[iDC] Lev Manovich on Remix Culture

[Brian Holmes]

Manovich is always an interesting guy and maybe one has to 
forgive his leaden techno-determinism and insistence on 
media copulating in the petri dish, etc, as defense 
mechanisms in the face of the triumphant American juggernaut 
- which, after all, looks pretty damn deterministic 
nowadays, and not only if your perspective is Eastern European!

What I find valuable in the "Info Aesthetics" project is 
another restatement of the thesis that the current 
multimedia toolkit automates the formal inventions of the 
20s vanguards. This is true, and one of the great historical 
ironies is that we are all bathed in a shifting 
sense-surround of manipulation techniques based on the very 
visual tropes of montage and jump-cut editing that were 
supposed to be communist and emancipatory. However, unlike 
Manovich, I think that the carry-over from the 20s (and then 
again fron the 60s) is best seen as a deep historical 
ambiguity. To ignore the way that long-term social dynamics 
influence the media mix is to forget the lessons of vanguard 
philologists from the 20s, Bakhtin for instance. There is a 
heteroglossia of new media, its language is complex and 
divided, full of latent potential. The traces of generations 
from all across the "color spectrum" who struggled to carve 
out some space of possibility in the technics of capitalist 
civilization now stare at us from every commercial 
application; and like Benjaminian media flaneurs we can 
embrace those frozen gazes if we want to, and make them into 
departure points for a new conversation. If only we have the 
strength of desire to somehow fly in the face of the inevitable.

best, BH



Trebor Scholz wrote:

 > At the occasion of the exhibition "Media Miniature" at 
Pratt Manhattan
 > Gallery Lev Manovich introduced a new essay from his 
upcoming book
 > "Infoaesthetics."
 >
 > <http://www.pratt.edu/news/popup.php?story=03.02.
 > 
06_Pratt_Manhattan_Gallery_Exhibition_Explores_Diminutive_Scale.html>
 >
 > <http://www.manovich.net/IA/index.html>
 >
 > Quickly going back and forth between a projected myriad 
of open browser
 > windows he presented his notion of remix culture.
 >
 > Manovich anthropomorphized the evolution of new media. He 
delineated a
 > map of the development of new media and linked stages in 
that trajectory
 > to the computerized simulation of physical objects. His 
core suggestion,
 > carefully constructed, was the emergence of hybrid media 
emerging out of
 > remix culture. Multimedia for Manovich is an inadequate 
concept that
 > defines media as standing next to each other. Today, "the 
computer
 > becomes a petri dish in which different media mate, 
hybridize, mix.
 > Media come together and create offspring. Meta media² 
(roughly quoted
 > from memory). Manovich called himself a biologist of new 
media observing
 > and reflecting this process. In his visual presentation 
he quickly
 > switched back and forth between art examples and 
commercial business
 > applications such as corporate promotional MTV-type video 
clips,
 > maps.a9.com or mappr.com.
 >
 > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia>
 > <http://mappr.com/>
 >
 > A9 maps shows a video of the location next to the map of 
the searched
 > spot. Examples demonstrated included the joining of 
video, drawing, and
 > 3D objects. Hybrid aesthetics. Manovich indeed treated 
the computer
 > programs and hybrid media forms like lab test animals. 
"We are not yet
 > techno-deterministic enough..." he said.
 >
 > In the question and answer session several problems were 
posed. Instead
 > of phrasing his media historical map as one aspect of the 
current media
 > landscape, he argued for these phenomena as the evolution 
of new media
 > in which one technological development informs the next. The
 > intentionally provocative formalism at play here leaves 
several facets
 > out of sight. But Manovich's argument undoubtedly sheds 
light on one
 > detail of the current media development.
 > Someone in the audience questioned the speaker's 
decisively formalist
 > approach dissecting the surface of the described media 
mix without
 > looking at the algorithmic workings of these processes. A 
perhaps
 > conscious blind spot of Manovich's suggestion, already 
evident in
 > "Language of New Media," was that "old" and emerging 
media are somewhat
 > described in a social vacuum. The idea of the isolated 
petri dish in
 > which one media copulates with the other pushes that 
notion to its
 > logical extreme. At the talk the question was posed if 
new media are not
 > conditioned by both, societal driving forces (e.g. the 
cold war leading
 > to the invention of the Internet) and the 
cross-pollination of one
 > technological development by previous technological 
findings. Manovich's
 > response to this question was "Can you prove that social 
factors were at
 > play?" Manovich¹s historical trajectory was also drawn in 
a straight
 > line as if one occurrence just leads directly to the next.
 >
 > A second comment was concerned with another aspect, 
central to today's
 > media panorama. Sociable media. Manovich's talk did not 
address the way
 > in which the users of technologies shape their 
development through their
 > use. Our devices are shaped by us and they in turn shape 
us. The
 > participatory characteristics of the current culture of 
sociable web
 > media as well as physical computing were absent from 
Manovich's mental
 > media history map.
 > None of the mentioned concerns would have been all that 
pertinent if
 > Manovich's argument would have been phrased as a 
micro-history of new
 > media, a snapshot of one aspect, instead of a grand 
representation of
 > the history of new media at large.
 >
 > People left Manovich's talk vividly debating, inspired, 
and provoked to
 > position themselves.
 > -Trebor
 >
 > 
<http://collectivate.net/journalisms/2006/4/9/lev-manovich-on-remix-
 > culture.html>
 >
 > _______________________________________________
 > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed 
Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)
 > iDC at bbs.thing.net
 > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
 >
 > List Archive:
 > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
 >
 >
 >
 >






Trebor Scholz wrote:
> At the occasion of the exhibition "Media Miniature" at Pratt Manhattan
> Gallery Lev Manovich introduced a new essay from his upcoming book
> "Infoaesthetics."
> 
> <http://www.pratt.edu/news/popup.php?story=03.02.
> 06_Pratt_Manhattan_Gallery_Exhibition_Explores_Diminutive_Scale.html>
> 
> <http://www.manovich.net/IA/index.html>
> 
> Quickly going back and forth between a projected myriad of open browser
> windows he presented his notion of remix culture.
> 
> Manovich anthropomorphized the evolution of new media. He delineated a
> map of the development of new media and linked stages in that trajectory
> to the computerized simulation of physical objects. His core suggestion,
> carefully constructed, was the emergence of hybrid media emerging out of
> remix culture. Multimedia for Manovich is an inadequate concept that
> defines media as standing next to each other. Today, "the computer
> becomes a petri dish in which different media mate, hybridize, mix.
> Media come together and create offspring. Meta media² (roughly quoted
> from memory). Manovich called himself a biologist of new media observing
> and reflecting this process. In his visual presentation he quickly
> switched back and forth between art examples and commercial business
> applications such as corporate promotional MTV-type video clips,
> maps.a9.com or mappr.com.
> 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia>
> <http://mappr.com/>
> 
> A9 maps shows a video of the location next to the map of the searched
> spot. Examples demonstrated included the joining of video, drawing, and
> 3D objects. Hybrid aesthetics. Manovich indeed treated the computer
> programs and hybrid media forms like lab test animals. "We are not yet
> techno-deterministic enough..." he said.
> 
> In the question and answer session several problems were posed. Instead
> of phrasing his media historical map as one aspect of the current media
> landscape, he argued for these phenomena as the evolution of new media
> in which one technological development informs the next. The
> intentionally provocative formalism at play here leaves several facets
> out of sight. But Manovich's argument undoubtedly sheds light on one
> detail of the current media development. 
> 
> Someone in the audience questioned the speaker's decisively formalist
> approach dissecting the surface of the described media mix without
> looking at the algorithmic workings of these processes. A perhaps
> conscious blind spot of Manovich's suggestion, already evident in
> "Language of New Media," was that "old" and emerging media are somewhat
> described in a social vacuum. The idea of the isolated petri dish in
> which one media copulates with the other pushes that notion to its
> logical extreme. At the talk the question was posed if new media are not
> conditioned by both, societal driving forces (e.g. the cold war leading
> to the invention of the Internet) and the cross-pollination of one
> technological development by previous technological findings. Manovich's
> response to this question was "Can you prove that social factors were at
> play?" Manovich¹s historical trajectory was also drawn in a straight
> line as if one occurrence just leads directly to the next.
> 
> A second comment was concerned with another aspect, central to today's
> media panorama. Sociable media. Manovich's talk did not address the way
> in which the users of technologies shape their development through their
> use. Our devices are shaped by us and they in turn shape us. The
> participatory characteristics of the current culture of sociable web
> media as well as physical computing were absent from Manovich's mental
> media history map. 
> 
> None of the mentioned concerns would have been all that pertinent if
> Manovich's argument would have been phrased as a micro-history of new
> media, a snapshot of one aspect, instead of a grand representation of
> the history of new media at large.
> 
> People left Manovich's talk vividly debating, inspired, and provoked to
> position themselves. 
> 
> -Trebor
> 
> <http://collectivate.net/journalisms/2006/4/9/lev-manovich-on-remix-
> culture.html>
> 
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at bbs.thing.net
> http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> 
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> 
> 
>