Manovich's Language of New Media made for interesting reading on my flight to the Computers & Writing Conference. Manovich seems to be coming at new media from a decidedly cinematic perspective, though he seems to have a better grasp of computers than some of other new media authors I've read. Manovich is also a former citizen of the Soviet Union, and his disillusionment with communism and general disgruntlement with the promise of media gives his treatment of new media a subtle color that adds greatly to his work. It's a dense book that resists easy summary. The book is quite dense, yet Manovich has a knack for providing memorable and well-written "punch lines" to his more abstract paragraphs that really bring his points home. Even though I hadn't seen Man with a Movie Camera, an old film that serves as a sort of allegory for the book, I still found much in Manovich that is relevant to my own work as a compositionist, rhetorician, and videogame scholar.
Manovich is quite upfront about the questions he intends to pursue. In many ways he is following the same trajectory of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation and making many of the same points. Yes, there is much of the "old media" in "new media," and the influence works both ways (i.e., TV is starting to look more like web pages, and web pages are borrowing more and more from TV). However, Manovich also wants to know what is unique about new media—in particular, how they manage to represent space and time.
One of Manovich's key points is that we shouldn’t assume (along with many game designers) that the goal of computer games is achieving photo or filmic realism (i.e., the graphics in a videogame would be indistinguishable from those of television of film). He writes, and I think quite insightfully, that "Instead of dismissing the visual strategies of early multimedia titles as the result of technological limitations, we may want to think of them as an alternative to traditional cinematic illusionism, as the beginning of digital cinema's new language" (314). I have certainly seen this as I've played through so many old graphical adventure games, with their many approaches to interfaces and representing virtual worlds. So many of my fellow gamers are convinced that the history of videogames is strictly linear, with games getting "worse" or "more primitive" as one goes back across the timeline. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 currently represent the "state of the art," whereas even the prequels to these games are poor in comparison. I've tried to challenge this belief about graphics as well as audio—things don't necessarily get better, artistically speaking, just because the technology offers us new possibilities. My Armchair Article The Rise and Fall of Game Audio is an attempt to get at this from a game-music perspective. Manovich argues that "Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality" (xxiii). It's a somewhat subtle point, but I'm right with Manovich on this one.
Another of Manovich's insights is that " Avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software" (xxxi). What he has in mind are operations like copy and paste, which seem to him to come directly from avant-garde artistic techniques. The Albertian window of the Renaissance—a "screen" with correct perspective that attempted to perfectly recreate reality—is not so important to modern computer screens as Dada. " A parallel can be established between the gradual turn of computer imaging toward representational and photorealistic … images from the end of the 1970s through the early 1980s and the similar turn toward representation painting and photography in the art world during the same period," writes Manovich (179).
According to Manovich, there are five principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcoding (20). He spends a great deal of time discussing these at length. He makes much of the fact that all computer images are broken into pixels and are those "discrete." He also emphasizes the "layered" construction of computer graphics, both in the sense of Photoshop's layering tools and the two layers of "surface appearance" and "underlying code" (289). Computer graphics are always at some level purely mathematical and thus "subject to algorithmic manipulation" (27). This point is especially significant when we think of how easy it is to manipulate digital images vs. photographic ones; our naïve faith in the honesty of the camera has been replaced by enthusiasm for Photoshopping.
He also talks about new media's "cultural layer" and "computer layer." He writes, "Strategies of working with computer data become our general cognitive strategies. At the same time, the design of software and the human-computer interface reflects a larger social logic, ideology, and imaginary of the contemporary society" (118). I just so happened to have recently downloaded a series of lectures on the history of science, where much is made of the connection between whatever the hot new technology is of an era and the way scientists construct the mind and their ideas of the natural world. In the 1600s, for instance, the big thing was the clock, so we get mechanical philosophy and metaphors about the "watchmaker." Perhaps the clock was responsible (or at least made possible) the advent of Ford or Taylorism—the assembly line. Of course, now the big thing is computers, so we get cognitive psychology. Without falling into the trap of technological determinism (new technologies cause social change), I still find it interesting to note how so much of our thinking is influenced by whatever hot new gadgets capture our imagination.
In one of his most memorable lines, Manovich's writes, "As though trying to compensate for their earlier role in making us all the same, descendents of the Jacquard loom, the Hollerith tabulator, and Zuse's cinema-computer are now working to convince us that we are all unique" (42). Manovich thinks we can try to buck this imperative by refusing to customize anything. Don't worry about changing the skin on your Winamp! In a line that reminded me strongly of the themes in Fight Club, Manovich writes, "Thus, short of using the command-line interface of UNIX, which can be thought of as an equivalent of the minimalist loft in the realm of computing, I would prefer using Microsoft Windows exactly the way it was installed at the factory instead of customizing it in the hope of expressing my "unique identity" (129). In fact, I'm surprised Manovich didn't mention Fight Club, since some of his descriptions echo the concern in that film with consumerism and the pacification of the ego.
Manovich also has some interesting things to say about narrative in games and hypertext. I have to wonder if he would consider some "wide open" computer games to be capable of narratives at all. He writes, "If the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all" (228). Though I know of no game where users click elements completely at random (except perhaps Sim Earth), there is no doubt that some games have more randomness than others and thus do not "tell a story" in the way a more linear game would do. Even though I would probably feel myself to be part of a story while playing Rogue, a text-graphic RPG with random dungeons and no storyline to speak of, I know any such narrative would be purely of my own doing. Manovich writes that "Instead of narration and description, we may be better off thinking about games in terms of narrative actions and exploration" (247). I tried hard to wrap my mind around what Manovich was getting at here. His point seems to be that the thrill of videogames has more to do with exploring the virtual world and dealing with the interface rather than the "story." He writes, "Movement through space allows the player to progress through the narrative, but it is also valuable in itself. It is a way for the player to explore the environment" (247). We can see this clearly with games like Myst and Riven, which I doubt anyone would play if they didn't have such fascinating worlds.
According to Manovich, we don't talk enough about space and how we navigate through virtual space. He writes, "The majority of navigable virtual spaces mimic existing physical reality without proposing any coherent aesthetic program" (264). This point stayed with me for awhile, and I thought about a late 90s series of games called Might and Magic which feature a first-person point of view that somehow represents what the party of four characters is seeing. At some point in these games the player gains the ability to fly, and, from then on, can move through the worlds like some sort of disembodied eye. I also though about the rather strange Rez game for the Dreamcast. Clearly there is more work to be done designing "aesthetic programs" of virtual space; I see no reason why we need to mimic meatspace or force ourselves to navigate these worlds as though we were restricted by the same physical laws that apply here.
It would be impossible for me to do any justice to this book in a brief review, and by the time I got to every interesting point, you might have done better to have bought the book. While I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone—particularly those with little interest in the history of cinema—I do appreciate its clarity and general lack of jargon or obfuscation. Even if I didn't always agree with what Manovich was saying, I could at least understand him. Some of his language is actually quite beautiful. For instance: "The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know; leaving imprints that, like computer hyperlinks, follow from one found object to another." I'm glad that I read the book and am looking forward to applying what I learned to my own works on new media.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
– 
– 
– 
Recent comments