Manovich Research Report 3

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 161 to 285

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 cannot 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 (or have read) during your in-class presentation. See file: Narration example.fla in the ART 383 folder on the Art Server.

Statements

1	What do you think of Manovich’s argument that cinematographic images will dominate digital imaging because: Realistic simulations are suitable for computer-based practices of production and distribution.
2	According to Manovich, the essence of telepresence is that it is anti-presence.
3	With definitions and examples demonstrate how Manovich distinguishes between communication (teleaction) and representation.
4	According to Manovich, from the point of view of the history of the technologies of action, telepresence is a much more radical technology than virtual reality, or computer simulations in general.
5	With visual examples and defining text, show how Bazin, Comolli and Bordwell/Staiger differ from each other in their analysis of the application of cinematic realism to 3-D computer animation.
6	From the mid 1970s until the end of the 1980s, computer imaging consisted in rapid development of key algorithms for photorealistic 3-D image synthesis such as Phong shading, texture mapping, bump mapping, reflection mapping and cast shadows. During the same time we witnessed in the art world, photo realism, neo-expressionism and postmodern “simulation” photography.
7	Unberto Eco once defined a sign as something that can be used to tell a lie.
8	According to Manovich, “if a traditional photograph always points to a past event, a synthetic photograph [3-D computer rendering] points to a future event.”
9	According to Manovich, despite persistent experiments of avant-garde artists with modern technologies of real-time communication – radio in the 1920s, video in the 1970s, the Internet in the 1990s – the ability to communicate over a physical distance in real time did not seem by itself to inspire fundamentally new aesthetic principles the way film or tape recording did.
10	“Why does new media favor the database form over others? Can we explain its popularity by analyzing the specificity of the digital medium and of computer programming?”
11	Manovich argues that cinematographic images will dominate digital imaging because: They share many qualities with natural perception and are easily processed by the brain.
12	What does Soviet Socialist Realism have to do with differentiating between Jurassic Park and Terminator 2?
13	From the 1960s until late 1970s , computer imaging was mostly abstract because it was algorithm-driven and the technologies for inputting photographs into a computer were not easily accessible. Similarly, the art world was dominated by nonrepresentational movements, such as conceptual art, minimalism and performance, or at least approached representation with a strong sense of irony and distance as in the case of pop art.
14	Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio equate nature with spatial distance between the observer and the observed, and they see technologies as destroying this distance.
15	According to Manovich, the ability to “teleport” instantly from one server to another, to be able to explore a multitude of documents located on computers around the world, all from one location, is much more important than being able to perform physical actions in one remote location.
16	According to Manovich, “While modernist avant-garde theater and film directors deliberately highlighted the machinery and conventions involved in producing and keeping the illusion in their works — for instance, having actors directly address the audience or pulling away the camera to show the crew and the set — the systematic “auto-deconstruction” performed by computer objects, applications, interfaces, and hardware does not seem to distract the user from giving in to the reality effect.”
17	What is Manovich’s answer to this question and explain why he chooses to answer it: “Can we expect that cinematographic images will at some point be replaced by very different images whose appearance will be more in tune with their underlying computer-based logic?”
18	In contrast to older action-enabling representational technologies, real-time image instruments literally allow us to touch objects over distance, thus making possible their easy destruction as well. The potential aggressiveness of looking turns out to be rather more innocent than the actual aggression of electronically enabled touch.
19	According to Manovich, popular media has downplayed the concept of telepresence in favor of the concept of virtual reality.
20	Manovich calls the new realism [interactive digital media] metarealism since it incorporates its own critique inside itself. Metarealism is based on oscillation between illusion and its destruction, between immersing a viewer and directly addressing the viewer. The new metarealism demands cognitive multitasking from the user.
21	According to Manovich: “Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality.”
22	If power, according to Latour, includes the ability to manipulate resources at a distance, then teleaction provides a new and unique kind of power, such as ..........................
23	According to Manovich, the concept of an aesthetic object as an object , that is, a self-contained structure limited in space and/or time, is fundamental to all modern thinking about aesthetics.
24	In the more dominant modern tendency to read distance negatively, distance becomes responsible for creating the gap between spectator and spectacle, for separating subject from object, for putting the first in the position of transcendental mastery and rendering the second inert.
25	“What is the relationship between the database and another form that has traditionally dominated human culture–narrative?
26	“The open nature of the Web as a medium (Web pages are computer files that can always be edited) means that Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are.”
27	“As the 1990’s progressed, artists increasingly began to approach the database more critically.”
28	“While computer games do not follow a database logic, they appear to be ruled by another logic–that of the algorithm.”
29	“The more complex the data structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vice versa.”
30	“In the 1990’s, when the new role of the computer as a Universal Media Machine became apparent, already computerized societies went into a digitizing craze.”
31	“The compute age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality -> media -> data -> database.”
32	“…database and narrative are natural enemies.”
33	“In computer programming, data structures and algorithms need each other; they are equally important for a program to work. What happens is the cultural sphere? Do databases and narratives have the same status in computer culture?”
34	What are the different computer game categories? What are the differences in the types of navigable spaces in each of these categories?
35	Doom and Myst follow the psychological tensions of modern literature, theater and cinema narratives.
36	“Instead of narration and description, we may be better off thinking of games in terms of narrative actions and exploration.”
37	“In contrast to the modern novel, action-oriented games do not have that much dialog, but looking and acting are indeed the key activities performed by a player.”
38	“… active treatment of space is the exception rather than the rule in new media. Although new media objects favor the use of space for representations of all kinds, virtual spaces are most often not true spaces butt collections of separate objects. Or, to put this in a slogan: There is no space in cyberspace.”
39	Erwin Panofsky established a parallel between the history of spatial representation and the evolution of abstract thought, in which the former moves from the space of individual objects in antiquity to the representation of space as continuous and systematic in modernity.
40	“... computer-generated worlds are actually much more haptic and aggregate than optic and systematic.”
41	The common superimposition of animated characters, still images, digital movies, and other elements over a separate background defines common computer space as mostly aggregate space rather than optic and systematic space.
42	“ ... although 3-D computer-generated virtual worlds are usually rendered in linear perspective, they are really collections of separate objects, unrelated to each other. In view of this, the common argument that 3-D computer simulations return us to Renaissance perspective and therefore, from the viewpoint of twentieth-century abstraction, should be considered regressive, turns out to be ungrounded.”
43	“ ...we may connect the American ideology of democracy with its paranoid fear of hierarchy and centralized control with the flat structure of the Web, where every page exists on the same level of importance as any other and where any two sources connected through hyper linking have equal weight.”
44	“… focus on the viewer offers an important lesson for new media designers, who often forget that what they are designing is not an object in itself but a viewer’s experience in time and space.”
45	What do you think of Manovich's contrasts between the Navigator and the Explorer? Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur in contrast with nineteenth century American writers James Fenimore Cooper’s and Mark Twain’s adventurer? How do they relate to computer navigation?