Lev Manovich

The Poetics of Augmented Space

This article discusses how people experience spatial forms when they are filled in with dynamic and rich multimedia information; spaces such as shopping or entertainment areas or other spaces where various information can be accessed wirelessly. The author calls such spaces ‘augmented space’: the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user. The article asks whether this form becomes irrelevant and ‘invisible’ or if people end up with a new experience in which the spatial and information layers are equally important. The author also discusses the general dynamic between spatial form and information and how this might function differently in today’s computer culture. Throughout the article, augmentation is reconceptualized as an idea and cultural and aesthetic practice rather than as technology. Various practices in professional and vernacular architecture and built environments, cinema, 20th-century art and media art are discussed in terms of augmentation.

Media After Software

While earlier reproduction technologies such as woodblock printing, moveable type printing, lithography, and photography represented media in ways accessible to bare senses, the media technologies of the late 19th century abandoned these formats in favor of an electrical signal. Simultaneously, they also introduced a fundamentally new dimension of media – interface (i.e. the ways to represent and control the signal). And this in its turn changed how media functions – its ‘properties’ were no longer solely contained in the data but were now also dependent on the interfaces provided by technology manufacturers. The shift to digital data and media software a hundred years later extends this principle further. With all types of data now encoded as sets of numbers, they can only be efficiently accessed by users via software applications. As a result, the ‘properties’ of digital media (how it can be edited, shared, and analyzed) are now defined by the particular software as opposed to solely being contained in the actual content (i.e. digital files).

Database as a genre of new media

After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate — database. Why does new media favour database form over others? Can we explain ist popularity by analysing the specificity of the digital medium and of computer programming? What is the relationship between database and another form, which has traditionally dominated human culture — narrative? In addressing these questions, I discuss the connection between computers ontology — the way software represents the world — and the new cultural forms privileged by computer culture such as database. I propose that computerisation of culture involves projection of two fundamental parts of computer software — data structures and algorithms — onto the cultural sphere. Thus CD-ROMs and Web databases are cultural manifestations of one half of this ontology — data structures; while new media narratives are manifestations of the second part — algorithms. I conclude by proposing that in computer culture database and narrative do not have the same status. Given that on the level of data organisation most new media objects are databases, it is not surprising that on the level of form database also dominates new media culture.

Cultural Analytics in Large-Scale Visualization Environments

Researchers can use a large-scale collaborative digital workspace combined with visual analysis techniques to progressively develop and refine hypotheses to apply in gaining new insights into large, digital image collections.

The engineering of vision and the aesthetics of computer art

he rise of modern image industries, such as colnputer graphics, human factors research or computer vision, can be seen as a part of the shift to the postindustrial society of perceptual labor. In contemporary society, human vision became the key instrument of labor as the channel of communication between human and machine. If industry aims to make human vision as productive, as efficient as possible, the computer artist, in contrast, can be defined as a designer of bad interfaces: interfaces which are inelYmient, wasteful, confusing.

Significance of visual interfaces in institutional and user-generated databases with category structures

In this paper we visually explore the data structure of two different visual platforms: the database behind the social environment of a social networking site, and the intricate infrastructure of a research institute for preservation of deposited datasets. We argue that visual analytics of metadata of collections can be used in multiple ways: for the backend users, to inform the archive about structure and growth of its collection; to foster collection strategies; and to check metadata consistency, for the end-users, to give an overview to the collections, and thus to generate more awareness of the collection and its metadata, to give the enduser extra information to contextualize the entirety of the archive. We conclude with a discussion on how text based search combined with different type of visually enhanced browsing improves data access, navigation, and reuse in these two radically different contexts.

Software is the Message

Did McLuhan ‘miss’ computers? In his major work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) the word ‘computer’ appears 21 times in the book, and a few of those references are to ‘computer age’. However, despite these references, his awareness of computers did not have a significant effect on his thinking. The book contains two dozens chapters each devoted to a particular medium – which for McLuhan range from writing and roads to cars and television. (The last chapter ‘Automation’ addresses the role of computers for industrial control, but not its other roles.)

AFTER EFFECTS, OR VELVET REVOLUTION

This article is a first part of the series devoted to the analysis of the new hybrid visual language of moving images that emerged during the period 1993–1998. Today this language dominates our visual culture. It can be seen in commercials, music videos, motion graphics, TV graphics, and other types of short non-narrative films and moving image sequences being produced around the world by the media professionals including companies, individual designers and artists, and students. This article analyzes a particular software application which played the key role in the emergence of this language: After Effects. Introduced in 1993, After Effects was the first software designed to do animation, compositing, and special effects on the personal computer. Its broad effect on moving image production can be compared to the effects of Photoshop and Illustrator on photography, illustration, and graphic design. This analysis is used to support the author’s theory that the logic of the new visual language is that of remixability. Normally remixing involves combining content – for example, different music tracks. In this case what gets remixed is not only the content of different media or simply their aesthetics, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, languages, and assumptions. United within the common software environment, cinematography, animation, computer animation, special effects, graphic design, and typography have come to form a new metamedium. A work produced in this new metamedium can use all techniques that were previously unique to these different media, or any subset of these techniques.

Ten Key Texts on Digital Art: 1970-2000

This article highlights ten major written works that reflect the brief history of digital art. The lack of public knowledge on digital art is largely due to a lack of standard text. While seen by most as a relatively new art form, several exhibitions are mentioned here dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, all of which have had a major impact on the development of the field. Authors and editors chosen for the list include Gene Youngblood, Jasia Reichardt, Cynthia Goodman, Friedrich Kittler, Michael Benedikt, Minna Tarkka, Peter Weibel, Espen Aarseth, and Ulf Poschardt.

Cultural analytics research environment

Our team of specialists in visual arts, communication, cognitive science, and structural engineering produces interactive visualizations of cultural flows, patterns, and relationships based on analysis of large sets of data comparable in size to datasets used in sciences.