Manovich Research Report 2

Examine how the theoretical framework that Lev Manovich presents for New Media can influence your approach to interactive multi media. Using the slide presentation format within Flash, develop and present a 10 minute slide show that clearly and convincingly proves or disproves with visual examples, headlines and spoken narration what Manovich writes in one of these direct quotes or paraphrases:

Procedure

Read: The Language of New Media, by Lev Manovich, pages 94 to 160

Select a partner that you can collaborate with on this project.

Select statement: Choose one of these statements or questions below by Manovich to be researched. Selection of the statement is on a first-come-first-serve basis. No two research groups are to investigate the same statement.

Research: Using the assigned reading, linked references and collections of pertinent interactive screen images (or other relevant images), find visual and written or vocal evidence for your interpretation of the statement, and/or your arguments for or against the statement.

Select images: Show at least ten images.

Write headlines: bullet statements for your screen. Do not use long paragraphs of text on the screen which can not be read by your viewers during the time you show the pertinent slides, while they are also listening to what you will speak or read out-loud from your narration script.

Other visuals: Develop diagrams, charts as needed to aid the understanding of your statement and/or to substantiate the statement or its evidence.

Narration: Write and type in easily readable form (14 point double spaced type) the statements to be read (or spoken from memory without direct reading) that will accommodate the screens you present as part of your slide presentation.

Present: In class, present your audio-visual observation with the evidence and proofs. The total time for your team’s presentation will be 15 minutes, with seven to 10 minutes for presenting your material and 5 minutes for group discussion.

Submit: Before 5:00 PM on the scheduled submission date for this report, submit in the appropriate folder on the Art Server both the FLA and SWF files. On the bottom section of each slide enter in 14 or 16 point type, the text that you will read during your in-class presentation. See file: Narration example.fla in the ART 383 folder on the Art Server.

Statements

1.	The era of the dynamic screen that began with cinema is now ending.
2.	The history of modern surveillance technologies that began with photography has had a major impact on computer technology and the culture it generates.
3.	A 3-D scene is much more functional than a film or video shot of the same scene, but, if it is to contain a similar level of detail, it may be much more expensive to generate.
4.	“What is the price the subject pays for the mastery of the world, focused and unified by the screen?”
5.	How does the shift from what film theorists call “primitive” to “classical” film language impact on current computer experience?
6.	Where does the cinema spectator’s identification with the camera eye impact on current interactive computer experience and where doesn’t it have a direct impact?
7.	Explain in detail with examples: “Alberti’s window, Durer’s perspectival machines, the camera obscura, photography, cinema–in all of these screen-based apparatuses, the subject has to remain immobile.”
8.	Explain and illustrate Friedberg’s claim: The progressive mobilization of he image in modernity was accompanied by the progressive imprisonment of the viewer: “as the ‘mobility’ of the gaze became more ‘virtual’–as techniques were developed to paint (and then to photograph) realistic images, as mobility was implied by changes in lighting (and then cinematography)–the observer became more immobile, passive, ready to receive the constructions of virtual reality placed in front of his or her unmoving body.”
9.	Explain and illustrate the consequences of Manovich’s statement: “Rather than disappearing, the screen threatens to take over our offices and homes.”
10.	With examples and text, explain Mainovich’s “cultural interfaces”–new sets of conventions for organizing cultural data.
11.	Using specific computer languages and their resulting products, illustrate “… from bare bones digital data to particular media objects, creative possibilities are being increasingly restricted,” while allowing us to accomplish more faster.
12.	Demonstrate with examples: “It is often claimed that the user of branching interactive program becomes its coauthor: By choosing a unique path through the elements of a work, she supposedly creates a new work. But it is also possible to see this process in a different way. If a complete work is the sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path accesses only a part of the whole. In other words, the user is activating only a part of the total work that already exists.” Could you also demonstrate successful works of co-authorship?
13.	Demonstrate with historical and current examples of recognized visual art works and images of contemporary lifestyles, that the new media process of selection “ is a new type of authorship that corresponds neither to the premodern (before Romanticism) idea of minor modification to the tradition nor to the modern (nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century) idea of a creator-genius revolting against it. It does however, fit perfectly with the logic of advanced industrial and post-industrial societies, where almost every practical act involves, choosing from some menu, catalog, or database. In fact as I have already noted, new media is the best available expression of the logic of identity in these societies–choosing values from a number of predefined menus.”
14.	Demonstrate with examples of recognized works of visual art “ In my view, this new cultural condition [postmodernism] found its perfect reflection in the emerging of software of the 1980s that privileged selection from ready-made media elements over creating them from scratch. And to a large extent it is this software that in fact made postmodernism possible.”
15.	With examples of computer code, and resulting interesting images, show how “All these filters, whether manipulating image appearance, creating a transition between moving images, or applying a filter to a piece of music, involve the same principle: the algorithmic modification of an existing media object or its parts.”
16.	With examples of computer code, and resulting images, show how “With new media, ‘malleability’ becomes ‘variability’.”
17.	With text and visual examples, demonstrate the differences between “selection” and “compositing” as defined by Manovich.
18.	With visual examples of applied “selection”, show how the following statement by Manovich applies to the visual world of new media artistic forms: “The DJ best demonstrates its new logic: selection and combination of preexistent elements. The DJ also demonstrates the true potential of this logic to create artistic forms. Finally, the example of the DJ makes it clear that selection is not an end in and of itself. The essence of the DJ’s art is the ability to mix selected elements in rich and sophisticated ways.”
19.	That evolution of MPEG allows us to trace the conceptual evolution in how we understand new media – from a traditional “stream” to a modular composition, more similar in its logic to a structural computer program than a traditional image or film.
20.	“The connection between the aesthetics of postmodernism and the operation of selection also applies to compositing. Together, these two operations simultaneously reflect and enable the postmodern practice of pastiche and quotation. They work in tandem: One operation is used to select elements from the “database of culture”; another is used to assemble them into new objects. Thus, along with selection compositing is the key operation of postmodern, or computer-based, authorship.”
21.	The instant changes in time and space characteristic of modern narrative, both in literature and cinema, are now replaced by the continuous non-interrupted first-person narrative of games and VR.
22.	Digital compositing is like these other simulation techniques used to create fake realities: fashion and makeup, realist painting, dioramas, military decoys and VR.
23.	Before the classical film period, the space of film theater and the screen space ere clearly separated, much like in theater or vaudeville. Viewers were free to interact, come and go, and maintain a psychological distance from the cinematic narrative. Actors played to the audience, and the style was strictly fontal. The composition of shots also emphasized frontality.
24.	Classical Hollywood cinema positions each viewer inside the fictional space of the narrative.