blinded with science

Lev Manovich, master coiner of phrases like Flash Generation and author of the widely read The Language of New Media (2001), presented a preview of his soon-to-be-released DVD Mission to Earth (MIT Press) at the Chelsea Art Museum yesterday. Asked to summarize Manovich's contribution to the field in one or two sentences, Assistant Professor at UiO Andrew Morrison wrote that "Lev Manovich's work consistently evinces diverse knowledge of software, cinematic discourse and digital media arts in proposing ways in which new forms, structures and expressions coalese. His focus on sampling and looping in 'data-art' as he terms it have provided core concepts for approaching the recombinatorial character of creative and emergent artistic expression." In conjunction with Manovich's talk, a panel that included new media curators Barabara London from MoMA and Christiane Paul from Whitney discussed technology and art for an audience of about 100 people.

Manovich (who looks nothing like this picture of Thomas Dolby) has labeled the genre of his new DVD "soft cinema"; unlike film or other analogue media, custom software generates variable layouts, text scrolls, music, and video clips in real time from a large database to coincide with the story's plot as it is read aloud by a narrator. In contrast to the narrative (the story of a woman sent to earth twenty years ago on an exploratory mission from another planet), which is the same and repeated every 15 minutes, the "software generates the aesthetic" by making more or less random selections from the video database for each sequence. Different versions of every scene thus appear in different windows on the screen each time the narrative is heard, allowing the subject, as his collaborator put it, to "construct his or her own meaning" (sorry Lev, but that cliché provoked the title here). This reflects the contemporary status of identity in a global, consumer society, according to Manovich, conceived as a constant stream of intersections - or samplings - from a global set of databases.

This implies a real shift, Manovich argues, from the metaphor of identity as a montage; although the genre montage bears resemblance to soft cinema, it is conceptually and structurally quite different; no longer a composite of disparate elements, identity in today's society actually "functions" differently. In other words, like all visual representations in new media art, there is a front and back.

Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is not included in subtitles in the actual work, and while soft cinema may be algorithmically generated it is also deceptively linear because of the ordered system of narrative. This explains why (some)"new media theory" is interesting while new media works often are not. As Christianne Paul commented, if she had walked into the gallery and watched the film for a few minutes, she would have walked out thinking "nice movie." She also would have missed the whole point, because it is the concept realized in the technology - the relation of coincidence to narrative that represents a new kind of logic - that is the significance of the work.

OK, it is interesting to explore connections between narrative, meaning and the shifting visual representations in this work. But perhaps more importantly, it points out how new media works demand a certain knowledge about process, and how that knowledge can make a fundamental difference in how a work is appreciated or understood. This knowledge about how to look, as Baudrillard and others have pointed out, is equated with social power in our digital culture. Another interesting take on the relationship between technology and historically developed ways of making and seeing is explored by Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer.

Other aspects of technology in art were discussed at the event as well, such as artists working with the politics of metadatabases and archives, and the possibility of making representations where NO information is withheld. A lively and interesting discussion that lasted almost three! hours, I left with the feeling that there was lots more to be said. All in all, a great way to spend a rainy Saturday New York afternoon.