Lev manovich the language of new media summary, Summaries of Media Management

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Lev Manovich

The Language of New Media

corresponding computer hardware (compression boards, storage formats such as DVD), is driven by a clearly defined goal: the exact duplication of cinematic realism. So if a computer screen, more and more, emulates cinema's screen, this not an accident but a result of conscious planning by the computer and entertainment industry. But this drive to turn new media into a simulation of classical film language, which paralles the encoding of cinema’s techniques in software interfaces and hardare itself, described in “Cultural Interfaces” section, is just one direction for new media dvelopment among numerous others. I will next examine a number of new media and old media objects which point towards other possible trajectories.

New Temporality: Loop as a Narrative Engine

One of the underlying assumptions of this book is that by looking at the history of visual culture and media, and in particular cinema, we can find many strategies and techniques relevant to new media design. Put differently, in order to develop new aesthetics of new media we should pay as much attention to the cultural history as to computer’s new unique possibilities to generate, organize, manipulate and distribute data. As we scan through cultural history (which includes the history of new media up until the time of research), three kinds of situations will be particularly relevant for us:

• when an earlier interesting strategy or technique was abandoned or forced into “underground” without fully developing its potential;
• when an earlier strategy can be understood as a response to the technological constrains (I am using this more technical term on purpose instead of more ideologically loaded “limitations”) similar to the constrains of new media;
• when an earlier strategy was used in a situation similar to a particular situation faced by new media designers. For instance, montage was a strategy to deal with modularity of a film (how do you join separate shots?) as well as with a problem of coordinating diffirent media types such as images and sound. Both of these simutaions are being faced once again today by new media designers.

I already used these principles in discussing the parallels between nineteenth century pro-cinematic techniques and the language of new media; they also guided me in thinking about animation (the “underground” of 20th^ century cinema) as the basis for digital cinema new language. I will now use a particular parallel between early cinematic and new media technology to highlight another

based real-time virtual worlds. What used to be the slow speed of CPUs became the slow bandwidth. As a result the 1990s VRML worlds look like the pre- rendered animations done ten years earlier. The similar logic applies to loops. Earlier QuickTime movies and computer games heavily relied on loops. As the CPU speed increased and larger storage media such as CD-ROM and DVD became available, the use of loops in stand-alone hypermedia declined. However, online virtual worlds such as Active Worlds came to use loops extensively, as it provides a cheap (in terms of bandwidth and computation) way of adding some signs of “life” to their

geometric-looking environments.

375 Similarly, we may expect that when digital

videos will appear on small displays in our cellular phones, personal managers such as Palm Pilot or other wireless communication devices, they will once again will be arranged in short loops because of bandwidth, storage, or CPU limitations. Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer

age?

376 It is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also

to computer programming. Programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as "if/then" and "repeat/while"; the loop is the most elementary of these control structures. Most computer programs are based on repetitions of a set number of steps; this repetition is controlled by the program’s main loop. So if we strip the computer from its usual interface and follow the execution of a typical computer program, the computer will reveal itself to be another version of Ford's factory, with a loop as its conveyer belt. As the practice of computer programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be thought as being mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to end by executing a series of loops. Another illustration of how these two temporal forms can work together is

Möbius House by Dutch team UN Studio/Van Berkel & Bos.

377 In this house a number of functionally different areas are arranged one after another in the form of a Möbius strip, thus forming a loop. As the narrative of the day progresses from one activity to the next, the inhabitants move from area to area. Traditional cell animation similarly combines a narrative and a loop. In order to save labor, animators arrange many actions, such as movements of characters’ legs, eyes and arms, into short loops and repeat them over and over. Thus, as already discussed in the previous section, in a typical twentieth century cartoon a large proportion of motions involves loops. This principle is taken to the extreme in Rybczynski’s Tango. Subjecting live action footage to the logic of animation, Rybczynski arranges the trajectory of every character through space as a loop. These loops are further composited together resulting in a complex and intricate time-based structure. At the same time, the overall “shape” of this structure is governed by a number of narratives. The film begins in an empty room; next the loops of character’s trajectories through this room are added, one

by one. The end of the film mirrors its beginning as the loops are “deleted” in a reverse order, also one by one. This metaphor for a progression of a human life (we are born alone, gradually forms relations with other humans, and eventually die alone) is also supported by another narrative: the first character to appear in the room is a young boy, the last one is an old woman. The concept of a loop as an “engine” which puts the narrative in motion becomes a foundation of a brilliant interactive TV program Akvaario (aquarium) by a number of graduate students at Helsinki’s University of Art and Design

(Professor and Media Lab coordinator: Minna Tarrka).

378 In contrast to many new media objects which combine the conventions of cinema, print and HCI, Akvaario aims to preserve the continuos flow of traditional cinema, while adding interactivity to it. Along with an earlier game Jonny Mnemonic (SONY, 1995), as well as the pioneering interactive laserdisk computer installations by Graham Weinbren done in the 1980s, this project is a rare example of a new media narrative which does not rely on the oscillation between non-interactive and interactive segments (see “Illusion, Narrative and Interactivity” section for the analysis of this temporal ossicilation.) Using the already familiar convention of such games such as Tamagotchi (1996-), the program asks TV viewers to “take charge” of a fictional human

character.

379 Most shots which we see show this character engaged in different activities in his apartment: eating dinner, reading a book, starring into space. The shots replace each other following standard conventions of film and TV editing. The result is something which looks at first like a conventional, although very long, movie (the program was projected to run for three hours every day over the course of a few months), even though the shots are selected in real time by a computer porgram from a database of a few hundreds diffirent shots. By choosing one of the four buttons which are always present on the bottom of the screen, the viewers control character’s motivation. When a button is pressed, a computer program selects a sequence of particular shots to follow the shot which plays currently. Because of visual, spatial and referential discontinuity between shots typical of standard editing, the result is something which the viewer interprets as a conventional narrative. A film or television viewer viewer does not expect that any two shots which follow one another have to display the same space or subsequent moments of time. Therefore in Akvaario a computer program can “weave” an endless narrative by choosing from a database of different shots. What gives the resulting “narrative: a suficient continuity is that almost all shots show the same character. Akvaario is one of the first examples of what in previous chapter I called a “database narrative.” It is, in other words, a narrative which fully utilizes many features of database organization of data. It relies on our abilities to classify database records according to different dimensions, to sort through records, to

only one possible structure, here the shots can appear in different combinations since they are activated by a user moving a mouse across the windows. At the same time, it is possible to find more traditional temporal montage in this work as well — for instance, the move from first screen which shows close-up of a woman to a second screen which shows water surfaces and back to the first screen. This move can be interpreted as a traditional parallel editing. In cinema parallel editing involves alternating between two subjects. For instance, a chase sequence may go back and forth between the images of two cars, one pursuing another. However in our case the water images are always present “underneath” the first set of images. So the logic here is again one of co-existence rather than that of replacement, typical of cinema (see my discussion of spatial montage below). The loop which structures Flora petrinsularis on a number of levels becomes a metaphor for human desire which can never achieve resolution. It can be also read as a comment on cinematic realism. What are the minimal conditions necessary to create the impression of reality? As Boissier demonstrates, in the case of a field of grass, a close-up of a plant or a stream, just a few looped frames become sufficient to produce the illusion of life and of linear time. Steven Neale describes how early film demonstrated its authenticity by representing moving nature: "What was lacking [in photographs] was the wind, the very index of real, natural movement. Hence the obsessive contemporary fascination, not just with movement, not just with scale, but also with waves and

sea spray, with smoke and spray."

381 What for early cinema was its biggest pride

and achievement — a faithful documentation of nature's movement — becomes for Boissier a subject of ironic and melancholic simulation. As the few frames are looped over and over, we see blades of grades shifting slightly back and forth, rhythmically responding to the blow of non-existent wind which is almost approximated by the noise of a computer reading data from a CD-ROM. Something else is being simulated here as well, perhaps unintentionally. As you watch the CD-ROM, the computer periodically staggers, unable to maintain consistent data rate. As a result, the images on the screen move in uneven bursts, slowing and speeding up with human-like irregularity. It is as though they are brought to life not by a digital machine but by a human operator, cranking the handle of the Zootrope a century and a half ago...

Spatial Montage

Along with taking on a loop, Flora petrinsularis can also be seen as a step towards what I will call a spatial montage. Instead of a traditional singular frame of cinema, Boissier uses two images at once, positioned side by side. This can be thought of a simplest case of a spatial montage. In general, spatial montage would