Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is an author of books on new media theory, professor in Computer Science program at City University of New York, Graduate Center, U.S. and visiting professor European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Manovich's research and teaching focuses on digital humanities, new media art and theory, and software studies His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and translated into eight languages. According to two reviewers, this book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject" and "it places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan". Manovich's new book Software Takes Command was published in 2013 by Bloomsbury and also released under a Creative Commons license.

Biography

Manovich was born in Moscow, USSR, where he studied painting, architecture, computer science, and semiotics. After spending several years practicing fine arts, he moved to New York in 1981. His interests shifted from still image and physical 3D space to virtual space, moving images, and the use of computers in media. While in New York he received an M.A. in Experimental Psychology (NYU, 1988) and additionally worked professionally in 3D computer animation from 1984 to 1992. He then went on to receive Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester 1993, under the supervision of Mieke Bal. His Ph.D. dissertation The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s.

Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include Little Movies, the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history, and Anna and Andy, a streaming novel (2000). He is also well known for his insightful articles, including "New Media from Borges to HTML" and "Database as Symbolic Form". In the latter article, he explains reasons behind the popularity of databases, while juxtaposing it to concepts such as algorithms and narrative. His works have been included in many key international exhibitions of new media art. In 2002 ICA in London presented his mini-retrospective under the title Lev Manovich: Adventures of Digital Cinema.

Manovich has been teaching new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design Helsinki. In 1993, students of his digital movie making classes at the UCLA Lab for New Media founded the Post-Cinematic Society which organized some of the first digital movie festivals based on his ideas about new media such as database cinema.

Manovich's latest book is Software Takes Command (2013). It is part of the series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, founded by series editor Francisco J. Ricardo. In 2007 Manovich founded Software Studies Initiative to develop methods and software for the analysis and visualization of massive cultural data sets.

His latest major digital art project is Soft Cinema which was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002–03; traveling to Helsinki, Finland, and Tokyo, Japan, in April 2003. "At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors". Each Soft Cinema run offers a unique viewing experience for the audience; the software works with a set of parameters that allow for almost every part of a film to change.

On November 8, 2012, it was announced that Lev Manovich would be joining the faculty of the City University of New York's Graduate Center in January 2013, with the goal of enhancing the graduate schools' digital initiatives. He will teach the course "Big Data, Visualization and Digital Humanities", which traces how the explosive growth of social media, combined with the digitization of artifacts by libraries and museums, opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of cultural processes. Students will be introduced to popular open-source tools for data analysis and visualization of large sets of images and video.

In the press release announcing the appointment, Manovich expressed excitement about the digital initiatives and grants going on at Graduate Center, and the tremendous pool of intellectual talent in its students and faculty. He also looks forward to collaboration both within the school and with the community of artists, designers, media and software developers in NYC that have the potential to transform how we look at the world at large. The research at Manovich’s Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at the University of California, San Diego, will be the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), to be housed at the Graduate Center.

Research interests

New media

In his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Manovich describes the general principles underlying new media:

• Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data
• Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently
• Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically
• Variability: new media objects exist in multiple versions
• Transcoding: The logic of the computer influences how we understand and represent ourselves.

In "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001), Manovich describes the eight definitions of "new media":

1. New Media versus Cyberculture
2. New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software
4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology
6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies
7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

Database as a Symbolic Form

In 1998, Lev Manovich published an article "Database as a Symbolic Form". Manovich contrasts database and narrative forms, pointing out that the web tends to privilege databases over narratives. Manovich uses the example of Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, and describes it as "the most important example of database imagination in modern media art". Manovich also discusses the concepts of paradigm and syntagm and explains how new media reverses their original relationship. Instead of syntagm being explicit and paradigm implicit, the paradigm (database) is given material existence and the syntagm (narrative) is de-materialized.

Cultural analytics

Cultural analytics refers to the use of computational methods for the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows. The term "cultural analytics" was coined by Lev Manovich in 2007. His Software Studies Initiative, founded the same year, focused on a particular part of analytics paradigm using digital image processing and visualization for the analysis of large image and video collections.

The lab's research is guided by the following questions:

• How do we navigate massive visual collections which may contain billions of images?
• How do we research interactive media processes and experiences (evolution of web design, playing a video game, etc.)?
• What new theoretical concepts and models we need to deal with the new scale of born-digital culture?
• How can the use of computational techniques and massive cultural data sets help develop cultural theory for the 21st century?

The lab is developing techniques and software and applying them to progressively larger image and video sets to analyze massive cultural data sets and flows. The techniques can also be used in digital humanities, art history, cinema studies, game studies, media studies, ethnography, exhibition design, and other fields.

Works

• Soft Cinema 2002-2005.
• Software Takes Command. Released under CC license, November 20, 2008.
• The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). http://www.manovich.net/LNM/index.html
• Database as a Symbolic Form (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998). http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/Database_as_symbolic_form.htm
• Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993).
• The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computer (University of Rochester, 1993).
• Little Movies Vol.1: microcinema: cinema for the early Net 1994-1997
• Freud-Lissitzky Navigator: Computer Game History Browser, 1999
• Anna and Andy: a Streaming Novel Emotional Movie Engine, 1999–2000
• FROZE 01 curated for Electronic Orphanage, 2001
• DATA BEAUTIFUL for Mapping the Web Infome exhibition, 2001

See also

• Cultural analytics
• Data mining
• Data Visualization
• Digital humanities
• New Media Art
• Electronic literature

External links

• Manovich.net, official homepage
• Software Studies Iniative, the research lab directed by Manovich
• Lev Manovich faculty profile at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee Biography, bibliography, and video lectures
• GENERATION FLASH a talk given by Lev Manovich at the Electronic Language International Festival Symposium/August/2003
• Abstraction and Complexity
• The Language of New Media (MIT Press/Leonardo Books)
• softcinema.org, film project
• Essay: Database as a Symbolic Form
• Essay: New Media from Borges to HTML
• Essay:Database as a Genre of New Media
• The Engineering of Vision Constructivism to Computers
• Video of lecture given by Manovich at The Computational Turn (Swansea) (2010)
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