection levels also change.
Lislegaard is playing a game with the viewer: while
the overall structure of the film soon becomes clear,
it is impossible to keep track of which space we are
in at any given moment. We are never quite sure if
we have already been there and it is now simply
lighted differently, or if it is a space that we have not
yet visited.
Bellona can be read as an allegory of “variable form.”
In this case, variability is played out as seemingly
endless color schemes and transparency settings. It
does not matter how many times we have already
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seen the same space, it always can appear in a new
way.
To show us our world and ourselves in a new way is,
of course, one of the key goals of all modern art,
regardless of the media. By substituting all constants
with variables, media software institutionalizes this
desire. Now everything can always change and
everything can be rendered in a new way. But, of
course, simple changes in color or variations in a
spatial form are not enough to create a new vision of
the world. It takes talent to transform the
possibilities offered by software into meaningful
statements and original experiences. Lislegaard,
Blake, and Murata—along with many other talented
designers and artists working today—offer us distinct
and original visions of our world in the stage of
continuous transformation and metamorphosis:
visions that are fully appropriate for our time of rapid
social, technological, and cultural change.
Amplification of the Simulated Techniques
Although the discussions in this chapter did not cover
all the changes that took place during Velvet
Revolution, the magnitude of the transformations in
moving image aesthetics and communication
strategies should by now be clear. While we can
name many social factors that all could have and
probably did played some role – the rise of branding,
experience economy, youth markets, and the Web as
a global communication platform during the 1990s –
I believe that these factors alone cannot account for
the specific design and visual logics which we see
today in media culture. Similarly, they cannot be
explained by simply saying that contemporary
consumption society requires constant innovation,
constant novel aesthetics, and effects. This may be
true – but why do we see these particular visual
languages as opposed to others, and what is the
logic that drives their evolution? I believe that to
properly understand this, we need to carefully look
at media creation, editing, and design software and
their use in production environment - which can
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range from a single laptop to a number of production
companies around the world with thousands of
people collaborating on the same large-scale project
such as a feature film. In other words, we need to
use the perspective of Software Studies.
The makers of software used in media production
usually do not set out to create a revolution. On the
contrary, software is created to fit into already
existing production procedures, job roles, and
familiar tasks. But software are like species within
the common ecology – in this case, a shared
environment of a digital computer. Once “released,”
they start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids.
Velvet Revolution can therefore be understood as the
period of systematic hybridization between different
software species originally designed to do work in
different media. By 1993, designers has access to a
number of programs which were already quite
powerful but mostly incompatible: Illustrator for
making vector-based drawings, Photoshop for editing
of continuous tone images, Wavefront and Alias for
3D modeling and animation, After Effects for 2D
animation, and so on. By the end of the 1990s, it
became possible to use them in a single workflow. A
designer could now combine operations and
representational formats such as a bitmapped still
image, an image sequence, a vector drawing, a 3D
model and digital video specific to these programs
within the same design. I believe that the hybrid
visual language that we see today across “moving
image” culture and media design in general is largely
the outcome of this new production environment.
While this language supports seemingly numerous
variations as manifested in the particular media
designs, its key aesthetics feature can be summed
up in one phrase: deep remixability of previously
separate media languages.
As I already stressed more than once, the result of
this hybridization is not simply a mechanical sum of
the previously existing parts but new “species.” This
applies both to the visual language of particular
designs, and to the operations themselves. When a
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pre-digital media operation is integrated into the
overall digital production environment, it often
comes to function in a new way. I would like to
conclude by analyzing in detail how this process
works in the case of a particular operation - in order
to emphasize once again that media remixability is
not simply about adding the content of diffirent
media, or adding together their techniques and
languages. And since remix in contemporary culture
is commonly understood as these kinds of additions,
we may want to use a different term to talk about
the kinds of transformations the example below
illustrates. I called this provisonally “deep
remixability,” but what important is the idea and not
a particular term. (So if you have a suggestion for a
better one, send me an email.)
What does it mean when we see depth of field effect
in motion graphics, films and television programs
which use neither live action footage nor
photorealistic 3D graphics but have a more stylized
look? Originally an artifact of lens-based recording,
depth of field was simulated in software in the 1980s
when the main goal of 3D compute graphics field
was to create maximum “photorealism,” i.e.
synthetic scenes not distinguishable from live action
cinematography. But once this technique became
available, media designers gradually realized that it
can be used regardless of how realistic or abstract
the visual style is – as long as there is a suggestion
of a 3D space. Typography moving in perspective
through an empty space; drawn 2D characters
positioned on different layers in a 3D space; a field
of animated particles – any spatial composition can
be put through the simulated depth of field.
The fact that this effect is simulated and removed
from its original physical media means that a
designer can manipulate it a variety of ways. The
parameters which define what part of the space is in
focus can be independently animated, i.e. they can
be set to change over time – because they are
simply the numbers controlling the algorithm and not
something built into the optics of a physical lens. So
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while simulated depth of field maintains the memory
of the particular physical media (lens-based photo
and film recording) from which it came from, it
became an essentially new technique which functions
as a “character” in its own right. It has the fluidity
and versatility not available previously. Its
connection to the physical world is ambiguous at
best. On the one hand, it only makes sense to use
depth of field if you are constructing a 3D space
even if it is defined in a minimal way by using only a
few or even a single depth cue such as lines
converging towards the vanishing point or
foreshortening. On the other hand, the designer is
now able to “draw” this effect in any way desirable.
The axis controlling depth of field does not need to
be perpendicular to the image plane, the area in
focus can be anywhere in space, it can also quickly
move around the space, etc.
Following Velvet Revolution, the aesthetic charge of
many media designs is often derived from more
“simple” remix operations – juxtaposing different
media in what can be called “media montage.”
However, for me the essence of this Revolution is the
more fundamental “deep remixability” illustrated by
this example of how depth of field was greatly
amplified when it was simulated in software.
Computerization virtualized practically all media
creating and modification techniques, “extracting”
them from their particular physical media and
turning them into algorithms. This means that in
most cases, we will no longer find any of the predigital
techniques in their pure original state. This is
something I already discussed in general when we
looked at the first stage in cultural software history,
i.e. 1960s and 1970s. In all cases we examined Sutherland’s
work on fist interactive graphical editor
(Sketchpad), Nelson’s concepts of hypertext and
hypermedia, Kay’s discussions of an electronic book
– the inventors of cultural software systematically
emphasized that they were not aiming at simply
simulating existing media in software. To quite Kay
and Goldberg once again when they write about the
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possibilities of a computer book, “It need not be
treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new
medium with new properties.”
We have now seen how this general idea articulated
already in the early 1960s made its way into the
details of the interfaces and tools of applications for
media design which eventually replaced most of
traditional tools: After Effects (which we analyzed in
detail), Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Final Cut, etc.
So what is true for depth of field effect is also true
for most other tools offered by media design
applications.
What was a set of theoretical concepts implemented
in a small number of custom software systems
accessible mostly to their own creators in the 1960s
and 1970s (such as Sketchpad or Xerox PARC
workstation) later became a universal production
environment used today throughout all areas of
culture industry. The ongoing interactions between
the ideas coming from software industry and the
desires of users of their tools (media designers,
graphic designers, film editors, and so on) – along
with new needs which emerge than these tools came
to used daily by hundreds of thousands of individuals
and companies led to the further evolution of
software - for instance, the emergence of an new
category of “digital asset management” systems
around early 2000s, or the concept of “production
pipeline” which becomes important in the middle of
this decade. In this chapter I highlighted just one
among many directions in which evolution – making
software applications, their tools, and media formats
compatible with each other. As we saw, the result of
this trend was anything but minor: an emergence of
fundamentally new type of aesthetics which today
dominates visual and media culture.
One of the consequences of this software
compatibility is that the 20th
century concepts that
we still use by inertia to describe different cultural
fields (or different areas of culture industry, if you
like) – “graphic design,” “cinema,” “animation” and
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others – are in fact no longer adequately describe
the reality. If each of the original media techniques
has been greatly expanded and “super-charged” as a
result of its implementation in a software, if the
practioners in all these fields have access to a
common set of tools, and if these tools can be
combined in a single project and even a single image
or a frame, are these fields really still distinct from
each other? In the next chapter I will wrestle with
this theoretical challenge by looking at a particularly
interesting case of media hybridity – the techniques
of Total Capture and originally developed for Matrix
films. I will also ask how one of the terms from the
list above which in the twentieth-century was used to
refer to a distinct medium – “animation” - functions
in a new software-based “post-media” universe of
hybridity.
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Chapter 4. Universal Capture
Introduction
For the larger part of the twentieth century, different
areas of commercial moving image culture
maintained their distinct production methods and
distinct aesthetics. Films and cartoons were
produced completely differently and it was easy to
tell their visual languages apart. Today the situation
is different. Softwarization of all areas of moving
image production created a common pool of
techniques that can be used regardless of whether
one is creating motion graphics for television, a
narrative feature, an animated feature, or a music
video. The abilities to composite many layers of
imagery with varied transparency, to place 2D and
3D visual elements within a shared 3D virtual space
and then move a virtual camera through this space,
to apply simulated motion blur and depth of field
effect, to change over time any visual parameter of a
frame are equally available to the creators of all
forms of moving images.
The existence of this common vocabulary of
software-based techniques does not mean that all
films now look the same. What it means, however, is
that while most live action films, animated features
and motion graphics do look quite distinct today, this
is the result of a deliberate choices rather than the
inevitable consequence of differences in production
methods and technology.
Given that all techniques of previously distinct media
are now available within a single software-based
production environment, what is the meaning of the
terms that were used to refer to these media in the
twentieth century – such as “animation”? From the
industry point of view, the answer is simple.
Animation not only continues to exist as a distinct
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area of media industry but its also very successful –
its success in no small part fueled by new efficiency
of software-based global production workflow. 2D
and 3D animated features, shorts and series are
produced today in larger numbers than ever before;
students can pursue careers in “animation”;
Japanese anime and animated features continue to
grow in popularity; China is building whole cities
around mega-size animation and rendering studios
and production facilities.
Certainly, the aesthetics of many contemporary
feature-length 3D animated features largely relies on
the visual language of twentieth-century commercial
animation. So while everything may be modeled and
animated in 3D computer animation program, the
appearance of the characters, their movements, and
the staging of scenes conceptually owe more to mid
20th century Disney than to 21st century Autodesk
(producer of industry-standard Maya software).
Similarly, hybrid looking short-form films
(exemplified by but not limited to “motion graphics”)
also often feature sequences or layers that look very
much like character animation we know from the
20th
century.
The examples above illustrate just one, more
obvious, role of animation in contemporary postdigital
visual landscape. In this chapter I will explore
its other role: as a generalized tool set that can be
applied to any images, including film and video.
Here, animation functions not as a medium but as a
set of general-purpose techniques – used together
with other techniques in the common pool of options
available to a filmmaker/designer. Put differently,
what has been “animation” has become a part of the
computer metamedium.
I have chosen a particular example for my discussion
that I think will illustrate well this new role of
animation. It is an especially intricate method of
combining live action and CG (a common
abbreviation for “compute graphics.”) Called
“Universal Capture” (U-cap) by their creators, it was
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first systematically used on a large scale by ESC
Entertainment in Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 films from
The Matrix trilogy. I will discuss how this method is
different from the now standard and older techniques
of integrating live action and computer graphics
elements. The use of Universal Capture also leads to
visual hybrids – but they are quite distinct from the
hybrids found in motion graphics and other shortform
moving image productions being created today.
With Universal Capture, different types of imagery
are “fused” together to create a new kind of image.
This image combines “the best of” qualities of two
types of imagery that we normally understand as
being ontologically the opposites: live action
recording and 3D computer animation. I will suggest
that such image hybrids are likely to play a large role
in future visual culture while the place of “pure”
images that are not fused or mixed with anything is
likely to gradually diminish.
Uneven Development
What kinds of images would dominate visual culture
a number of decades from now? Would they still be
similar to the typical images that surround us today
– photographs that are digitally manipulated and
often combined with various graphical elements and
type? Or would future images be completely
different? Would photographic code fade away in
favor of something else?
There are good reasons to assume that the future
images would be photograph-like. Like a virus, a
photograph turned out to be an incredibly resilient
representational code: it survived waves of
technological change, including computerization of all
stages of cultural production and distribution. One of
the reason for this persistence of photographic code
lies in its flexibility: photographs can be easily mixed
with all other visual forms - drawings, 2D and 3D
designs, line diagrams, and type. As a result, while
photographs continue to dominate contemporary
visual culture, most of them are not pure
photographs but various mutations and hybrids:
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photographs which went through different filters and
manual adjustments to achieve a more stylized look,
a more flat graphic look, more saturated color, etc.;
photographs mixed with design and type elements;
photographs which are not limited to the part of the
spectrum visible to a human eye (night vision, xray);
simulated photographs created with 3D
computer graphics; and so on. Therefore, while we
can say that today we live in a “photographic
culture,” we also need to start reading the word
“photographic” in a new way. “Photographic” today is
really photo-GRAPHIC, the photo providing only an
initial layer for the overall graphical mix. (In the area
of moving images, the term “motion graphics”
captures perfectly the same development: the
subordination of live action cinematography to the
graphic code.)
One way in which change happens in nature, society,
and culture is inside out. The internal structure
changes first, and this change affects the visible skin
only later. For instance, according to Marxist theory
of historical development, infrastructure (i.e., mode
of production in a given society – also called “base”)
changes well before superstructure (i.e., ideology
and culture in this society). To use a different
example, think of the history of technology in the
twentieth century. Typically, a new type of machine
was at first fitted within old, familiar skin: for
instance, early twentieth century cars emulated the
form of horse carriage. The popular idea usually
ascribed to Marshall McLuhan – that the new media
first emulates old media – is another example of this
type of change. In this case, a new mode of media
production, so to speak, is first used to support old
structure of media organization, before the new
structure emerges. For instance, first typeset book
were designed to emulate hand-written books;
cinema first emulated theatre; and so on.
This concept of uneven development can be useful in
thinking about the changes in contemporary visual
culture. Since this process started in the middle of
the 1950s, computerization of photography (and
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cinematography) has by now completely changed the
internal structure of a photographic image. Yet its
“skin,” i.e. the way a typical photograph looks, still
largely remains the same. It is therefore possible
that at some point in the future the “skin” of a
photographic image would also become completely
different, but this did not happen yet. So we can say
at present our visual culture is characterized by a
new computer “base” and old photographic
“superstructure.”
The Matrix films provide us with a very rich set of
examples perfect for thinking further about these
issues. The trilogy is an allegory about how its visual
universe is constructed. That is, the films tell us
about The Matrix, the virtual universe that is
maintained by computers – and of course, visually
the images of The Matrix trilogy that we the viewers
see in the films were all indeed assembled using help
software. (The animators sometimes used Maya but
mostly relied on custom written programs). So there
is a perfect symmetry between us, the viewers of a
film, and the people who live inside The Matrix –
except while the computers running The Matrix are
capable of doing it in real time, most scenes in each
of The Matrix films took months and even years to
put together. (So The Matrix can be also interpreted
as the futuristic vision of computer games in the
future when it would become possible to render The
Matrix-style visual effects in real time.)
The key to the visual universe of The Matrix is the
new set of computer graphic techniques that over
the years were developed by Paul Debevec, Georgi
Borshukov, John Gaeta, and a number of other
people both in academia and in the special effects
industry.133
Their inventors coined a number of
names for these techniques: “virtual cinema,”
“virtual human,” “virtual cinematography,” “universal
capture.” Together, these techniques represent a
true milestone in the history of computer-driven
special effects. They take to their logical conclusion
the developments of the 1990s such as motion
capture, and simultaneously open a new stage. We
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can say that with The Matrix, the old “base” of
photography has finally been completely replaced by
a new computer-driven one. What remains to be
seen is how the “superstructure” of a photographic
image – what it represents and how – will change to
accommodate this “base.”
Reality Simulation versus Reality Sampling
Before proceeding, I should note that not all of
special effects in The Matrix rely on Universal
Capture. Also, since the Matrix, other Hollywood
films and video games (EA SPORT Tiger Woods
2007) already used some of the same strategies.
However, in this chapter I decided to focus on the
use of this process in the second and third films of
the Matrix for which the method of Universal Capture
was originally developed. And while the complete
credits for everybody involved in developing
Universal Capture would run for a whole page, here I
will identify it with Gaeta. The reason is not because,
as a senior special effects supervisor for The Matrix
Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions he got most
publicity. More importantly, in contrast to many
others in the special effects industry, Gaeta has
extensively reflected on the techniques he and his
colleagues have developed, presenting it as a new
paradigm for cinema and entertainment and coining
useful terms and concepts for understanding it.
In order to understand better the significance of
Gaeta’s method, lets briefly run through the history
of 3D photo-realistic image synthesis and its use in
the film industry. In 1963 Lawrence G. Roberts (who
later in the 1960s became one of the key people
behind the development of Arpanet but at that time
was a graduate student at MIT) published a
description of a computer algorithm to construct
images in linear perspective. These images
represented the objects’ edges as lines; in
contemporary language of computer graphics they
would be called “wire frames.” Approximately ten
years later computer scientists designed algorithms
that allowed for the creation of shaded images (so-
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called Gouraud shading and Phong shading, named
after the computer scientists who create the
corresponding algorithms). From the middle of the
1970s to the end of the 1980s the field of 3D
computer graphics went through rapid development.
Every year new fundamental techniques were
created: transparency, shadows, image mapping,
bump texturing, particle system, compositing, ray
tracing, radiosity, and so on.134
By the end of this
creative and fruitful period in the history of the field,
it was possible to use combination of these
techniques to synthesize images of almost every
subject that often were not easily distinguishable
from traditional cinematography. (“Almost” is
important here since the creation of photorealistic
moving images of human faces remained a hard to
reach a goal – and this is in part what Total Capture
method was designed to address.)
All this research was based on one fundamental
assumption: in order to re-create an image of visible
reality identical to the one captured by a film
camera, we need to systematically simulate the
actual physics involved in construction of this image.
This means simulating the complex interactions
between light sources, the properties of different
materials (cloth, metal, glass, etc.), and the
properties of physical film cameras, including all their
limitations such as depth of field and motion blur.
Since it was obvious to computer scientists that if
they exactly simulate all this physics, a computer
would take forever to calculate even a single image,
they put their energy in inventing various short cuts
which would create sufficiently realistic images while
involving fewer calculation steps. So in fact each of
the techniques for image synthesis I mentioned in
the previous paragraph is one such “hack” – a
particular approximation of a particular subset of all
possible interactions between light sources,
materials, and cameras.
This assumption also meant that you are re-creating
reality step-by-step starting from a blank canvas (or,
more precisely, an empty 3D space.) Every time you
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want to make a still image or an animation of some
object or a scene, the story of creation from The
Bible is being replayed.
(I imagine God creating Universe by going through
the numerous menus of a professional 3D modeling,
animation, and rendering program such as Maya.
First he has to make all the geometry: manipulating
splines, extruding contours, adding bevels…Next for
every object and creature he has to choose the
material properties: specular color, transparency
level, image, bump and reflexion maps, and so on.
He finishes one set of parameters, wipes his
forehead, and starts working on the next set. Now
on defining the lights: again, dozens of menu options
need to be selected. He renders the scene, looks at
the result, and admires his creation. But he is far
from being done: the universe he has in mind is not
a still image but an animation, which means that the
water has to flow, the grass and leaves have to
move under the blow of the wind, and all the
creatures also have to move. He sights and opens
another set of menus where he has to define the
parameters of algorithms that simulate the physics
of motion. And on, and on, and on. Finally the world
itself is finished and it looks good; but now God
wants to create the Man so he can admire his
creation. God sights again, and takes from the shelf
a particular Maya manuals from the complete set
which occupies the whole shelf…)
Of course we are in somewhat better position than
God was. He was creating everything for the first
time, so he could not borrow things from anywhere.
Therefore everything had to be built and defined
from scratch. But we are not creating a new universe
but instead visually simulating universe that already
exists, i.e. physical reality. Therefore computer
scientists working on 3D computer graphics
techniques have realized early on that in addition to
approximating the physics involved they can also
sometimes take another shortcut. Instead of defining
something from scratch through the algorithms, they
can simply sample it from existing reality and
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incorporate these samples in the construction
process.
The examples of the application of this idea are the
techniques of texture mapping and bump mapping
which were introduced already in the second part of
the 1970s. With texture mapping, any 2D digital
image – which can be a close-up of some texture
such as wood grain or bricks, but which can be also
anything else, for instance a logo, a photograph of a
face or of clouds – is wrapped around a 3D model.
This is a very effective way to add visual richness of
a real world to a virtual scene. Bump texturing works
similarly, but in this case the 2D image is used as a
way to quickly add complexity to the geometry itself.
For instance, instead of having to manually model all
the little cracks and indentations which make up the
3D texture of a concrete wall, an artist can simply
take a photograph of an existing wall, convert into a
grayscale image, and then feed this image to the
rendering algorithm. The algorithm treats grayscale
image as a depth map, i.e. the value of every pixel is
being interpreted as relative height of the surface.
So in this example, light pixels become points on the
wall that are a little in front while dark pixels become
points that are a little behind. The result is enormous
saving in the amount of time necessary to recreate a
particular but very important aspect of our physical
reality: a slight and usually regular 3D texture found
in most natural and many human-made surfaces,
from the bark of a tree to a weaved cloth.
Other 3D computer graphics techniques based on the
idea of sampling existing reality include reflection
mapping and 3D digitizing. Despite the fact that all
these techniques have been always widely used as
soon as they were invented, many people in the
computer graphics field always felt that they were
cheating. Why? I think this feeling was there
because the overall conceptual paradigm for creating
photorealistic computer graphics was to simulate
everything from scratch through algorithms. So if
you had to use the techniques based on directly
sampling reality, you somehow felt that this was just
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temporary - because the appropriate algorithms
were not yet developed or because the machines
were too slow. You also had this feeling because
once you started to manually sample reality and then
tried to include these samples in your perfect
algorithmically defined image, things rarely would fit
exactly right, and painstaking manual adjustments
were required. For instance, texture mapping would
work perfectly if applied to a flat surface, but if the
surface were curved, inevitable distortion would
occur.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the “reality
simulation” paradigm and “reality sampling”
paradigms co-existed side-by-side. More precisely,
as I suggested above, sampling paradigm was
“imbedded” within reality simulation paradigm. It
was a common sense that the right way to create
photorealistic images of reality is by simulating its
physics as precisely as one could. Sampling existing
reality and then adding these samples to a virtual
scene was a trick, a shortcut within over wise honest
game of mathematically simulating reality in a
computer.
Building The Matrix
So far we looked at the paradigms of 3D computer
graphics field without considering the uses of the 3D
images? So what happens if you want to incorporate
photorealistic images produced with CG into a film?
This introduces a new constraint. Not only every
simulated image has to be consistent internally, with
the cast shadows corresponding to the light sources,
and so on, but now it also has to be consistent with
the cinematography of a film. The simulated universe
and live action universe have to match perfectly (I
am talking here about the “normal” use of computer
graphics in narrative films and not the hybrid
aesthetics of TV graphics, music videos, etc. which
deliberately juxtaposes different visual codes). As
can be seen in retrospect, this new constraint
eventually changed the relationship between the two
paradigms in favor of sampling paradigm. But this is
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only visible now, after films such as The Matrix made
the sampling paradigm the basis of its visual
universe.135
At first, when filmmakers started to incorporate
synthetic 3D images in films, this did not have any
effect on how computer scientists thought about
computer graphics. 3D computer graphics for the
first time briefly appeared in a feature film in 1980
(Looker). Throughout the 1980s, a number of films
were made which used computer images but always
only as a small element within the overall film
narrative. (One exception was Tron; released in
1982, it can be compared to The Matrix since its
narrative universe is situated inside computer and
created through computer graphics – but this was an
exception.) For instance, one of Star Track films
contained a scene of a planet coming to life; it was
created using CG. (In fact, now commonly used
“particle system” was invented for to crate this
effect). But this was a single scene, and it had no
interaction with all other scenes in the film.
In the early 1990s the situation has started to
change. With pioneering films such as The Abyss
(James Cameron, 1989), Terminator 2 (James
Cameron, 1991), and Jurassic Park (Steven
Spielberg, 1993) computer generated characters
became the key protagonists of feature films. This
meant that they would appear in dozens or even
hundreds of shots throughout a film, and that in
most of these shots computer characters would have
to be integrated with real environments and human
actors captured via live action photography (such
shots are called in the business “live plates.”)
Examples are the T-100 cyborg character in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park. These computer-generated characters
are situated inside the live action universe that is the
result of capturing physical reality via the lens of a
film camera. The simulated world is located inside
the captured world, and the two have to match
perfectly.
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As I pointed out in The Language of New Media in
the discussion of compositing, perfectly aligning
elements that come from different sources is one of
fundamental challenges of computer-based realism.
Throughout the 1990s filmmakers and special effects
artists have dealt with this challenge using a variety
of techniques and methods. What Gaeta realized
earlier than others is that the best way to align the
two universes of live action and 3D computer
graphics was to build a single new universe.136
Rather than treating sampling reality as just one
technique to be used along with many other “proper”
algorithmic techniques of image synthesis, Gaeta
and his colleagues turned it into the key foundation
of Universal Capture process. The process
systematically takes physical reality apart and then
systematically reassembles the elements together to
create a new software-based representation. The
result is a new kind of image that has photographic /
cinematographic appearance and level of detail yet
internally is structured in a completely different way.
Universal Capture was developed and refined over a
three-year period from 2000 to 2003.137
How does
the process work? There are actually more stages
and details involved, but the basic procedure is the
following.138
An actor’s performance is recorded using
five synchronized high-resolution video cameras.
“Performance” in this case includes everything an
actor will say in a film and all possible facial
expressions.139
(During the production the studio was
capturing over 5 terabytes of data each day.) Next
special algorithms are used to track each pixel’s
movement over time at every frame. This
information is combined with a 3D model of a neutral
expression of the actor captured via a 3D scanner.
The result is an animated 3D shape that accurately
represents the geometry of the actor’s head as it
changes during a particular performance. The shape
is mapped with color information extracted from the
captured video sequences. A separate very high
resolution scan of the actor’s face is used to create
the map of small-scale surface details like pores and
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wrinkles, and this map is also added to the model.
(How is that for hybridity?)
After all the data has been extracted, aligned, and
combine, the result is what Gaeta calls a “virtual
human” - a highly accurate reconstruction of the
captured performance, now available as a 3D
computer graphics data – with all the advantages
that come from having such representation. For
instance, because actor’s performance now exists as
a 3D object in virtual space, the filmmaker can
animate virtual camera and “play” the reconstructed
performance from an arbitrary angle. Similarly, the
virtual head can be also lighted in any way desirable.
It can be also attached to a separately constructed
CG body.140
For example, all the characters which
appeared the Burly Brawl scene in The Matrix 2 were
created by combining the heads constructed via
Universal Capture done on the leading actors with
CG bodies which used motion capture data from a
different set of performers. Because all the
characters along with the set were computer
generated, this allowed the directors of the scene to
choreograph the virtual camera, having it fly around
the scene in a way not possible with real cameras on
a real physical set.
The process was appropriately named Total Capture
because it captures all the possible information from
an object or a scene using a number of recording
methods – or at least, whatever is possible to
capture using current technologies. Different
dimensions – color, 3D geometry, reflectivity and
texture – are captured separately and then put back
together to create a more detailed and realistic
representation.
Total Capture is significantly different from the
commonly accepted methods used to create
computer-based special effects such as keyframe
animation and physically based modeling. In the first
method, an animator specifies the key positions of a
3D model, and the computer calculates in-between
frames. With the second method, all the animation is
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automatically created by software that simulates the
physics underlying the movement. (This method thus
represents a particular instance of “reality
simulation” paradigm.) For instance, to create a
realistic animation of moving creature, the
programmers model its skeleton, muscles, and skin,
and specify the algorithms that simulate the actual
physics involved. Often the two methods are
combined: for instance, physically based modeling
can be used to animate a running dinosaur while
manual animation can be used for shots where the
dinosaur interacts with human characters.
When the third Matrix film was being released, the
most impressive achievement in physically based
modeling was the battle in The Lord of the Rings:
Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003) which
involved tens of thousands of virtual soldiers all
driven by Massive software.141
Similar to the Nonhuman
Players (or bots) in computer games, each
virtual soldier was given the ability to “see” the
terrain and other soldiers, a set of priorities and an
independent “brain,” i.e. a AI program which directs
character’s actions based on the perceptual inputs
and priorities. But in contrast to games AI, Massive
software does not have to run in real time. Therefore
it can create the scenes with tens and even hundreds
of thousands realistically behaving agents (one
commercial created with the help of Massive
software featured 146,000 virtual characters.)
Universal Capture method uses neither manual
animation nor simulation of the underlying physics.
Instead, it directly samples physical reality, including
color, texture and the movement of the actors. Short
sequences of an actor’s performances are encoded
as 3D computer animations; these animations form a
library from which the filmmakers can then draw as
they compose a scene. The analogy with musical
sampling is obvious here. As Gaeta pointed out, his
team never used manual animation to try to tweak
the motion of character’s face; however, just as a
musician may do it, they would often “hold”
particular expression before going to the next one.142
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This suggests another analogy – analog video
editing. But this is a second-degree editing, so to
speak: instead of simply capturing segments of
reality on video and then joining them together,
Gaeta’s method produces complete virtual
recreations of particular phenomena – self-contained
micro-worlds – which can be then further edited and
embedded within a larger 3D simulated space.
Animation as an Idea
The brief overview of the methods of computer
graphics that I presented above in order to explain
Universal Capture offers good examples of the
multiplicity of ways in which animation is used in
contemporary moving image culture. If we consider
this multiplicity, it is possible to come to a conclusion
that “animation” as a separate medium in fact hardly
exists anymore. At the same time, the general
principles and techniques of putting objects and
images into motion developed in nineteenth and
twentieth century animation are used much more
frequently now than before computerization. But
they are hardly ever used by themselves – usually
they are combined with other techniques drawn from
live action cinematography and computer graphics.
So where does animation start and end today? When
you see a Disney or Pixar animated feature or many
graphics shorts it is obvious that you are seeing
“animation.” Regardless of whether the process
involves drawing images by hand or using 3D
software, the principle is the same: somebody
created the drawings or 3D objects, set keyframes
and then created in-between positions. (Of course in
the course of commercial films, this is not one
person but large teams.) The objects can be created
in multiple ways and inbetweening can be done
manually or automatically by the software, but this
does not change the basic logic. The movement, or
any other change over time, is defined manually –
usually via keyframes (but not always). In
retrospect, the definition of movement via keys
probably was the essence of twentieth century
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animation. It was used in traditional cell animation
by Disney and others, for stop motion animation by
Starevich and Trnka, for the 3D animated shorts by
Pixar, and it continues to be used today in animated
features that combine traditional cell method and 3D
computer animation. And while experimental
animators such as Norman McLaren refused keys /
inbetweens system in favor of drawing each frame
on film by hand without explicitly defining the keys,
this did not change the overall logic: the movement
was created by hand. Not surprisingly, most
animation artists exploited this key feature of
animation in different ways, turning it into
aesthetics: for instance, exaggerated squash and
stretch in Disney, or the discontinuous jumps
between frames in McLaren.
What about other ways in which images and objects
can be set into motion? Consider for example the
methods developed in computer graphics: physically
based modeling, particle systems, formal grammars,
artificial life, and behavioral animation. In all these
methods, the animator does not directly create the
movement. Instead it is created by the software that
uses some kind of mathematical model. For instance,
in the case of physically based modeling the
animator may sets the parameters of a computer
model which simulates a physical force such as wind
which will deform a piece of cloth over a number of
frames. Or, she may instruct the ball to drop on the
floor, and let the physics model control how the ball
will bounce after it hits the floor. In the case of
particle systems used to model everything from
fireworks, explosions, water and gas to animal flocks
and swarms, the animator only has to define initial
conditions: a number of particles, their speed, their
lifespan, etc.
In contrast to live action cinema, these computer
graphics methods do not capture real physical
movement. Does it mean that they belong to
animation? If we accept that the defining feature of
traditional animation was manual creation of
movement, the answer will be no. But things are not
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so simple. With all these methods, the animator sets
the initial parameters, runs the model, adjusts the
parameters, and repeats this production loop until
she is satisfied with the result. So while the actual
movement is produced not by hand by a
mathematical model, the animator maintains
significant control. In a way, the animator acts as a
film director – only in this case she is directing not
the actors but the computer model until it produces
a satisfactory performance. Or we can also compare
her to a film editor who is selecting among best
performances of the computer model.
James Blinn, a computer scientist responsible for
creating many fundamental techniques of computer
graphics, once made an interesting analogy to
explain the difference between manual keyframing
method and physically based modeling.143
He told the
audience at a SIGGRAPH panel that the difference
between the two methods is analogous to the
difference between painting and photography. In
Blinn’s terms, an animator who creates movement
by manually defining keyframes and drawing
inbetween frames is like a painter who is observing
the world and then making a painting of it. The
resemblance between a painting and the world
depends on painter’s skills, imagination and
intentions. Whereas an animator who uses physically
based modeling is like a photographer who captures
the world as it actually is. Blinn wanted to emphasize
that mathematical techniques can create a realistic
simulation of movement in the physical world and an
animator only has to capture what is created by the
simulation.
Although this analogy is useful, I think it is not
completely accurate. Obviously, the traditional
photographer whom Blinn had in mind (i.e. before
Photoshop) chooses composition, contrast, depth of
field, and many other parameters. Similarly, an
animator who is using physically based modeling also
has control over a large number of parameters and it
depends on her skills and perseverance to make the
model produce a satisfying animation. Consider the
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following example from the related area of software
art that uses some of the same mathematical
methods. Casey Reas, an artist who is well-know
both for his own still images and animations and for
Processing graphics programming environment he
helped to develop, told me that he may spend only a
couple of hours writing a software program to create
a new work – and then another two years working
with the different parameters of the same program
and producing endless test images until he is
satisfied with the results.144
So while at first
physically based modeling appears to be opposite of
traditional animation in that the movement is
created by a computer, in fact it should be
understood as a hybrid between animation and
computer simulation. While the animator no longer
directly draws each phase of movement, she is
working with the parameters of the mathematical
model that “draws” the actual movement.
And what about Universal Capture method as used in
The Matrix? Gaeta and his colleagues also banished
keyframing animation – but they did not used any
mathematical modes to automatically generate
motion either. As we saw, their solution was to
capture the actual performances of an actor (i.e.,
movements of actor’s face), and then reconstruct it
as a 3D sequence. Together, these reconstructed
sequences form a library of facial expressions. The
filmmaker can then draw from this library, editing
together a sequence of expressions (but not
interfering with any parameters of separate
sequences). It is important to stress that a 3D model
has no muscles, or other controls traditionally used
in animating computer graphics faces - it is used “as
is.”
Just as it is the case when animator employs
mathematical models, this method avoids drawing
individual movements by hand. And yet, its logic is
that of animation rather than of cinema. The
filmmaker chooses individual sequences of actors’
performances, edits them, blends them if necessary,
and places them in a particular order to create a
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scene. In short, the scene is actually constructed by
hand even though its components are not. So while
in traditional animation the animator draws each
frame to create a short sequence (for instance, a
character turning his head), here the filmmaker
“draws” on a higher level: manipulating whole
sequences as opposed to their individual frames.
To create final movie scenes, Universal Capture is
combined with Virtual Cinematography: staging the
lighting, the positions and movement of a virtual
camera that is “filming” the virtual performances.
What makes this Virtual Cinematography as opposed
to simply “computer animation” as we already know
it? The reason is that the world as seen by a virtual
camera is different from a normal world of computer
graphics. It consists from reconstructions of the
actual set and the actual performers created via
Universal Capture. The aim is to avoid manual
processes usually used to create 3D models and
sets. Instead, the data about the physical world is
captured and then used to create a precise virtual
replica.
Ultimately, ESC’s production method as used in
Matrix is neither “pure” animation, nor
cinematography, nor traditional special effects, nor
traditional CG. Instead, it is “pure” example of
hybridity in general, and “deep remixability” in
particular. With its complex blend of the variety of
media techniques and media formats, it is also
typical of moving image culture today. When the
techniques drawn from these different media
traditions are brought together in a software
environment, the result is not a sum of separate
components but a variety of hybrid methods - such
as Universal Capture. As I already noted more than
once, I think that this how different moving image
techniques function now in general. After
computerization virtualized them – “extracting” them
from their particular physical media to turn into
algorithms – they start interacting and creating
hybrids. While we have already encountered various
examples of hybrid techniques, Total Capture and
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Virtual Cinematography illustrate how creative
industries today develop whole production workflow
based on hybridity.
It is worthwhile here to quote Gaeta who himself is
very clear that what he and his colleagues have
created is a new hybrid. In 2004 interview, he says:
“If I had to define virtual cinema, I would say it is
somewhere between a live-action film and a
computer-generated animated film. It is computer
generated, but it is derived from real world people,
places and things.”145
Although Universal Capture
offers a particularly striking example of such
“somewhere between,” most forms of moving image
created today are similarly “somewhere between,”
with animation being one of the coordinate axises of
this new space of hybridity.
“Universal Capture”: Reality Re-assembled
The method which came to be called “Universal
Capture” combines the best of two worlds: visible
reality as captured by lens-based cameras, and
synthetic 3D computer graphics. While it is possible
to recreate the richness of the visible world through
manual painting and animation, as well as through
various computer graphics techniques (texture
mapping, bump mapping, physical modeling, etc.), it
is expensive in terms of labor involved. Even with
physically based modeling techniques endless
parameters have to be tweaked before the animation
looks right. In contrast, capturing visible reality via
lens-based recording (the process which in the
twentieth century was called “filming”) is cheap: just
point the camera and press “record” button.
The disadvantage of such lens-based recordings is
that they lack flexibility demanded by contemporary
remix culture. Remix culture demands not selfcontained
aesthetic objects or self-contained records
of reality but smaller units - parts that can be easily
changed and combined with other parts in endless
combinations. However, lens-based recording
process flattens the semantic structure of reality.
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Instead of a set of unique objects which occupy
distinct areas of a 3D physical space, we end up with
a flat field of made from pixels (or film grains in the
case of film-based capture) that do not carry any
information of where they came from, i.e., which
objects they correspond to. Therefore, any kind of
spatial editing operation – deleting objects, adding
new ones, compositing, etc – becomes quite difficult.
Before anything can be done with an object in the
image, it has to be manually separated from the rest
of the image by creating a mask. And unless an
image shows an object that is properly lighted and
shot against a special blue or green background, it is
practically impossible to mask the object precisely.
In contrast, 3D computer generated worlds have the
exact flexibility one would expect from media in
information age. (It is not therefore accidental that
3D computer graphics representation – along with
hypertext and other new computer-based data
representation methods – was conceptualized in the
same decade when the transformation of advanced
industrialized societies into information societies
became visible.) In a 3D computer generated worlds
everything is discrete. The world consists from a
number of separate objects. Objects are defined by
points described as XYZ coordinates; other
properties of objects such as color, transparency and
reflectivity are similarly described in terms of
discrete numbers. As a result, while a 3D CG
representation may not have the richness of a lensbased
recording, it does contain a semantic structure
of the world. This structure is easily accessible at any
time. A designer can directly select any object (or
any object part) in the scene. Thus, to duplicate an
object hundred times requires only a few mouse
clicks or typing a short command; similarly, all other
properties of a world can be always easily changed.
And since each object itself consists from discrete
components (flat polygons or surface patches
defined by splines), it is equally easy to change its
3D form by selecting and manipulating its
components. In addition, just as a sequence of genes
contains the code that is expanded into a complex
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organism, a compact description of a 3D world that
contains only the coordinates of the objects can be
quickly transmitted through the network, with the
client computer reconstructing the full world (this is
how online multi-player computer games and
simulators work).
Universal Capture brings together the
complementary advantages of lens-based capture
and CG representation in an ingenious way.
Beginning in the late 1970s when James Blinn
introduced CG technique of texture mapping146
,
computer scientists, designers and animators were
gradually expanding the range of information that
can be recorded in the real world and then
incorporated into a computer model. Until the early
1990s this information mostly involved the
appearance of the objects: color, texture, light
effects. The next significant step was the
development of motion capture. During the first half
of the 1990s it was quickly adopted in the movie and
game industries. Now computer synthesized worlds
relied not only on sampling the visual appearance of
the real world but also on sampling of movements of
animals and humans in this world. Building on all
these techniques, Gaeta’s method takes them to a
new stage: capturing just about everything that at
present can be captured and then reassembling the
samples to create a digital - and thus completely
malleable - recreation. Put in a larger context, the
resulting 2D / 3D hybrid representation perfectly fits
with the most progressive trends in contemporary
culture which are all based on the idea of a hybrid.
The New Hybrid
It is my strong feeling that the emerging
“information aesthetics” (i.e., the new cultural
features specific to information society) already has
or will have a very different logic from what
modernism. The later was driven by a strong desire
to erase the old - visible as much in the avant-garde
artists’ (particularly the futurists) statements that
museums should be burned, as well as in the
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dramatic destruction of all social and spiritual
realities of many people in Russia after the 1917
revolution, and in other countries after they became
Soviet satellites after 1945. Culturally and
ideologically, modernists wanted to start with “tabula
rasa,” radically distancing them from the past. It was
only in the 1960s that this move started to feel
inappropriate, as manifested both in loosening of
ideology in communist countries and the beginnings
of new post-modern sensibility in the West. To quote
the title of a famous book by Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (published in 1972,
it was the first systematic manifestation of new
sensibility), Learning from Las Vegas meant
admitting that organically developing vernacular
cultures involves bricolage and hybridity, rather than
purity seen for instance in “international style” which
was still practiced by architects world-wide at that
time. Driven less by the desire to imitate vernacular
cultures and more by the new availability of previous
cultural artifacts stored on magnetic and soon digital
media, in the 1980s commercial culture in the West
systematically replaced purity by stylistic
heterogeneity. Finally, when Soviet Empire
collapsed, post-modernism has won world over.
Today we have a very real danger of being
imprisoned by new “international style” - something
which we can call the new “global style” The cultural
globalization, of which cheap airline flights, the web,
and billions of mobile phones are two most visible
carriers, erases some dimensions of the cultural
specificity with the energy and speed impossible for
modernism. Yet we also witness today a different
logic at work: the desire to creatively place together
old and new – local and transnational - in various
combinations. It is this logic, for instance, which
made cities such as Barcelona (where I talked with
John Gaeta in the context of Art Futura 2003 festival
which led to this article), such a “hip” and “in” place
at the turn of the century (that is, 20th
to 21st
). All
over Barcelona, architectural styles of many past
centuries co-exist with new “cool” spaces of bars,
lounges, hotels, new museums, and so on. Medieval
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meets multi-national, Gaudy meets Dolce and
Gabana, Mediterranean time meets global time. The
result is the invigorating sense of energy which one
feels physically just walking along the street. It is
this hybrid energy, which characterizes in my view
the most interesting cultural phenomena today.147
The hybrid 2D / 3D image of The Matrix is one such
hybrids.
The historians of cinema often draw a contrast
between the Lumières and Marey. Along with a
number of inventors in other countries all working
independently from each other, the Lumières created
what we now know as cinema with its visual effect of
continuous motion based on the perceptual synthesis
of discrete images. Earlier Maybridge already
developed a way to take successive photographs of a
moving object such as horse; eventually the
Lumières and others figured out how to take enough
samples so when projected they perceptually fuse
into continuous motion. Being a scientist, Marey was
driven by an opposite desire: not to create a
seamless illusion of the visible world but rather to be
able to understand its structure by keeping
subsequent samples discrete. Since he wanted to be
able to easily compare these samples, he perfected a
method where the subsequent images of moving
objects were superimposed within a single image,
thus making the changes clearly visible.
The hybrid image of The Matrix in some ways can be
understand as the synthesis of these two approaches
which for a hundred years ago remained in
opposition. Like the Lumières, Gaeta’s goal is to
create a seamless illusion of continuous motion. In
the same time, like Marey, he also wants to be able
to edit and sequence the individual recordings of
reality.
In the beginning of this chapter I evoked the notion
of uneven development, pointing that often the
structure inside (“infrastructure”) completely
changes before the surface (“superstructure”)
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 189
catches up. What does this idea imply for the future
of images and in particular 2D / 3D hybrids as
developed by Gaeta and others? As Gaeta pointed
out in 2003, while his method can be used to make
all kinds of images, so far it was used in the service
of realism as it is defined in cinema – i.e., anything
the viewer will see has to obey the laws of physics.148
So in the case of The Matrix, its images still have
traditional “realistic” appearance while internally they
are structured in a completely new way. In short, we
see the old “superstructure” which stills sits on top of
“old” infrastructure. What kinds of images would we
see then the superstructure” would finally catch up
with the infrastructure?
Of course, while the images of Hollywood special
effects movies so far follow the constraint of realism,
i.e. obeying the laws of physics, they are also
continuously expanding the boundaries of what
“realism” means. In order to sell movie tickets,
DVDs, and all other merchandise, each new special
effects film tries to top the previous one showing
something that nobody has seen before. In The
Matrix 1 it was “bullet time”; in The Matrix 2 it was
the Burly Brawl scene where dozens of identical
clones fight Neo; in Matrix 3 it was the
Superpunch.149
The fact that the image is
constructed differently internally does allow for all
kinds of new effects; listening to Gaeta it is clear
that for him the key advantage of such image is the
possibilities it offers for virtual cinematography. That
is, if before camera movement was limited to a small
and well-defined set of moves – pan, dolly, roll –
now it can move in any trajectory imaginable for as
long as the director wants. Gaeta talks about the
Burly Brawl scene in terms of virtual choreography:
both choreographing the intricate and long camera
moves impossible in the real word and also all the
bodies participating in the flight (all of them are
digital recreations assembled using Total Capture
method). According to Gaeta, creating this one scene
took about three years. So while in principle Total
Capture represents one of the most flexible way to
recreate visible reality in a computer so far, it will be
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years before this method is streamlined and
standardized enough for these advantages to
become obvious. But when it happens, the artists will
have an extremely flexible hybrid medium at their
disposal: completely virtualized cinema. Rather than
expecting that any of the present pure forms will
dominate the future of visual culture, I think this
future belongs to such hybrids. In other words, the
future images would probably be still photographic –
although only on the surface.
And what about animation? What will be its future?
As I have tried to explain, besides animated films
proper and animated sequences used as a part of
other moving image projects, animation has become
a set of principles and techniques which animators,
filmmakers and designers employ today to create
new techniques, new production methods and new
visual aesthetics. Therefore, I think that it is not
worthwhile to ask if this or that visual style or
method for creating moving images which emerged
after computerization is “animation” or not. It is
more productive to say that most of these methods
were born from animation and have animation DNA –
mixed with DNA from other media. I think that such
a perspective which considers “animation in an
extended field” is a more productive way to think
about animation today, and that it also applies to
other modern media fields which “donated” their
genes to a computer metamedium.
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PART 3: Webware
Chapter 5. What Comes After Remix?
Introduction
It is always more challenging to think theoretically
about the present than the past. But this challenge is
what also makes it very exiting.
In Part 2 we looked at the interface and tools of
professional media authoring software that were
largely shaped in the 1990s. While each major
release of Photoshop, Flash, Maya, Flame, and other
commonly used applications continues to introduce
dozens of new features and improvements, in my
view these are incremental improvements rather
than new paradigms.
The new paradigms that emerge in the 2000s are
not about new types of media software per ce.
Instead, they have to with the exponential expansion
of the number of people who now use it – and the
web as a new universal platform for non-professional
media circulation. “Social software,” “social media,”
“user-generated content,” “Web 2.0,” “read/write
Web” are some of the terms that were coined in this
decade to capture these developments.
If visual communication professionals have adopted
software-based tools and workflows throughout the
1990s, in the next decade “media consumers” were
gradually turned into “media producers.” The decline
in prices and increase in the media capabilities of
consumer electronics (digital cameras, media
players, mobile phones, laptops) combined with the
ubiquity of the internet access combined with the
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emergence of new social media platforms have
created a whole new media ecology and dynamics.
In retrospect, if we can designate 1995 as the year
of professional media revolution (for example,
version 3 of After Effects released this year added
Illustrator and Photoshop layers import), I would
center consumer media revolution on 2005. During
this year, photo and video blogging have exploded;
the term “user-generated content” entered
mainstream; YouTube was started; and both Flickr
was bought by Yahoo, while MySpace wer acquired
by larger companies (Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation, respectively.)
If the professional media revolution of the 1990s can
be identified with a small set of software
applications, the cultural software which enables new
media ecology emerging in the middle of 2000s is
much more diverse and heterogeneous. Media
sharing sites (Flickr), social networking sites
(Facebook), webware such as Google Docs, APIs of
major Web 2.0 companies, RSS readers, blog
publishing software (Blogger), virtual globes (Google
Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth), consumer-level media
editing and cataloging software (iPhoto), media and
communication software running on mobile phones
and other consumer electronics devices, and, last but
not least, search engines are just some of the
categories. (Of course, each brand name appearing
in brackets in the preceding sentence is just one
example of a whole software category.) Add to these
other software categories which are not directly
visible to consumers but which are responsible for
networked-based media universe of sharing,
remixing, collaboration, blogging, reblogging, and so
on – everything from web services and client-server
architecture to Ajax and Flex – and the task of
tracking cultural software today appears to be
daunting. But not impossible.
The two chapters of this part of the book consider
different dimensions of the new paradigm of usergenerated
content and media sharing which emerged
in 2000s. As before, my focus is on the relationships
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 193
between the affordances provided by software
interfaces and tools, the aesthetics and structure of
media objects created with their help, and the
theoretical impact of software use on the very
concept of media. (In other words: what is “media”
after software?) One key difference from Part 2,
however, is that instead of dealing with separate
media design applications, we now have to consider
larger media environments which integrates the
functions of creating media, publishing it, remixing
other people’ media, discussing it, keeping up with
friends and interest groups, meeting new people,
and so on.
I look at the circulation, editing and experience of
media as structured by web interfaces. Given that
the term remix has already been widely used in
discussing social media, I use it as a starting point in
my own investigation. Similarly to how I did this in
the discussion of software-based media design in
Part 2, here I am also interested in both revealing
the parallels and highlighting the differences
between “remix culture” in general and softwareenabled
remix operations in particular. (If we don’t
do this and simply refer to everything today as
“remix,” we are not really trying to explain things
anymore – we are just labeling them.) I also discuss
other crucial dimensions of the new universe of
social media: modularity and mobility. (Mobility here
refers not to the movement of individuals and groups
or accessing media from mobile devices, but to
something else which so far has not been
theoretically acknowledged: the movement of media
objects between people, devices, and the web.)
I continue by examining some of the new types of
user-to-user visual media communication which
emerged on social media platforms. I conclude by
asking how the explosion of user-generated content
challenges professional cultural producers – not the
media industries (since people in the industry,
business and press are already discussing this all the
time) - but rather another cultural industry which
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 194
has been the slowest to respond to the social web –
professional art world.
Given the multitude of terms already widely used
describe the new developments of 2000s and the
new concepts we can develop to fill the gaps, is
there a single concept that would sum it all? The
answers to this question would of course vary
widely, but here is mine. For me, this concept is
scale. The exponential growth of a number of both
non-professional and professional media producers
during 2000s has created a fundamentally new
cultural situation. Hundreds of millions of people are
routinely created and sharing cultural content (blogs,
photos, videos, online comments and discussions,
etc.). This number is only going to increase. (During
2008 the number of mobile phones users’ is
projected to grow from 2.2 billion to 3 billion).
A similar explosion in the number of media
professionals has paralleled this explosion in the
number of non-professional media producers. The
rapid growth of professional, educational, and
cultural institutions in many newly globalized
countries, along with the instant availability of
cultural news over the web, has also dramatically
increased the number of "culture professionals" who
participate in global cultural production and
discussions. Hundreds of thousands of students,
artists and designers now have access to the same
ideas, information and tools. It is no longer possible
to talk about centers and provinces. In fact, the
students, culture professionals, and governments in
newly globalized countries are often more ready to
embrace latest ideas than their equivalents in "old
centers" of world culture.
Before, cultural theorists and historians could
generate theories and histories based on small data
sets (for instance, "classical Hollywood cinema,"
"Italian Renaissance," etc.) But how can we track
"global digital culture" (or cultures), with its billions
of cultural objects, and hundreds of millions of
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contributors? Before you could write about culture by
following what was going on in a small number of
world capitals and schools. But how can we follow
the developments in tens of thousands of cities and
educational institutions?
If the shift from previous media technologies and
distribution platforms to software has challenged our
most basic concepts and theories of “media,” the
new challenge in my view is even more serious. Let’s
say I am interested in thinking about cinematic
strategies in user-generated videos on YouTube.
There is no way I can manually look through all the
billions of videos there. Of course, if I watch some of
them, I am likely to notice some patterns emerging..
but how do I know which patterns exist in all the
YouTube videos I never watched? Or, maybe I am
interested in the strategies in the works of design
students and young professionals around the world.
The data itself is available: every design school,
studio, design professional and a student have their
stuff on the web. I can even consult special web sites
such as colorflot.com that contains (as of this
writing) over 100,000 design portfolios submitted by
designers and students from many countries. So how
do I go about studying 100,000+ portfolios?
I don’t know about you, but I like challenges. In fact,
my lab is already working on how we can track and
analyze culture at a new scale that involve hundreds
of millions of producers and billions of media objects.
(You can follow our work at softwarestudies.com and
culturevis.com.) The first necessary step, however, is
to put forward some conceptual coordinates for the
new universe of social media – an initial set of
hypothesis about its new features which later can be
improved on.
And this is what this chapter is about. Let’s dive in.
“The Age of Remix”
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It is a truism that we live in a “remix culture.”
Today, many cultural and lifestyle arenas - music,
fashion, design, art, web applications, user created
media, food - are governed by remixes, fusions,
collages, and mash-ups. If post-modernism defined
1980s, remix definitely dominates 1990s and 2000s,
and it will probably continue to rule the next decade
as well. (For an expanding resource on remix
culture, visit remixtheory.net by Eduardo Navas.)
Here are just a few examples. In his winter collection
John Galliano (a fashion designer for the house of
Dior) mixes vagabond look, Yemenite traditions,
East-European motifs, and other sources that he
collects during his extensive travels around the world
(2004 collection). DJ Spooky creates a featurelength
remix of D.W. Griffith's 1912 "Birth of a
Nation” which he appropriately names "Rebirth of a
Nation." The group BOOM BOOM SATELLITES
initiates a remix competition aimed at bringing
together two cultures: “the refined video editing
techniques of AMV enthusiasts” and “the cuttingedge
artistry of VJ Culture” (2008).150
The celebrated
commentator on copyright law and web culture
Lawrence Lessig names his new book Remix: Making
Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
(2008.)
The Web in particular has become a breeding ground
for variety of new remix practices. In April 2006
Annenberg Center at University of Southern
California run a conference on “Networked Politics”
which put forward a useful taxonomy of some of
these practices: political remix videos, anime music
videos, machinima, alternative news, infrastructure
hacks.151
In addition to these cultures that remix
media content, we also have a growing number of
“software mash-ups,” i.e. software applications that
remix data. (In case you skipped Part 1, let me
remind you that, in Wikipedia definition, a mash-up
as “a website or application that combines content
from more than one source into an integrated
experience.”152
As of March 1, 2008, the web site
www.programmableweb.com listed the total of 2814
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software mash-ups, and approximately 100 new
mash-ups were created every month.153
Yet another type of remix technology popular today
is RSS. With RSS, any information source which is
periodically updated – a personal blog one’s
collection of photos on Flickr, news headlines,
podcasts, etc. – can be published in a standard
format, i.e., turned into a “feed.”) Using RSS reader,
an individual can subsribe to such feeds - create her
custom mix selected from many millions of feeds
available. Alternatively, you can use widget-based
feed readers such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, or Netvibes
to create a personalized home page that mixes
feeds, weather reports, Facebook friends updates,
podcasts, and other types of information sources.
(Appropriately, Netvibes includes the words “re(mix)
the web” in its logo.)
Given the trends towards ubiquitous computing and
“Internet of things,” it is inevitable that remixing
paradigm will make its way into physical space as
well. Bruce Sterling’s brilliant book Shaping Things
describes a possible future scenario where objects
publish detailed information about their history, use,
and impact on the environment, and ordinary
consumers track this information.154
I imagine a
future RSS reader may give you a choice of billions
of objects to track. (If you were already feeling
overwhelmed by 112 million blogs tracked by
Technorati [xxx check the spelling] - as of
December 2007 - this is just a beginning.155
)
For a different take on how a physical space – in this
case, a city - can reinvent itself via remix, consider
coverage of Buenos Aires by The, the journal by
“trend and future consultancy” The Future
Laboratory.156
The enthusiastically describes the city
in remix terms – and while the desire to project a
fashionable term on everything in site is obvious, the
result is actually mostly convincing. The copy reads
as follows: “Buenos Aires has gone mash-up. The
portefnos are adopting their traditions with some
American sauce and European pepper.” A local DJ
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Villa Diamante released an album that “mixes
electronic music with cumcia, South American
peasant music.” A clothing brand 12-na “mixes fleamarket
finds with modern materials. A non-profit
publication project Eloisa Cartonea “combines covers
painted by kids who collect the city’s cardboard with
the work of emerging writers and poets.”
Remix practices extend beyond particular
technologies and areas of culture. Wired magazine
devoted its July 2005 issue to the theme Remix
Planet. The introduction boldly stated: “From Kill Bill
to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this
is the age of the remix.”157
Another top IT trend
watcher in the world – the annual O’Reilly Emerging
Technology conferences (ETECH) similarly adopted
Remix as the theme for its 2005 conference.
Attending the conference, I watched in amazement
how top executives from Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon,
and other leading IT companies not precisely known
for their avant-garde aspirations described their
recent technologies and research projects using the
concept of remix. If I had any doubts that we are
living not simply in Remix Culture but in a Remix
Era, they disappeared right at that conference.
Remix, Appropriation, Quotation, Montage
“Remixing” originally had a precise and a narrow
meaning limited to music. Although precedents of
remixing can be found earlier, it was the introduction
of multi-track mixers that made remixing music a
standard practice. With each element of a song –
vocals, drums, etc. – available for separate
manipulation, it became possible to “re-mix” the
song: change the volume of some tracks or
substitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually
the term became more and more broad, today
referring to any reworking of already existing cultural
work(s).
In his book DJ Culture Ulf Poscardt singles out
different stages in the evolution of remixing practice.
In 1972 DJ Tom Moulton made his first disco
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remixes; as Poscard points out, they “show a very
chaste treatment of the original song. Moulton
sought above all a different weighting of the various
soundtracks, and worked the rhythmic elements of
the disco songs even more clearly and
powerfully…Moulton used the various elements of the
sixteen or twenty-four track master tapes and
remixed them.”158
By 1987, “DJs started to ask other
DJs for remixes” and the treatment of the original
material became much more aggressive. For
example, “Coldcut used the vocals from Ofra Hanza’s
‘Im Nin Alu’ and contrasted Rakim’s ultra-deep bass
voice with her provocatively feminine voice. To this
were added techno sounds and a house-inspired
remix of a rhythm section that loosened the heavy,
sliding beat of the rap piece, making it sound lighter
and brighter.”159
Around the turn of the century (20th
to 21st
) people
started to apply the term “remix” to other media
besides music: visual projects, software, literary
texts. Since, in my view, electronic music and
software serve as the two key reservoirs of new
metaphors for the rest of culture today, this
expansion of the term is inevitable; one can only
wonder why it did no happen earlier. Yet we are left
with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of
commercial music remixing is officially accepted160
, in
other cultural areas it is seen as violating the
copyright and therefore as stealing. So while
filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, architects
and Web designers routinely remix already existing
works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper
terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to
describe these practices.
One term that is sometimes used to talk about these
practices in non-music areas is “appropriation.” The
term was first used to refer to certain New Yorkbased
“post-modern” artists of the early 1980s who
re-worked older photographic images – Sherrie
Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and a few
others. But the term “appropriation” never achieved
the same wide use as “remixing.” In fact, in contrast
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to “remix,” “appropriation” never completely left its
original art world context where it was coined. I
think that “remixing” is a better term anyway
because it suggests a systematic re-working of a
source, the meaning which “appropriation” does not
have. And indeed, the original “appropriation artists”
such as Richard Prince simply copied the existing
image as a whole rather than re-mixing it. As in the
case of Duchamp’s famous urinal, the aesthetic
effect here is the result of a transfer of a cultural
sign from one sphere to another, rather than any
modification of a sign.
The other older term commonly used across media is
“quoting” but I see it as describing a very different
logic than remixing. If remixing implies
systematically rearranging the whole text, quoting
refers to inserting some fragments from old text(s)
into the new one. Therefore, I don’t think that we
should see quoting as a historical precedent for
remixing. Rather, we can think of it as a precedent
for another new practice of authorship practice that,
like remixing, was made possible by electronic and
digital technology – sampling.
Music critic Andrew Goodwin defined sampling as
“the uninhibited use of digital sound recording as a
central element of composition. Sampling thus
becomes an aesthetic programme.”161
It is tempting
to say that the arrival of sampling technologies has
industrialized the practices of montage and collage
that were always central to twentieth century
culture. Yet we should be careful in applying the old
terms to new technologically driven cultural
practices. While it is comforting to see the historical
continuities, it is also too easy to miss new
distinctive features of the present. The use of terms
“montage” and “collage” in relation to the sampling
and remixing practices is a case in point. These two
terms regularly pop up in the writings of music
theorists from Poscardt to DJ Spooky and Kodwo
Eshun. (In 2004 Spooky published brilliant book
Rhythm Science162
which ended up on a number of
“best 10 books of 2004” lists and which put forward
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“unlimited remix” as the artistic and political
technique of our time).
The terms “montage” and “collage” come to us from
literary and visual modernism of the early twentieth
century – think for instance of works by MoholyNagy,
Sergey Eisenstein, Hannah Hooch or Raoul
Hausmann. In my view, they do not always
adequately describe contemporary electronic music.
Let me note just three differences. Firstly, musical
samples are often arranged in loops. Secondly, the
nature of sound allows musicians to mix pre-existent
sounds in a variety of ways, from clearly
differentiating and contrasting individual samples
(thus following the traditional modernist aesthetics of
montage/collage), to mixing them into an organic
and coherent whole.
To borrow the terms from
Roland Barthes we can say that if modernist collage
always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and
software collage also allows for “blend.”163
Thirdly,
the electronic musicians now often conceive their
works beforehand as something that will be remixed,
sampled, taken apart and modified. In other words,
rather than sampling from mass media to create a
unique and final artistic work (as in modernism),
contemporary musicians use their own works and
works by other artists in further remixes.
It is relevant to note here that the revolution in
electronic pop music that took place in the second
part of the 1980s was paralleled by similar
developments in pop visual culture. The introduction
of electronic editing equipment such as switcher,
keyer, paintbox, and image store made remixing and
sampling a common practice in video production
towards the end of the decade. First pioneered in
music videos, it eventually later took over the whole
visual culture of TV. Other software tools such as
Photoshop (1989) and After Effects (1993) had the
same effect on the fields of graphic design, motion
graphics, commercial illustration and photography.
And, a few years later, World Wide Web redefined an
electronic document as a mix of other documents.
Remix culture has arrived.
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The question that at this point is really hard to
answer is what comes after remix? Will we get
eventually tired of cultural objects - be they dresses
by Alexander McQueen, motion graphics by MK12 or
songs by Aphex Twin – made from samples which
come from already existing database of culture? And
if we do, will it be still psychologically possible to
create a new aesthetics that does not rely on
excessive sampling? When I was emigrating from
Russia to U.S. in 1981, moving from grey and red
communist Moscow to a vibrant and post-modern
New York, me and others living in Russia felt that
Communist regime would last for at least another
300 years. But already ten years later, Soviet Union
caused to exist. Similarly, in the middle of the 1990s
the euphoria unleashed by the Web, collapse of
Communist governments in Eastern Europe and early
effects of globalization created an impression that we
have finally Cold War culture behind – its heavily
armed borders, massive spying, and the militaryindustrial
complex. And once again, only ten years
later it appeared that we are back in the darkest
years of Cold War - except that now we are being
tracked with RFID chips, computer vision surveillance
systems, data mining and other new technologies of
the twenty first century. So it is very possible that
the remix culture, which right now appears to be so
firmly in place that it can’t be challenged by any
other cultural logic, will morph into something else
sooner than we think.
I don’t know what comes after remix. But if we now
try now to develop a better historical and theoretical
understanding of remix era and the technological
platforms which enable it, we will be in a better
position to recognize and understand whatever new
era which will replace it.
Communication in a “Cloud”
During 2000s remix gradually moved from being one
of the options to being treated as practically a new
cultural default. The twentieth century paradigm in
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which a small number of professional producers send
messages over communication channels that they
also controlled to a much larger number of users was
replaced by a new paradigm.164
In this model, a
much large number of producers publish content into
“a global media cloud”; the users create personalized
mixes by choosing from this cloud.165
A significant
percentage of these producers and users overlap i.e.
they are the same people. Furthermore, a user
can also select when and where to view her news – a
phenomenon that has come to be known as
“timeshifting” and “placeshifting.” Another feature of
the new paradigm, which I will discuss in detail
below, is what I call “media mobility.” A message
never arrives at some final destination as in
broadcasting / mass publishing model. Instead, a
message continues to move between sites, people,
and devices. As it moves, it accumulates comments
and discussions. Frequently, its parts are extracted
and remixed with parts of other messages to create
new messages.
The arrival of a new paradigm has been reflected in
and supported by a set of new terms. Twentieth
century terms “broadcasting” and “publishing” and
“reception” have been joined (and in many contexts,
replaced), by new terms that describe new
operations now possible in relation to media
messages. They include “embed,” “annotate,”
“comment,” “respond,” “syndicate,” “aggregate,”
“upload,” “download,” “rip,” and “share.”
There are a number of interesting things worth
noting in relation to this new vocabulary, Firstly, the
new terms are more discriminating than the old ones
as they now name many specific operations involved
in communication. You don’t simply “receive” a
message; you can also annotate it, comment on it,
remix it, etc. Secondly, most of the new terms
describe new types of users’ activities which were
either not possible with the old media or were strictly
marginal (For instance, a marginal practice of “slash”
videos made by science fiction fans.) Thirdly, if old
terms such as “read,” “view” and “listen” were
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 204
media-specific, the new ones are not. For instance,
you can “comment” on a blog, a photo, a video, a
slide show, a map, etc. Similarly, you can “share” a
video, a photo, an article, a map layer, and so on.
This media-indifference of the terms indirectly
reflects the media-indifference of the underlying
software technologies. (As I have already discussed
in depth earlier, the important theme in the
development of cultural software has been the
development of new information management
principles and techniques – such as Englebardt’s
“view control” – which work in the same way on
many types of media.)
Among these new terms, “remix” (or “mix”) occupies
a major place. As the user-generated media content
(video, photos, music, maps) on the Web exploded
in 2005, an important semantic switch took place.
The terms “remix” (or “mix”) and “mashup” started
to be used in contexts where previously the term
“editing” had been standard – for instance, when
referring to a user editing a video. When in the
spring of 2007 Adobe released video editing software
for users of the popular media sharing web site
Photobucket, it named the software Remix. (The
software was actually a stripped down version of one
of the earliest video editing applications for PCs
called Premiere.166
) Similarly, Jumpcut, a free video
editing and hosting site, does not use the word
“edit.”167
Instead, it puts forward “remix” as the core
creative operation: “You can create your own movie
by remixing someone else's movie.” Other online
video editing and hosting services which also use the
term “remix”, or “mashup” instead of “edit” (and
which existed at least when I was writing this
chapter in the Spring 2008) include eyespot and
Kaltura.168
The new social communication paradigm where
millions are publishing “content” into the “cloud” and
an individual curates her personal mix of content
drawn from this cloud would be impossible without
new types of consumer applications, new software
features and underlying software standards and
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technologies such as RSS. To make a parallel with
the term “cloud computing,” we can call this
paradigm “communication in a cloud.” If “cloud
computing” enables users and developers to utilize [IT]
services without knowledge of, expertise with, nor
control over the technology infrastructure that supports
them,”169
software developments of 2000s similarly
enable content creators and content receivers to
communicate without having to deeply understand
underlying technologies.
Another reason why a metaphor of a “ cloud” –
which at first appears vague – may also be better for
describing communication patterns communication in
2000s than the “web” has changed do with the
changes in the patterns of information flow between
the original Web and so-called Web 2.0. In the
original web model, information was published in the
form of web pages collected into web sites. To
receive information, a user had to visit each site
individually. You could create a set of bookmarks for
the sites you wanted to come back to, or a separate
page containing the links to these sites (so-called
“favorites”) - but this was all. The lack of a more
sophisticated technology for “receiving” the web was
not an omission on the part of the web’s architect
Tim Berners-Lee – it is just that nobody anticipated
that the number of web sites will explode
exponentially. (This happened after first graphical
browsers were introduced in 1993. In 1998 First
Google index collected 26 million pages; in 2000 it
already had one billion; on June 25, 2008, Google
engineers announced on Google blog that they
collected one trillion unique URLs…170
)
In the new communication model that has been
emerging after 2000, information is becoming more
atomized. You can access individual atoms of
information without having to read/view the larger
packages in which it is enclosed (a TV program, a
music CD, a book, a web site, etc.) Additionally,
information is gradually becoming presentation and
device independent – it can be received using a
variety of software and hardware technologies and
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 206
stripped from its original format. Thus, while web
sites continue to flourish, it is no longer necessary to
visit each site individually to access their content.
With RSS and other web feed technologies, any
periodically changing or frequently updated content
can be syndicated (i.e., turned into a feed, or a
channel), and any user can subscribe to it. Free blog
software such as Blogger and WordPress
automatically create RSS feeds for elements of a
blog (posts, comments). Feeds can be also be
created for parts of web sites (using tools such as
feedity.com), weather data, search results, Flickr’s
photo galleries, YouTube channels, and so on. For
instance, let’s say you go and register for a Flickr
account. After you do that, Flickr automatically creates
a feed for your photos. So when you upload photos to
your Flickr account – which you can do from your
laptop, mobile phone or (in some cases) directly from a
digital camera – people who subscribed to your feed will
automatically get all your new photos.
The software technologies used to send information
into the cloud are complemented by software that
allows people to curate (or “mix”) the information
sources they are interested in. Software in this
category is referred to as newsreaders, feed readers,
or aggregators. Examples include separate webbased
feed readers such as Bloglines and Google
Reader; all popular web browsers that also provide
functions to read feeds; desktop-based feed-readers
such as NetNewsWire; and personalized home pages
such as live.com, iGoogle, my Yahoo!
Finally, If feed technologies turned the original web
of interlinked web pages sites into a more
heterogeneous and atomized global “cloud” of
content, other software developments helped to
make this cloud rapidly grow in size.171
It is not
accidental that during the period when “user
generated media” started to grow exponentially, the
interfaces of most consumer-level media applications
came to prominently feature buttons and options
which allow for to move new media documents into
the “cloud” – be they PowerPoint presentations, PDF
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files, blog posts, photographs, video, etc. For
example, iPhoto ’08 groups functions which allow the
user to email photos, or upload them to her blog or
website (under a top level “Share” menu). Similarly,
Windows Live Photo Gallery includes “Publish” and
“E-mail” among its top menu bar choices. Meanwhile,
the interfaces of social media sites were given
buttons to easily move content around the “cloud,”
so to speak – emailing it to others, embedding it in
one’s web site or blog, linking it, posting to one’s
account on other popular social media sites, etc.
Regardless of how easy it is to create one personal
mix of information sources – even if only takes a
single click – the practically unlimited number of
these sources now available in the “cloud” means
that manual ways of selecting among these sources
become limited in value. Enter the automation. From
the very beginning, computers were used to
automate various processes. Over time, everything factory
work, flying planes, financial trading, or
cultural processes - is gradually subjected to
automation.172
However, algorithmic automated
reasoning on the Web arrived so quickly that it
hardly even been publically discussed. We take it for
granted that Google and other search engines
automatically process tremendous amounts of data
to deliver search results. We also take it for granted
that Google’s algorithms automatically insert ads in
web pages by analyzing pages’ content. Flickr uses
its own algorithm to select the photos it calls
“interesting.”173
Pandora, Musicovery, OWL music
search, and many other similar web services
automatically create music programs based on the
users’ musical likes. Digg automatically pushes the
stories up based on how many people have voted for
them. Amazon and Barnes & Noble use collaborative
filtering algorithms to recommend books; Last.fm
and iTunes – to recommend music, Netflix – to
recommend movies; StumbleUpon – to recommend
websites; and so on.174
(iTunes 8 calls its automation
feature Genius sidebar; it is designed to make
“playlists in your song library that go great together”
and also to recommend “music from the iTunes
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 208
Stores that you don’t already have.) In contrast to
these systems which provide recommedations by
looking at the users which have similar rating
patterns, Mufin is fully automatic recommendatio
system for music which works by matching songs
based on 40 attributes such as tempo, instruments,
and percussion.175
As I write this in the summer of 2008, the use of
automation to create mixes from hundreds of
millions information sources is just beginning. One
already popular service is Google News site that
algorithmically assembles “news” by remixing
material gathered from thousands of news
publications. (As it is usually the case with
algorithms used by web companies, when I checked
last there was no information on the Google News
web site about the algorithm used, so we know
nothing about its selection criteria or what counts as
important and relevant news.) Newspond similarly
automatically aggregates news, and it similarly
discloses little about the process. According to its
web site, “Newspond’s articles are found and sorted
by real-time global popularity, using a fully
automated news collection engine.”176
Spotplex
assembles news from blogosphere using yet another
type of automation: counting most read articles
within a particular time frame.177
Going further,
news.ask.com not only automatically selects the
news but it also provides BigPicture pages for each
news story containing relevant articles, blog posts,
images, videos, and diggs.178
News.ask.com also tells
us that it selects news stories based on four factors –
breaking, impact, media, and discussion – and it
actually shows how each story rates in terms of
these factors Another kind of algorithmic “news
remix” is performed by the web-art application
10x10 by Jonathan Harris. It presents a grid of news
images based on the algorithmic analysis of news
feeds from The New York Times, the BBC, and
Reuters.179
Remixability And Modularity
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 209
The dramatic increase in quantity of information
greatly speeded up by the web has been
accompanied by another fundamental development.
Imagine water running down a mountain. If the
quantity of water keeps continuously increasing, it
will find numerous new paths and these paths will
keep getting wider. Something similar is happening
as the amount of information keeps growing - except
these paths are also all connected to each other and
they go in all directions; up, down, sideways. Here
are some of these new paths which facilitate
movement of information between people, listed in
no particular order: SMS, forward and redirect
buttons in email applications, mailing lists, Web
links, RSS, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging,
publishing (as in publishing one’s playlist on a web
site), peer-to-peer networks, Web services, Firewire,
Bluetooth. These paths stimulate people to draw
information from all kinds of sources into their own
space, remix and make it available to others, as well
as to collaborate or at least play on a common
information platform (Wikipedia, Flickr). Barb
Dybwad introduces a nice term “collaborative
remixability’” to talk about this process: “I think the
most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools
that explore the continuum between the personal
and the social, and tools that are endowed with a
certain flexibility and modularity which enables
collaborative remixability — a transformative process
in which the information and media we’ve organized
and shared can be recombined and built on to create
new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and
services.”180
If a traditional twentieth century model of cultural
communication described movement of information
in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the
reception point is just a temporary station on
information’s path. If we compare information or
media object with a train, then each receiver can be
compared to a train station. Information arrives,
gets remixed with other information, and then the
new package travels to other destination where the
process is repeated.
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 210
We can find precedents for this “remixability” – for
instance, in modern electronic music where remix
has become the key method since the 1980s. More
generally, most human cultures developed by
borrowing and reworking forms and styles from
other cultures; the resulting “remixes” were later
incorporated into other cultures. Ancient Rome
remixed Ancient Greece; Renaissance remixed
antiquity; nineteenth century European architecture
remixed many historical periods including the
Renaissance; and today graphic and fashion
designers remix together numerous historical and
local cultural forms, from Japanese Manga to
traditional Indian clothing.
At first glance it may seem that remixability as
practiced by designers and other culture
professionals is quite different from “vernacular”
remixability made possible by the software-based
techniques described above. Clearly, a professional
designer working on a poster or a professional
musician working on a new mix is different from
somebody who is writing a blog entry or publishing
her bookmarks.
But this is a wrong view. The two kinds of
remixability – professional and vernacular - are part
of the same continuum. For the designer and
musician (to continue with the sample example) are
equally affected by the same software technologies.
Design software and music composition software
make the technical operation of remixing very easy;
the web greatly increases the ease of locating and
reusing material from other periods, artists,
designers, and so on. Even more importantly, since
every company and freelance professionals in all
cultural fields, from motion graphics to architecture
to fashion, publish documentation of their projects
on their Web sites, everybody can keep up with what
everybody else is doing. Therefore, although the
speed with which a new original architectural
solution starts showing up in projects of other
architects and architectural students is much slower
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 211
than the speed with which an interesting blog entry
gets referenced in other blogs, the difference is
quantitative than qualitative. Similarly, when H&M or
Gap can “reverse engineer” the latest fashion
collection by a high-end design label in only two
weeks, this is an example of the same cultural
remixability speeded up by software and the web. In
short, a person simply copying parts of a message
into the new email she is writing, and the largest
media and consumer company recycling designs of
other companies are doing the same thing – they
practice remixability.
The remixability does not require modularity (i.e.,
organization of a cultural objects into clearly
separable parts) - but it greatly benefits from it. For
example, as already discussed above, remixing in
music really took after the introduction of multi-track
equipment. With each song element available on its
own track, it was not long before substituting tracks
become commonplace.
In most cultural fields today we have a clear-cut
separation between libraries of elements designed to
be sampled – stock photos, graphic backgrounds,
music, software libraries – and the cultural objects
that incorporate these elements. For instance, a
design for a corporate report or an ad may use
photographs that the designer purchased from a
photo stock house. But this fact is not advertised;
similarly, the fact that this design (if it is successful)
will be inevitably copied and sampled by other
designers is not openly acknowledged by the design
field. The only fields where sampling and remixing
are done openly are music and computer
programming, where developers rely on software
libraries in writing new software.
Will the separation between libraries of samples and
“authentic” cultural works blur in the future? Will the
future cultural forms be deliberately made from
discrete samples designed to be copied and
incorporated into other projects? It is interesting to
imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural
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objects regardless of the medium or material are
made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks
come with complete information necessary to easily
copy and paste them in a new object – either by a
human or machine. A block knows how to couple
with other blocks – and it even can modify itself to
enable such coupling. The block can also tell the
designer and the user about its cultural history – the
sequence of historical borrowings which led to the
present form. And if original Lego (or a typical
twentieth century housing project) contains only a
few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can
design with Lego rather similar in appearance,
software can keep track of unlimited number of
different blocks.
One popular twentieth century notion of cultural
modularity involved artists, designers or architects
making finished works from the small vocabulary of
elemental shapes, or other modules. Whether we are
talking about construction industry, Kandinsky’s
geometric abstraction, or modular furniture systems,
the underlying principle is the same. The scenario I
am entertaining proposes a very different kind of
modularity that may appear like a contradiction in
terms. It is modularity without a priori defined
vocabulary. In this scenario, any well-defined part
of any finished cultural object can automatically
become a building block for new objects in the same
medium. Parts can even “publish” themselves and
other cultural objects can “subscribe” to them the
way you subscribe now to RSS feeds or podcasts.
When we think of modularity today, we assume that
a number of objects that can be created in a modular
system is limited. Indeed, if we are building these
objects from a very small set of blocks, there are a
limited number of ways in which these blocks can go
together. (Although as the relative physical size of
the blocks in relation to the finished object get
smaller, the number of different objects which can
be built increases: think IKEA modular bookcase
versus a Lego set.) However, in my imaginary
scenario modularity does not involve any reduction
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in the number of forms that can be generated. On
the contrary, if the blocks themselves are created
using one of many already developed software-based
designed methods (such as parametric design),
every time they are used again they can modify
themselves automatically to assure that they look
different. In other words, if pre-software modularity
leads to repetition and reduction, post-software
modularity can produce unlimited diversity.
I think that such “real-time” or “on-demand”
modularity can only be imagined today after various
large-scale projects created at the turn of the
century - online stores such as Amazon, blog
indexing services such as Technorati, buildings such
as Yokohama International Port Terminal by Foreign
Office Architects and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los
Angeles by Frank Gehry - visibly demonstrated that
we can develop hardware and software to coordinate
massive numbers of cultural objects and their
building blocks: books, bog entries, construction
parts. Whether we will ever have such a cultural
ecology is not important. We often look at the
present by placing it within long historical
trajectories. But I believe that we can also
productively use a different, complementary method.
We can imagine what will happen if the
contemporary techno-cultural conditions which are
already firmly established are pushed to their logical
limit. In other words, rather than placing the present
in the context of the past, we can look at it in the
context of a logically possible future. This “look from
the future” approach may illuminate the present in a
way not possible if we only “look from the past.” The
sketch of a logically possible cultural ecology I just
made is a little experiment in this method:
futurology or science fiction as a method of
contemporary cultural analysis.
So what else can we see today if we will look at it
from this logically possible future of a “total
remixability” and universal modularity? If my
scenario sketched above looks like a “cultural science
fiction,” consider the process that is already
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happening at one end of remixability continuum. This
process is gradual atomization of information on the
web that we already touched on earlier in this
chapter. New software technologies separate content
from particular presentation formats, devices, and
the larger cultural “packages” where it is enclosed by
the producers. (For instance, consider how iTunes
and other online music stores changed the unit of
music consumption from a record/CD to a separate
music track.) In particular, wide adoption and
standardization of feed formats allows cultural bits to
move around more easily – changing a web into
what I called a “communication cloud.” The
increased modularity of content allowed for a wide
adoption of remix as a preferred way of receiving it
(although, as we saw, in many cases it is more
appropriate to call the result a collection rather than
a true remix.)
The Web was invented by the scientists for scientific
communication, and at first it was mostly text and
“bare-bones” HTML. Like any other markup
language, HTML was based on the principle of
modularity (in this case, separating content from its
presentation). And of course, it also brought a new
and very powerful form of modularity: the ability to
construct a single document from parts that may
reside on different web servers. During the period of
web’s commercialization (second part of the 1990s),
twentieth century media industries that were used to
producing highly structured information packages
(books movies, records, etc.) similarly pushed the
web towards highly coupled and difficult to take
apart formats such as Shockwave and Flash.
However, since approximately 2000, we see a strong
move in the opposite direction: from intricately
packaged and highly designed “information objects”
(or “packages”) which are hard to take apart – such
as web sites made in Flash – to “strait” information:
ASCII text files, RSS feeds, blog posts, KML files,
SMS messages, and microcontent. As Richard
MacManus and Joshua Porter put it in 2005, “Enter
Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is
broken up into “microcontent” units that can be
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distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of
documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are
no longer just looking to the same old sources for
information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools
to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and
useful ways.”181
And it is much easier to “aggregate
and remix microcontent” if it is not locked by a
design. An ASCII file, a JPEG image, a map, a sound
or video file can move around the Web and enter
into user-defined remixes such as a set of RSS feed
subscriptions; cultural objects where the parts are
locked together (such as Flash interface) can’t. In
short, in the era of Web 2.0, we can state that
information wants to be ASCII.
This very brief and highly simplified history of the
web does not do justice to many other important
trends in web evolution. But I do stand by its basic
idea. That is, a contemporary “communication cloud”
is characterized by a constantly present tension
between the desires to “package” information (for
instance, use of Flash to create “splash” web pages)
and to strip it from all packaging so it can travel
easier between different sites, devices, software
applications, and people. Ultimately, I think that in
the long run, the future will belong to the word of
information that is more atomized and more
modular, as opposed to less. The reason I think that
is because we can observe a certain historical
correspondence between the structure of cultural
“content” and the structure of the media that carries
it. Tight packaging of the cultural products of mass
media era corresponds to the non-discrete
materiality of the dominant recording media –
photographic paper, film, and magnetic tape used for
audio and later video recording. In contrast, the
growing modularity of cultural content in the
software age perfectly corresponds the systematic
modularity of modern software which manifest itself
on all levels: “structured programming” paradigm,
“objects” and “methods” in object-oriented
programming paradigm, modularity of Internet and
web protocols and formats, etc. – all the way to the
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bits, bytes, pixels and other atoms which make up
digital representations in general.
If we approach the present from the perspective of a
potential future of “ultimate modularity /
remixability,” we can see other incremental steps
towards this future which are already occurring.
Creative Commons developed a set of flexible
licenses that give the producers of creative work in
any field more options than the standard copyright
terms. The licenses have been widely used by
individuals, non-profits and companies – from MIT
Open Course Initiative and Australian Government to
Flickr and blip.tv. The available types include a set of
Sampling Licenses which “let artists and authors
invite other people to use a part of their work and
make it new.”182
In 2005 a team of artists and developers from
around the world set out to collaborate on an
animated short film Elephants Dream using only
open source software183
; after the film was
completed, all production files from the move (3D
models, textures, animations, etc.) were published
on a DVD along with the film itself.184
Flickr offers multiple tools to combine multiple
photos (not broken into parts – at least so far)
together: tags, sets, groups, Organizr. Flickr
interface thus position each photo within multiple
“mixes.” Flickr also offers “notes” which allows the
users to assign short notes to individual parts of a
photograph. To add a note to a photo posted on
Flickr, you draw a rectangle on any part of the phone
and then attach some text to it. A number of notes
can be attached to the same photo. I read this
feature as another a sign of modularity/remixability
paradigm, as it encourages users to mentally break a
photo into separate parts. In other words, “notes”
break a single media object – a photograph – into
blocks.
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In a similar fashion, the common interface of DVDs
breaks a film into chapters. Media players such as
iPod and online media stores such as iTunes break
music CDs into separate tracks – making a track into
a new basic unit of musical culture. In all these
examples, what was previously a single coherent
cultural object is broken into separate blocks that
can be accessed individually. In other words, if
“information wants to be ASCII,” “content wants to
be modular.” And culture as a whole? Culture has
always been about remixability – but now this
remixability is available to all participants of web
culture.
Since the introduction of first Kodak camera, “users”
had tools to create massive amounts of vernacular
media. Later they were given amateur film cameras,
tape recorders, video recorders...But the fact that
people had access to "tools of media production" for
as long as the professional media creators until
recently did not seem to play a big role: the
amateur’ and professional’ media pools did not mix.
Professional photographs traveled between
photographer’s darkroom and newspaper editor;
private pictures of a wedding traveled between
members of the family. But the emergence of
multiple and interlinked paths which encourage
media objects to easily travel between web sites,
recording and display devices, hard drives and flash
drives, and, most importantly, people changes
things. Remixability becomes practically a built-in
feature of digital networked media universe. In a
nutshell, what maybe more important than the
introduction of a video iPod (2001), YouTube (2005),
first consumer 3-CCD camera which can record full
HD video (HD Everio GZ-HD7, 2007), or yet another
exiting new device or service is how easy it is for
media objects to travel between all these devices
and services - which now all become just temporary
stations in media’s Brownian motion.
Modularity and “Culture Industry”
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 218
Although we see a number of important new types of
cultural modularity emerged in software era, it is
important to remember that modularity is something
that only applies to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web
Services. We are talking about the larger cultural
logic that extends beyond the Web and digital
culture.
Modularity has been the key principle of modern
mass production. That is, mass production is possible
because of the standardization of parts and how they
fit with each other - i.e. modularity. Although there
are historical precedents for mass production, until
twentieth century they have been separate historical
cases. But after Ford installs first moving assembly
lines at his factory in 1913, others follow. ("An
assembly line is a manufacturing process in which
interchangeable parts are added to a product in a
sequential manner to create an end product."185
)
Soon modularity permeates most areas of modern
society. The great majority of products we use today
are mass produced, which means they are modular,
i.e. they consist from standardized mass produced
parts which fit together in standardized way. But
modularity was also taken up outside of factory. For
instance, already in 1932 – long before IKEA and
Logo sets – Belgian designer Louis Herman De
Kornick developed first modular furniture suitable for
smaller council flats being built at the time.
Today we are still leaving in an era of mass
production and mass modularity, and globalization
and outsourcing only strengthen this logic. One
commonly evoked characteristic of globalization is
greater connectivity – places, systems, countries,
organizations, etc. becoming connected in more and
more ways. Although there are ways to connect
things and processes without standardizing and
modularizing them – and the further development of
such mechanisms is probably essential if we ever
want to move beyond all the grim consequences of
living in a standardized modular world produced by
the twentieth century – for now it appears so much
easier just to go ahead and apply the twentieth
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 219
century logic. Because society is so used to it, it is
not even thought of as one option among others.
In November 205 I was at a Design Brussels event
where a well-known designer Jerszy Seymour
speculated that once Rapid Manufacturing systems
become advanced, cheap and easy, this will give
designers in Europe a hope for survival. Today, as
Seymour pointed out, as soon as some design
becomes successful, a company wants to produce it
in large quantities – and its production goes to
China. He suggested that when Rapid Manufacturing
and similar technologies would be installed locally,
the designers can become their own manufactures
and everything can happen in one place. But
obviously this will not happen tomorrow, and it is
also not at all certain that Rapid Manufacturing will
ever be able to produce complete finished objects
without any humans involved in the process,
whether its assembly, finishing, or quality control.
Of course, modularity principle did not stayed
unchanged since the beginning of mass production a
hundred years ago. Think of just-in-time
manufacturing, just-in-time programming or the use
of standardized containers for shipment around the
world since the 1960s (over %90 of all goods in the
world today are shipped in these containers). The
logic of modularity seems to be permeating more
layers of society than ever before, and software –
which is great to keeping track of numerous parts
and coordinating their movements – only help this
process.
The logic of culture often runs behind the changes in
economy (recall the concept of “uneven
development” I already evoked in Part 2) – so while
modularity has been the basis of modern industrial
society since the early twentieth century, we only
start seeing the modularity principle in cultural
production and distribution on a large scale in the
last few decades. While Adorno and Horkheimer were
writing about "culture industry" already in early
1940s, it was not then - and it is not today - a true
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 220
modern industry.186
In some areas such as largescale
production of Hollywood animated features or
computer games we see more of the factory logic at
work with extensive division of labor. In the case of
software engineering, software is put together to a
large extent from already available software modules
- but this is done by individual programmers or
teams who often spend months or years on one
project – quite different from Ford production line
model used assembling one identical car after
another in rapid succession. In short, today cultural
modularity has not reached the systematic character
of the industrial standardization circa 1913.
But this does not mean that modularity in
contemporary culture simply lags behind industrial
modularity. Rather, cultural modularity seems to be
governed by a different logic. In terms of packaging
and distribution, “mass culture” has indeed achieved
complete industrial-type standardization. In other
words, all the material carriers of cultural content in
the 20th
century have been standardized, just as it
was done in the production of all other goods - from
first photo and films formats in the end of the
nineteenth century to game cartridges, DVDs,
memory cards, interchangeable camera lenses, and
so on today. But the actual making of content was
never standardized in the same way. In “Culture
industry reconsidered,” Adorno writes:
The expression "industry" is not to be taken too
literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing
itself — such as that of the Western, familiar to
every movie-goer — and to the rationalization of
distribution techniques, but not strictly to the
production process… it [culture industry] is industrial
more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of
industrial forms of organization even when nothing is
manufactured — as in the rationalization of office
work — rather than in the sense of anything really
and actually produced by technological rationality.187
So while culture industries, at their worst,
continuously put out seemingly new cultural products
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(fims, television programs, songs, games, etc.)
which are created from a limited repertoire of
themes, narratives, icons and other elements using a
limited number of conventions, these products are
conceived by the teams of human authors on a oneby-one
basis – not by software. In other words,
while software has been eagerly adopted to help
automate and make more efficient lower levels of the
cultural production (such as generating in-between
frames in an animation or keeping track of all files in
a production pipeline), humans continue to control
the higher levels. Which means that the semiotic
modularity of cultural industries’ products – i.e.,
their Lego-like construction from mostly pre-existent
elements already familiar to consumers – is not
something which is acknowledged or thought about.
The trend toward the reuse of cultural assets in
commercial culture, i.e. media franchising –
characters, settings, icons which appear not in one
but a whole range of cultural products – film sequels,
computer games, theme parks, toys, etc. – this does
not seem to change this basic “pre-industrial” logic
of the production process. For Adorno, this individual
character of each product is part of the ideology of
mass culture: “Each product affects an individual air;
individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so
far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely
reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy
and life.”188
Neither fundamental re-organization of culture
industries around software-based production in the
1990s nor the rise of user-generated content and
social media paradigms in 2000s threatened the
Romantic ideology of an artist-genius. However,
what seems to be happening is that the "users"
themselves have been gradually "modularizing"
culture. In other words, modularity has been coming
into mass culture from the outside, so to speak,
rather than being built-in, as in industrial production.
In the 1980s musicians start sampling already
published music; TV fans start sampling their
favorite TV series to produce their own “slash films,”
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game fans start creating new game levels and all
other kinds of game modifications, or “mods”. (Mods
“can include new items, weapons, characters,
enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, and story
lines.”189
) And of course, from the very beginning of
mass culture in early twentieth century, artists have
immediately starting sampling and remixing mass
cultural products – think of Kurt Schwitters, collage
and particularly photomontage practice which
becomes popular right after WWI among artists in
Russia and Germany. This continued with Pop Art,
appropriation art, video art, net art...
Enter the computer. In The Language of New Media I
named modularity as one of the trends I saw in a
culture undergoing computerization. If before
modularity principle was applied to the packaging of
cultural goods and raw media (photo stock, blank
videotapes, etc.), computerization modularizes
culture on a structural level. Images are broken into
pixels; graphic designs, film and video are broken
into layers in Photoshop, After Effects, and other
media design software. Hypertext modularizes text.
Markup languages such as HTML and media formats
such as QuickTime modularize multimedia
documents in general. This all already happened by
1999 when I was finishing The Language of New
Media; as we saw in this chapter, soon thereafter the
adoption of web feed formats such as RSS further
modularized media content available on the web,
breaking many types of packaged information into
atoms…
In short: in culture, we have been modular already
for a long time already. But at the same time, “we
have never been modular”190
- which I think is a very
good thing.
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Chapter 6. Social Media: Tactics as Strategies
From Mass Consumption to Mass (Cultural)
Production
The evolution of cultural software during 2000s is
closely linked to from the rise a web as the platform
for media publishing, sharing, and social
communication. The key event in this evolution has
been the shift from the original web to the so-called
Web 2.0 (the term was introduced by Tim O'Reilly in
2004.) This term refers to a number of different
technical, economical, and social developments
which were given their own terms: social media,
user-generated content, long tail, network as
platform, folksonomy, syndication, mass
collaboration, etc. We have already discussed a
number of these developments directly or indirectly
in relation to the topics of remixability and
modularity. What I want to do now is to approach
them from a new perspective. I want to ask how the
phenomena of social media and user-generated
content reconfigure the relationships between
cultural “amateurs” and official institutions and
media industries, on the one hand, and “amateurs”
and professional art world, on the other hand.
To get the discussion started, let’s simply summarize
these two Web 2.0 themes. Firstly, in 2000s, we see
a gradual shift from the majority of web users
accessing content produced by a much smaller
number of professional producers to users
increasingly accessing content produced by other
non-professional users.191
Secondly, if 1990s Web
was mostly a publishing medium, in 2000s it
increasingly became a communication medium.
(Communication between users, including
conversations around user-generated content, take
place through a variety of forms besides email:
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posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and
tokens, votes, links, badges, photo, and video.192
)
What do these trends mean for culture in general
and for professional art in particular? First of all, they
do not mean that every user has become a producer.
According to 2007 statistics, only between 0.5% –
1.5% users of most popular (in the U.S.) social
media sites - Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia contributed
their own content. Others remained
consumers of the content produced by this 0.5 -
1.5%. Does this mean that professionally produced
content continues to dominate in terms of where
people get their news and media? If by “content” we
mean typical twentieth century mass media - news,
TV shows, narrative films and videos, computer
games, literature, and music – then the answer is
often yes. For instance, in 2007 only 2 blogs made it
into the list of 100 most read news sources. At the
same time, we see emergence of the “long-tail”
phenomenon on the net: not only “top 40” but most
of the content available online - including content
produced by individuals - finds some audiences.193
These audiences can be tiny but they are not 0. This
is best illustrated by the following statistics: in the
middle of 2000s every track out of a million of so
available through iTunes sold at least once a quarter.
In other words, every track no matter how obscure
found at least one listener. This translates into new
economics of media: as researchers who have
studied the long tail phenomena demonstrated, in
many industries the total volume of sales generated
by such low popularity items exceeds the volume
generated by “top forty” items.194
Let us now consider another set of statistics showing
that people increasingly get their information and
media from social media sites. In January 2008,
Wikipedia has ranked as number 9 most visited web
site; Myspace was at number 6, Facebook was at 5,
and MySpace was at 3. (According to the company
that collects these statistics, it is more than likely
that these numbers are U.S. biased, and that the
rankings in other countries are different.195
However,
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the general trend towards increasing use of social
media sites – global, localized, or local - can be
observed in most countries. In fact, according to
2008 report, the growth in social media has been
accelerating outside of U.S., with a number of
countries in Asia significantly outpacing Western
Countries in areas – reading and writing blogs,
watching and making video and photos, etc. For
instance, while only %26.4 of Internet users in the
U.S. started a blog at some point, this number was
%60.3 for Mexico, %70.3 for China, and %71.7 for
South Korea. Similarly, while in the U.S. the
percentage of Internet users who also use social
networks was %43, it was %66 for India, %71.1 for
Russia, %75.7 for Brazil, and %83.1 for
Philippines.196
)
The numbers of people participating in these social
networks, sharing media, and creating “user
generated content” are astonishing – at least from
the perspective of early 2008. (It is likely that in
2012 or 2018 they will look trivial in comparison to
what will be happening then). MySpace:
300,000,000 users.197
Cyworld, a Korean site similar
to MySpace: 90 percent of South Koreans in their
20s, or 25 percent of the total population of South
Korea.198
Hi4, a leading social media site Central
America: 100,000,000 users.199
Facebook: 14,00,000
photo uploads daily.200
The number of new videos
uploaded to YouTube every 24 hours (as of July
2006): 65,000.201
The number of videos watched by
79 million visitors to YouTube during January 2008:
more than 3 billion.202
If these numbers are already amazing, consider
another platform for accessing, sharing, and
publishing media: a mobile phone. In Early 2007, 2.2
billion people have mobile phones; by the end of the
year this number was expected to be 3 billion.
Obviously, today people in an Indian village who all
sharing one mobile phone do not make video blogs
for global consumption – but this is today. Think of
the following trend: in the middle of 2007, Flickr
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contained approximately 600 million images. By
early 2008, this number has already doubled.
These statistics are impressive. The more difficult
question is: how to interpret them? First of all, they
don’t tell us about the actual media diet of users
(obviously these diets vary between places and
demographics). For instance, we don’t have exact
numbers (at least, they are not freely available)
regarding what exactly people watch on sites such as
YouTube – the percentage of user-generated content
versus commercial content such as music videos,
anime, game trailers, movie clips, etc.203
Secondly,
we also don’t have exact numbers regarding which
percentage of peoples’ daily media/information
intake comes from big news organization, TV,
commercially realized films and music versus nonprofessional
sources.
These numbers are difficult to establish because
today commercial media does not only arrive via
traditional channels such as newspapers, TV stations
and movie theatres but also via the same channels
which carry user-generated content: blogs, RSS
feeds, Facebook’s posted items and notes, YouTube
videos, etc. Therefore, simply counting how many
people follow a particular communication channel is
no longer tells you what they are watching.
But even if we knew precise statistics, it still would
not be clear what are the relative roles between
commercial sources and user-produced content in
forming people understanding of the world,
themselves, and others. Or, more precisely: what
are the relative weights between the ideas expressed
in large circulation media and alternative ideas
available elsewhere? And, if one person gets all her
news via blogs, does this automatically mean that
her understanding of the world and important issues
is different from a person who only reads
mainstream newspapers?
The Practice of Everyday Media Life: Tactics as
Strategies
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 227
For different reasons, media, businesses, consumer
electronics and web industries, and academics
converge in celebrating content created and
exchanged by users. In U.S. academic discussions, in
particular, the disproportional attention was given to
certain genres such as “youth media,” “activist
media,” “political mash-ups” – which are indeed
important but do not represent more typical usage of
hundreds of millions of people.
In celebrating user-generated content and implicitly
equating “user-generated” with “alternative” and
“progressive,” academic discussions often stay away
from asking certain basic critical questions. For
instance: To what extent the phenomenon of usergenerated
content is driven by consumer electronics
industry – the producers of digital cameras, video
cameras, music players, laptops, and so on? Or: To
what extent the phenomenon of user-generated
content is generated by social media companies
themselves – who, after all, are in the business of
getting as much traffic to their sites as possible so
they can make money by selling advertising and
their usage data?
Here is another question. Given that the significant
percentage of user-generated content either follows
the templates and conventions set up by professional
entertainment industry, or directly re-uses
professionally produced content (for instance, anime
music videos), does this means that people’s
identities and imagination are now even more firmly
colonized by commercial media than in the twentieth
century? In other words: Is the replacement of mass
consumption of commercial culture in the 20th
century by mass production of cultural objects by
users in the early 21st century is a progressive
development? Or does it constitutes a further stage
in the development of “culture industry” as analyzed
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1944
book The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception? Indeed, if the twentieth century subjects
were simply consuming the products of culture
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industry, 21st
century prosumers and “pro-ams” are
passionately imitating it. That is, they now make
their own cultural products that follow the templates
established by the professionals and/or rely on
professional content.
The case in point is anime music videos (often
abbreviated as AMV). My search for “anime music
videos” on YouTube on April 7, 2008 returned
275,000 videos.204
Animemusicvideos.org, the main
web portal for anime music video makers (before the
action moved to YouTube) contained 130,510 AMVs
as of February 9, 2008. AMV are made mostly by
fans of anime in the West. They edit together clips
from one or more anime series to music, which
comes from different sources such as professional
music videos. Sometimes, AMV also use cut-scene
footage from video games. From approximately
2002-2003, AMV makers also started to increasingly
add visual effects available in software such as After
Effects. But regardless of the particular sources used
and their combination, in the majority of AMV all
video and music comes from commercial media
products. AMVs makers see themselves as editors
who re-edit the original material, rather than as
filmmakers or animators who create from scratch.205
To help us analyze AMV culture, let us put to work
the categories set up by Michel de Certeau in his
1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life.206
De
Certeau makes a distinction between “strategies”
used by institutions and power structures and
“tactics” used by modern subjects in their everyday
life. The tactics are the ways in which individuals
negotiate strategies that were set for them. For
instance, to take one example discussed by de
Certeau, city’s layout, signage, driving and parking
rules and official maps are strategies created by the
government and companies. The ways an individual
is moving through the city, taking shortcuts,
wondering aimlessly, navigating through favorite
routes and adopting others constitute tactics. In
other words, an individual can’t physically reorganize
the city but she can adopt itself to her needs by
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choosing how she moves through it. A tactic “expects
to have to work on things in order to make them its
own, or to make them ‘habitable’.”207
As De Certeau points out, in modern societies most
of the objects which people use in their everyday life
are mass produced goods; these goods are the
expressions of strategies of producers, designers,
and marketers. People build their worlds and
identities out of these readily available objects by
using different tactics: bricolage, assembly,
customization, and – to use the term which was not
a part of De Certeau’s vocabulary but which has
become important today – remix. For instance,
people rarely wear every piece from one designer’s
collection as they appear in fashion shows: they
usually mix and match different pieces from different
sources. They also wear clothing pieces in different
ways than it was intended, and they customize the
cloves themselves through buttons, belts, and other
accessories. The same goes for the ways in which
people decorate their living spaces, prepare meals,
and in general construct their lifestyles.
While the general ideas of The Practice of Everyday
Life still provide an excellent intellectual paradigm
for thinking about the vernacular culture, since the
book was published in 1980s many things also
changed. These changes are less drastic in the area
of governance, although even there we see moves
towards more transparency and visibility. (For
instance, most government agencies operate
detailed web sites.) But in the area of consumer
economy, the changes have been quite substantial.
Strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in
an interactive relationship, and often their features
are reversed. This is particularly true for “born
digital” industries and media such as software,
computer games, web sites, and social networks.
Their products are explicitly designed to be
customized by the users. Think, for instance, of the
original Graphical User Interface (popularized by
Apple’s Macintosh in 1984) designed to allow a user
to customize the appearance and functions of the
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computer and the applications to her liking. The
same applies to recent web interfaces – for instance,
iGoogle which allows the user to set up a custom
home page selecting from many applications and
information sources. Facebook, Flickr, Google and
other social media companies encourage others to
write applications, which mash-up their data and add
new services (as of early 2008, Facebook hosted
over 15,000 applications written by outside
developers.) The explicit design for customization is
not limited to the web: for instance, many computer
games ship with level editor that allows the users to
create their own levels. And Spore (2008) designed
by celebrated Will Write went much further: most of
the content of the game is created by users
themselves: “The content that the player can create
is uploaded automatically to a central database (or a
peer-to-peer system), cataloged and rated for
quality (based on how many users have downloaded
the object or creature in question), and then redistributed
to populate other players' games.”208
Although the industries dealing with the physical
world are moving much slower, they are on the same
trajectory. In 2003 Tayota introduced Scion cars.
Scion marketing was centered on the idea of
extensive customization. Nike, Adidas, and Puma all
experimented with allowing the consumers to design
and order their own shoes by choosing from a broad
range of shoe parts. (In the case of Puma Mongolian
Barbeque concept, a few thousand unique shoes can
be constructed.)209
In early 2008 Bug Labs
introduced what they called “the Lego of gadgets”:
open sourced consumer electronics platform
consisting from a minicomputer and modules such as
a digital camera or a LCD screen.210
The celebration
of DIY practice in various consumer industries from
2005 onward is another example of this growing
trend. Other examples include the idea of co-creation
of products and services between companies and
consumers (The Future Of Competition: Co-Creating
Unique Value with Customers by C.K. Prahalad and
Venkat Ramaswamy211
), as well as the concept of
crowdsourcing in general.
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In short: since the original publication of The Practice
of Everyday Life, companies have developed new
kinds of strategies. These strategies mimic people’s
tactics of bricolage, re-assembly and remix. In other
words: the logic of tactics has now become the logic
of strategies.
According to De Certeau original analysis from 1980,
tactics do not necessary result in objects or anything
stable or permanent: “Unlike the strategy, it
<tactic> lacks the centralized structure and
permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a
competitor to some other entity… it renders its own
activities an "unmappable" form of subversion.”212
Since the early 1980s, however, consumer and
culture industries have started to systematically turn
every subculture (particularly every youth
subculture) into products. In short, the cultural
tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies
now sold to them. If you want to “oppose the
mainstream,” you now had plenty of lifestyles
available – with every subculture aspect, from music
and visual styles to clothes and slang – available for
purchase.
This adaptations, however, still focused on distinct
subcultures: bohemians, hip hop and rap, Lolita
fashion, rock, punk, skin head, Goth, etc.213
However, in 2000s, the transformation of people’s
tactics into business strategies went into a new
direction. The developments of the previous decade
– the Web platform, the dramatically decreased costs
of the consumer electronics devices for media
capture and playback, increased global travel, and
the growing consumer economies of many countries
which after 1990 joined the global economy – led to
the explosion of user-generated content available in
digital form: Web sites, blogs, forum discussions,
short messages, digital photo, video, music, maps,
etc. Responding to this explosion, Web 2.0
companies created powerful platforms designed to
host this content. MySpace, Facebook, Orkut,
Livejournal, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, h5 (Central
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America), Cyworld (Korea), Wretch (Taivan), Orkut
(Brasil), Baidu (China), and thousands of other social
media sites make this content instantly available
worldwide (except, of course, in a small number of
countries which block or filter these sites). Thus, not
just particular features of particular subcultures but
the details of everyday life of hundreds of millions of
people who make and upload their media or write
blogs became public.
What before was ephemeral, transient, umappable,
and invisible become permanent, mappable, and
viewable. Social media platforms give users
unlimited space for storage and plenty of tools to
organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts,
opinions, behavior, and media to others. As I am
writing this, you can already directly stream video
from your laptop or mobile phone’s camera, and it is
only a matter of time before constant broadcasting
of one’s live becomes as common as email. If you
follow the evolution from MyLifeBits project (2001-)
to Slife software (2007-) and Yahoo! Live personal
broadcasting service (2008-), the trajectory towards
continuous capture and broadcasting of one’s
everyday life is clear.
According to De Certeau’s 1980 analysis, strategy “is
engaged in the work of systematizing, of imposing
order… its ways are set. It cannot be expected to be
capable of breaking up and regrouping easily,
something which a tactical model does naturally.”
The strategies used by social media companies
today, however, are the exact opposite: they are
focused on flexibility and constant chance. Of course,
all businesses in the age of globalization had to
become adaptable, mobile, flexible, and ready to
break up and regroup – but the companies involved
in producing and handling physical objects rarely
achieve the flexibility of web companies and software
developers.214
According to the Tim O'Reilly (in case
you don’t remember – he originated the term Web
2.0 in 2004), an important feature of Web 2.0
applications is “design for ‘hackability’ and
remixability.”215
Indeed, Web 2.0 era has truly got
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 233
under way when major web companies - Amazon,
eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube make
available some of their services (APIs) and
data to encourage others to create new applications
using this data.216
In summary, today strategies used by social media
companies often look more like tactics in the original
formulation by De Certeau – while tactics look
strategies. Since the companies which create social
media sites make money from having as many users
as possible visiting their sites as often as possible –
because they sell ads, sell data about site usage to
other companies, selling ad-on services, etc. – they
have a direct interest in having users pouring their
lives into these platforms. Consequently, they give
users unlimited storage space to store all their
media, the ability to customize their “online lives”
(for instance, by controlling what is seen by who)
and expand the functionality of the platforms
themselves.
All this, however, does not mean strategies and
tactics have completely exchanged places. If we look
at the actual media content produced by users, here
strategies/tactics relationship is different. As I
already mentioned, for a few decades now
companies have been systematically turning the
elements of various subcultures developed by people
into commercial products. But these subcultures
themselves, however, rarely develop completely
from scratch – rather, they are the result of cultural
appropriation and/or remix of earlier commercial
culture by consumers and fans.217
AMV subculture is
a case in point. On the other hand, it exemplifies
new “strategies as tactics” phenomenon: AMVs are
hosted on mainstream social media sites such as
YouTube, so they can’t be described as “transient” or
“unmappable” - you can use search to find them, see
how others users rated them, save them as
favorites, etc. On the other hand, on the level of
content, it is “practice of everyday life” as before:
the great majority of AMVs consist from segments
sampled from commercial anime programs and
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commercial music. This does not mean that best
AMVs are not creative or original – only that their
creativity is different from the romantic/modernist
model of “making it new.” To borrow De Certeau’s
terms, we can describe it as tactical creativity that
“expects to have to work on things in order to make
them its own, or to make them ‘habitable.’”
Media Conversations
“Creativity” is not the only term impacted by the
phenomena of social media. Other very basic terms
– content, a cultural object, cultural production,
cultural consumption, communication – are similarly
being expanded or redefined. In this section we will
look at some of the most interesting developments in
social media which are responsible for these
redefinitions.
One of the characteristics of social media is that it is
often hard to say where “content” ends and the
discussions of this content begin. Blog writing offers
plenty of examples. Frequently, blog posts are
comments by a blog writer about an item that s/he
copied from another source. Or, consider comments
by others that may appear below a blog post. The
original post may generate a long discussion which
goes into new and original directions, with the
original post itself long forgotten. (Discussions on
Forums often follow the same patterns.)
Often “content,” “news” or “media” become tokens
used to initiate or maintain a conversation. Their
original meaning is less important than their function
as such tokens. I am thinking here of people posting
pictures on each other pages on MySpace, or
exchanging gifts on Facebook. What kind of gift you
get is less important than the act of getting a gift, or
posting a comment or a picture. Although it may
appear at first that such conversation simply
foreground Roman Jakobson’s emotive and/or phatic
communication functions which he described already
in 1960218
, it is also possible that a detailed analysis
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 235
will show them to being a genuinely new
phenomenon.
The beginnings of such analysis can be found in the
writing of social media designer Adrian Chan. As he
points out, “All cultures practice the exchange of
tokens that bear and carry meanings, communicate
interest and count as personal and social
transactions.” Token gestures “cue, signal, indicate
users’ interests in one another.” While the use of
tokens in not unique to networked social media,
some of the features pointed by Chan do appear to
be new. For instance, as Chan notes, the use of
tokens in net communication is often “accompanied
by ambiguity of intent and motive (the token's
meaning may be codified while the user's motive for
using it may not). This can double up the meaning of
interaction and communication, allowing the
recipients of tokens to respond to the token or to the
user behind its use.”219
Consider another very interesting new
communication situation: a conversation around a
piece of media – for instance, comments added by
users below somebody’s Flickr photo or YouTube
video which do not only respond to the media object
but also to each other. According to a survey
conducted in 2007, %13 of Internet users who watch
video also post comments about the videos.220
(The
same is often true of comments, reviews and
discussions on the web in general – the object in
question can be software, a film, a previous post,
etc.) Of course, such conversation structures are
also common in real life. However, web
infrastructure and software allow such conversations
to become distributed in space and time – people
can respond to each other regardless of their
location and the conversation can in theory go
forever. (The web is millions of such conversations
taking place at the same time – as dramatized by
the installation Listening Post created by Ben Rubin
and Mark Hansen221
). These conversations are quite
common: according to the report by Pew internet &
American Life Project (12/19/2007), among U.S.
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teens who post photos online, %89 reported that
people comment on these photos at least some of
the time.222
Equally interesting is conversations which takes
place through images or video – for instance,
responding to a video with a new video. This
phenomenon of “conversation through media” was
first pointed to me by UCSD graduate student Derek
Lomas in 2006 in relation to comments on MySpace
pages that often consists of only images without any
accompanying text. Soon thereafter, YouTube UI
“legitimized” this new type of communication by
including “post a video response” button and along
with other tools that appear below a rectangle where
videos are played. It also provides a special places
for videos created as responses. (Note again that all
examples of interfaces, features, and common uses
of social media sites here refer to middle of 2008;
obviously some of the details may change by the
time you read this.) Social media sites contain
numerous examples of such “conversations through
media” and most of them are not necessary very
interesting – but enough are. One of them is a
conversation around a five-minute “video essay”
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us posted by a
cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch on January 31,
2007.223
A year later this video was watched
4,638,265 times.224
It has also generated 28 video
responses that range from short 30-second
comments to equally theoretical and carefully crafted
longer videos.
Just as it is the case with any other feature of
contemporary digital culture, it is always possible to
find some precedents for any of these
communication situations. For instance, modern art
can be understood as conversations between
different artists or artistic schools. That is, one
artist/movement is responding to the works
produced earlier by another artist/movement. For
instance, modernists react against classical
nineteenth century salon art culture; Jasper John
and other pop-artists react to abstract
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expressionism; Godard reacts to Hollywood-style
narrative cinema; and so on. To use the terms of
YouTube, we can say that Godard posts his video
response to one huge clip called “classical narrative
cinema.” But the Hollywood studios do not respond –
at least not for another 30 years.
As can be seen from these examples, typically these
conversations between artists and artistic schools
were not full conversations. One artist/school
produced something, another artist/school later
responded with their own productions, and this was
all. The first art/school usually did not respond. But
beginning in the 1980s, professional media cultures
begin to respond to each other more quickly and the
conversations are no longer go one way. Music
videos affect the editing strategies of feature films
and television; similarly, today the aesthetics of
motion graphics is slipping into narrative features.
Cinematography, which before only existed in films,
is taken up in video games, and so on. But these
conversations are still different from the
communication between individuals through media in
a networked environment. In the case of Web 2.0, it
is individuals directly talking to each other using
media rather than only professional producers.
New Media Technologies and the Arts: a History of
Diminishing Options
It has become a cliché to discuss new
communication and media technologies in terms of
“new possibilities they offer for artists.” Since I
started writing about new media art in the early
1990s, I have seen this stated countless times in
relation to each new technology which came along –
virtual reality and virtual worlds, Internet, Web,
networks in general (“network art”), computer
games, locative media, mobile media, and social
media.
But what if instead of automatically accepting this
idea of “expanding possibilities,” we imagine its
opposite? What if new media technologies impact
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professional arts in a very different way? Let us
explore the thesis that, instead of offering arts new
options, each new modern media technology has put
further limits on the kinds of activities and strategies
for making media that artists can claim as unique.
As an example, consider a well-known and
extensively discussed episode in the history of arts
and technology: the effect of photography on
painting in the 19th
century. According to a common
interpretation, the new medium of photography
liberated painting from its documentary function. By
taking over the job of recording visible reality,
photography set painters free to discover new
functions for their artworks. As a result, painters
gradually moved away from representation towards
abstraction. A two-dimensional canvas came to be
understood as an object in itself rather than as a
window into an illusionary space. From there,
modern artists took the next step of moving from a
flat painting to a three-dimensional object
(constructivism, pop art). Artists also came up with a
variety of new techniques for making both
representational and non-representational images
that opposed the automatic generation of an image
in photography and film - for example,
expressionism of 1910s and 1920s and post-war
abstract expressionism. They also stared to use
mass produced objects and their own bodies as both
subjects and materials of art (pop art, performance,
and other new forms which emerged in the 1960s).
But it is also possible to reinterpret these
developments in visual arts in a different way. By
taking over the documentary function of painting,
photography has taken away painters’ core business
- portraits, family scenes, landscapes, and historical
events. As a result, paintings suddenly lost the key
roles they played both in religious and in secularized
societies until that time – encoding social and
personal memories, constructing visual symbols,
communicating foundational narratives and world
views – all in all, carrying over society’s semiotic
DNAs. So what could painters do after this? In fact,
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they never recovered. They turned towards
examining the visual language of painting
(abstraction), the material elements of their craft
and the conventions of painting’s existence (“white
on white” paintings, stretched canvases exhibited
with their back facing the viewer, and so on), and
the conditions of art institutions in general (from
Duchamp to Conceptual Art to Institutional Critique.)
And if at first these explorations were generating
fresh and socially useful results - for instance,
geometric abstraction was adopted as the new
language of visual communication, including graphic
design, packaging, interior design, and publicity eventually
they degenerated, turning into painful and
self-absorbed exercises. In other words, by the
1980s professional art more often than not was
chasing its own tale.
Thus, rather than thinking of modern art as a
liberation (from representation and documentation),
we can see it as a kind of psychosis – an intense,
often torturous examination of the contents of its
psyche, the memories of its glamorous past lives,
and the very possibilities of speaking. At first this
psychosis produced brilliant insights and inspired
visions but eventually, as the mental illness
progressed, it degenerated into endless repetitions.
This is only to be expected, given that art has given
up its previously firm connection to outside reality.
Or, rather, it was photography that forced art into
this position. Having severed its connection to visible
reality, art became like a mental patient whose
mental processing is no longer held in check by
sensory inputs. What eventually saved art from this
psychosis was globalization of the 1990s. Suddenly,
the artists in newly "globalized" countries – China,
India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Kazakhstan,
Turkey, Poland, Macedonia, Albania, etc. – had
access to global cultural markets – or rather, the
global market had now access to them. Because of
the newness of modern art and the still conservative
social norms in many of these countries, the social
functions of art that by that time lost their
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effectiveness in the West – representation of sexual
taboos, critique of social and political powers, the
ironic depiction of new middle classes and new rich –
still had relevance and urgency in these contexts.
Deprived from quality representational art, Western
collectors and publics rushed to admire the critical
realism produced outside of the West – and thus
realism returned to become if not the center, than at
least one of the key focuses of contemporary global
art.
Looking at the history of art between middle of the
nineteenth century and the end of Cold War (1990),
it is apparent that painting did quite well for itself. If
you want the proof, simply take a look at the auction
prices for 20th century paintings that in 2000s
became higher than the prices for the classical art.
But not everybody was able to recover as well as
painters from the impact of new media technologies.
Probably the main reason for their success was the
relatively slow development of photographic
technology in the nineteenth and first third of the
twentieth century. From the moment painters
perceived the threat – let us say in 1839 when
Daguerre developed his daguerreotype process – it
took about a hundred years before color
photography got to the point there it could compete
with painting in terms of visual fidelity. (The relevant
date here is 1935 when Kodak introduced first massmarketed
still color film Kodachrome). So painters
had a luxury of time to work out new subjects and
new strategies. In the last third of the twentieth
century, however, the new technologies have been
arriving at an increasing pace, taking over more and
more previously unique artistic strategies within a
matter of a few years.
For instance, in the middle of the 1980s more
sophisticated video keyers and early electronic and
digital effects boxes designed to work with
professional broadcast video – Quantel Paintbox,
Framestore, Harry, Mirage and others – made
possibly to begin combining at least a few layers of
video and graphics together, resulting in a kind of
Manovich | Version 11/20/2008 | 241
use video collage.225
As a result, the distinctive visual
strategies which previously clearly marked
experimental film – superimposition of layers of
imagery, juxtaposition of unrelated objects of filmed
reality and abstract elements – quickly became the
standard strategies of broadcast video postproduction.
In the 1990s the wide adoption of a
Video Toaster, an Apple Macintosh and a PC, which
could do such effects at a fraction of a cost,
democratized the use of such visual strategies. By
the middle of the 1990s most techniques of
modernist avant-garde become available as standard
features of software such as Adobe Premiere (1991),
After Effects (1993), Flash (1996), and Final Cut
(1999).
As a result, the definition of experimental film,
animation and video radically shifted. If before their
trademark was an unusual and often “difficult” visual
form, they could no longer claim any formal
uniqueness. Now experimental video and films could
only brand themselves through content – deviant
sexuality, political views which would be radical or
dangerous in the local context, representations of all
kinds of acts which a viewer would not see on TV (of
course, this function was also soon to be taken over
by YouTube), social documentary, or the use of
performance strategies focused on the body of an
artist. Accordingly, we see a shift from
experimentation with forms to the emphasis on
“radical” content,” while the term “experimental”
gradually replaced by the term “independent.” The
latter term accurately marks the change from a
definition based on formal difference to a definition
based on economics: an independent (or “art”)
project is different from a “commercial” project
mainly because it is not commissioned and paid by a
commercial client (i.e., a company). Of course, in
reality things are not so neatly defined: many
independent films and other cultural projects are
either explicitly commissioned by some organization
or made for a particular market. In the case of
filmmaking, the difference is even smaller: any film
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can be considered independent as long as its
producer is not an older large Hollywood studio.
In summary: from the early days of modern media
technologies in the middle of the nineteenth century
until now, modern artists were able to adopt to
competition from these media creatively, inventing
new roles for themselves and redefining what art
was. (This, in fact, is similar to how today
globalization and outsourcing pushes companies and
professionals in different fields to redefine
themselves: for instance, graphic designers in the
West are turning into design consultants and
managers). However, the emergence of social media
- free web technologies and platforms which enable
normal people to share their media and easily access
media produced by others – combined with the
rapidly fallen cost for professional-quality media
devices such as HD video cameras – brings
fundamentally new challenges.226
Is Art After Web 2.0 still possible?
How does art world responds to these challenges?
Have professional artists benefited from the
explosion of media content online being produced by
regular users and the easily availability of media
publishing platforms? Is the fact that we now have
such platforms where anybody can publish their
videos mean that artists have a new distribution
channel for their works? Or is the world of social
media – hundreds of millions of people daily
uploading and downloading video, audio, and
photographs; media objects produced by unknown
authors getting millions of downloads; media objects
easily and rapidly moving between users, devices,
contexts, and networks – makes professional art
simply irrelevant? In short, while modern artists
have so far successfully met the challenges of each
generation of media technologies, can professional
art survive extreme democratization of media
production and access?
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On one level, this question is meaningless. Surely,
never in the history of modern art it has been doing
so well commercially. No longer a pursuit for a few,
in 2000s contemporary art became another form of
mass culture. Its popularity is often equal to that of
other mass media. Most importantly, contemporary
art has become a legitimate investment category,
and with the all the money invested into it, today it
appears unlikely that this market will ever
completely collapse.
In a certain sense, since the beginnings of
globalization in the early 1990s, the number of
participants in the institution called “contemporary
art” has experienced a growth that parallels the rise
of social media in 2000s. Since 1990s, many new
countries entered the global economy and adopted
western values in their cultural politics. Which
includes supporting, collecting, and promoting
“contemporary art.” When I first visited Shanghai in
2004, it already had has not just one but three
museums of contemporary art plus more large-size
spaces that show cotemporary art than New York or
London. Starchitects rank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao
Ando (above) and Zaha Hadid are now building
museums and cultural centers on Saadiyat Island in
Abu Dhabi.227
Rem Koolhaus is building new museum
of contemporary art in Riga, a capital of tiny Latvia
(2007 population: 2.2 million). I can continue this
list but you get the idea.
In the case of social media, the unprecedented
growth of numbers of people who upload and view
each other media led to lots of innovation. While the
typical diary video or anime on YouTube may not be
that special, enough are. In fact, in all media where
the technologies of productions were democratized music,
animation, graphic design, (and also software
development itself) - I have came across many
projects available online which not only rival those
produced by most well-known commercial companies
and most well-known artists but also often explore
the new areas not yet touched by those with lots of
symbolic capital.
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Who is creating these projects? In my observations,
while some of them do come from prototypical
“amateurs,” “prosumers” and “pro-ams,” most are
done by young professionals, or professionals in
training. The emergence of the Web as the new
standard communication medium in the 1990s
means that today in most cultural fields, every
professional or a company, regardless of its size and
geo location, has a web presence and posts new
works online. Perhaps most importantly, young
design students can now put their works before a
global audience, see what others are doing, and
develop together new tools and projects (for
instance, see processing.org community).
Note that we are not talking about “classical” social
media or “classical” user-generated content here,
since, at least at present, many of such portfolios,
sample projects and demo reels are being uploaded
on companies’ own web sites and specialized
aggregation sites known to people in the field (such
as archinect.com for architecture), rather than Flickr
or YouTube. Here are some examples of such sites
that I consult regularly: xplsv.tv (motion graphics,
animation), coroflot.com (design portfolios from
around the world), archinect.com (architecture
students projects), infosthetics.com (information
visualization projects). In my view, the significant
percentage of works you find on these web sites
represents the most innovative cultural production
done today. Or at least, they make it clear that the
world of professional art has no special license on
creativity and innovation.
But perhaps the most amount of conceptual
innovation is to be found today in software
development for the web medium itself. I am
thinking about all the new creative software tools web
mashups, Firefox plug-ins, Processing libraries,
etc. – coming out from large software companies,
small design firms, individual developers, and
students.
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Therefore, the true challenge posed to art by social
media may be not all the excellent cultural works
produced by students and non-professionals which
are now easily available online – although I do think
this is also important. The real challenge may lie in
the dynamics of web culture – its constant
innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.
To summarize: Alan Kay was deeply right in thinking
of a computer as generation engine which would
enable invention of many new media. And yet, the
speed, the breadth, and the sheer number of people
now involved in constantly pushing forward what
media is would be very hard to imagine thirty years
ago when a computer metamedium was only coming
into existence.