Jorge Luis Borges (left) Roland Barthes (right)
Present one written text (the more academic the better) from your own academic
background. Contextualize it to our coursework.
In thiscrazy computer age, digital culture has come full circle and has started to influence mainstream culture. Manovich claims that all new media exists somewhere on a continuum between database and narrative, with database front-ends such as MySQL at one extreme, and interactive 3D environments at the other.
The age of linear media, characterized by narrative forms such as film and literature, is coming to an end. In its place, the database will emerge as the primary cultural form of the twenty-first century. This is the contention of Lev Manovich in his book, The Language of New Media. As proof of this, he shares an anecdote about walking into a small boutique in New York and buying a wallet with a Nintendo controller on the front. This, he explains, is an example of digital culture emerging in mainstream, traditional culture. And since, as we will see, digital media is entirely based on the database, the database has clearly become an influential cultural form. Working as a database programmer at a small web firm in downtown Manhattan, this idea seemed quite romantic to me. Was I somehow contributing to some great cultural revolution, sitting there at my ash-covered desk, drinking way too much coffee and writing SQL queries for web applications? Was I on the cutting edge of cultural development? Probably not. But as we will see, in Manovich's view of new media, I was indeed playing with the fundamental stuff of new media; the bricks with which all new media objects are built.
The role of the database is only one topic that Manovich tackles in his book, working mostly to position new media within the framework of traditional media forms. He does so by drawing heavily on examples from film studies, and how the world dealt with the introduction of this other revolutionary media form. This is typical of new media studies, however, with many theorists coming originally from cinema. And in some ways this approach was successful for Manovich. His theories are insightful and tidy, but it doesn't always seem that he has a deep understanding of the medium, which sometimes makes his book (which was published in 2000) seem dated, as if he is stuck in an early-90's mindset, where data access was paramount, and computers were thought of as little more than glorified filing cabinets. Some say that this view produced what is called "shovelware" - software heavy on static assets such as pre-recorded sounds and movies, and light on procedural generation - the product of a time when developers were so impressed by the storage capacity of the CD-ROM that their primary goal became to use every one of the 600MB. Ironically, this period was sandwiched between two periods where there was much more emphasis on the "thinking" ability of computers (pre-CD-ROM and today), as developers focused more on the algorithmic and less on the data side of the affordances of the computer.
But Manovich embraces the data-heavy approach to new media and sings its praises somewhat convincingly - at least for someone with little media studies background such as myself, way back in my sophomore year of college. This mentality can also be seen in his ideas about databases, where it seems he is not interested in the computer's ability recognize new and interesting connections and relationships between the data, so much as the speed with which the computer can access, sort, and reorganize the data. This oversight could be due in part to the fact that, although the internet had been up and running for about six years by the time the book was published, Manovich fails to engage this undeniably essential part of the topic. Without considering the largest, decentralized, constantly growing database that has ever existed - the Web - it is no wonder such issues never found their way into this chapter.
And finally, some critics have argued that Manovich ignores many political issues, such as “commodification, privacy, enhanced reproduction, cloned trees, genetically engineered food, race, gender, age, class and geographical location” (Scholz), which also play a large part in the acceptance and integration of new media into our lives - a topic that he claims to cover. But despite all of these shortcomings, Manovich's ideas are still generally respected and definitely useful, if not as reflections on the current state of media, at least as a picture of the way things once were.
Manovich begins his discussion of databases by pointing out what he considers the most popular kind of database in existence - the CD-ROM encyclopedia - which, if they are still produced today, can't be anywhere near as popular as their web-based counterparts. He points to their ability to accommodate multiple data types, the speed of access, and multiple indexes as defining qualities of databases that are exemplified by these CD-ROMs. For instance, a typical entry in a CD-ROM encyclopedia will have text, audio, and video, it will be searchable by topic, keyword, chronological order, etc., and it the access speed will be limited only by the hardware, which, even at the dawn of the computer age, was significantly faster than thumbing through your Worldbook. Of all of these qualities, he explores the issue of indexing most, citing the case of pornography websites, where the same few hundred images are used and reused on multiple sites, so that collectively, these sites have more indexes than content. This situation recalls a story by Jorge Luis Borges about a kingdom of cartographers who created a map so detailed that it was the size of the entire kingdom, and covered the entire land when unfurled. Manovich suggests that we have moved well beyond this, and the map has become larger than the land, which raises the question, what, then, it being indexed? The content or the indexers?
Jorge Luis Borges (left) Roland Barthes (right)
It is exactly this quality of having more than one index that makes the database the perfect foundation for new media objects, which Manovich defines as a database of content with one or more interfaces. Without the ability to access and organize the data in different ways, it would not be possible to create more than one interface. For instance, in Alex Galloway's project, "Carnivore", he provides an application that streams data about network to a client. These clients can take any number of forms, including Flash applications, Java applets, C programs, and Director executables - all of which are available in template form on the Carnivore site. The artists use these templates to create their own visualizations of the network traffic, highlighting certain relationships between or aspects of the data. This makes Carnivore PE the perfect new media object, as it explicitly encourages the development of new interfaces to the data that it provides.
This quality can also be illustrated by the idea of "syntagm and paradigm", described by Ferdinand de Saussure in the late 19th century in his linguistics studies, and later adopted by Roland Barthes in the 1970s for his work in semiotics. In this system, a syntagm is defined as “A sequence of words in a particular syntactic relationship to one another”, such as any valid English sentence. The paradigm, then, is defined as the entire space of possibilities for such a construction, which could be defined as "all grammatically correct English sentences". Likewise, if you consider the song "Pappa Don't Preach" by Madonna to be the syntagm, you could define the paradigm as any song that Madonna has, or could ever make, based on the musical grammar of Madonna songs.
Manovich brings this up to illustrate another way of defining new media in relation to traditional, non-interactive media. In traditional media, the syntagm is present and the paradigm is implied, meaning that there is one set object among a set of imaginable, but non-existent possibilities. When you visit a museum and look at a statue, you are seeing the one manifestation of that statue that the artist created. However, with new media objects, the paradigm is present, and the syntagm is implied. As an example, take any video game - say, Pac Man. By itself, the game is nothing but a collection of instructions that define what could happen in any given game. Think of this as a sort of matrix of possibilities, or a database. When the game is actually played, the player chooses one path through this matrix of possibilities, and the syntagm is created.
In the case of new media objects, Manovich claims that the syntagm takes the form of a narrative. That is, as the user chooses a path through the database, a narrative is created. But not just any path can be considered a narrative. Searching for a random word on Google and clicking on links is making a path through a database, but few would consider it a narrative. To create a narrative, there must be several elements, and for these, Manovich looks to Mieke Bal, who says that all narratives must have an actor, narrator, text, story, fibula, and a series of connected events caused or experienced by the actors. Which brings us to the job of the new media artist. Because it's not enough to simply provide the database to the user. The true new media artist will ensure that the users path through the database becomes a narrative, complete with all of the elements listed above.
But if the database is supposed to be the herald of some new digital age, with new technologies and a new premiere cultural form, then why are we right back where we started, at narrative? Well, it seems that, at least for cultural (read: entertainment) applications, the narrative still holds on to the first place ribbon, and true applications of the database form are only truly accepted in work-related fields. In entertainment (which, after all, is what we're really interested in here), the database does provide for some new and exciting experiences, such as interaction, but when all is said and done, we are still looking for a linear story to make us laugh and cry. Manovich admits that there are some media that attempt to avoid linear narrative, and talks briefly about what he calls the Database Filmmakers.
The Database Filmmakers, rather than using narrative to order their shots, whose "logic" is derived from a screenplay, use some other form of logic which usually relates the clips to each other. Perhaps the best example of this approach is John Witney, who systematically explored the transformation of geometric shapes using an analog computer, and archived these experiments. Peter Greenaway is another well-known database filmmaker who plays with non-chronological narratives, and wanted to see film catch up with literature in its experimentation with time. And finally, Dziga Vertov, who's "Man With the Movie Camera" is often held up as the ultimate example of films that use a logic other than narrative logic. But, this doesn't change the fact that most popular entertainment media, both new and traditional, still have linear narrative at their core. So, to describe the relationship between database and narrative, Manovich hauls out some Computer Science terminology.
In every freshman CS course, students are taught about the dualism of data and algorithm. In object-oriented programming, for instance, an object is defined as some data, and the methods (algorithms) that can manipulate that data. This is a useful distinction because it aids in the abstraction process - an important one in programming. Without the data, the algorithm is useless because it has nothing to manipulate, and without the algorithm, the data is useless because it cannot be used. They are mutually exclusive, and yet dependant. This puts them at opposite ends of some spectrum, which Manovich labels active and passive.
A similar dichotomy exists between database and narrative. Without some mechanism for creating a path, the database is useless. But without the database, any methods for traversing it are equally useless. Manovich says that all new media objects are located somewhere on the continuum of database and narrative, where at one end lies a pure data-access application such as Yahoo, and at the other end is a purely narrative-driven, immersive environment, such as Myst. And so we see our connection to 3D Virtual Environments. Essentially, Manovich sees 3D virtual environments as the anthesis of the database - still as dependant on database as the database is on narrative, but with as little emphasis on data retrieval as possible. Thus, "if CD-ROMs and Web databases are cultural manifestations of one half of [the computer ontology] - data structures - then computer games are manifestations of the other half - algorithms."
Another interesting way to look at these virtual environments is as an interface to spatial data. In this sense, it is useful to think of 3D development environments such as Maya as a type of WYSIWYG editor, where the user edits spatial data, such as the position in 3D space of a polygon, the size of this cube, and which texture is mapped onto a particular polygon. Unlike Photoshop, where you are editing actual pixels and there is no additional layer of interpretation, in Maya you are writing data that is interpreted in real-time when the environment is rendered. This is an important distinction to make because it is the difference between creating a database and creating a traditional art object, such as a painting. Similarly, when one creates a web page in Dreamweaver, the HTML that is created can be read in any number of ways; a web-browser is only one possible interface. In this sense, it could be useful for 3D developers to think of their work as creating a database of both spatial and other media.>
Manovich, Lev. "The Database."The Language of New Media. The MIT Press: Cambidge, Massachusetts, 2001. 213-243.
Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media - Voiceover - Brief Article. Afterimage, May, 2002. by Trebor Scholz. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_6_29/ai_8713045