The New Media Reader Intro #2 Summary

In Lev Manovich's "New Media from Borges to HTML," Manovich discusses the history of the new media field. It wasn't until the laste 80s that the field really began to develop in mainstream culture. New institutions dedicated to new media were popping up across all Europe at that time. Japan and Europe were the centers of new media technology where festivals, installations, and advancements in the field were being made. Although the technology was developed in the U.S., it did not really become used here until the 1990s. Even then, it was slowly assimilated into the art world over time. This was due in part to the fact of the U.S. having very low federal funding for the development and technologic display of such digital new media creations. Also the U.S. was still caught up in the idea of artistic works being one-of-a-kind, tangible creations of single artists. In the mid-90s, universities in the western states began to introduce digital new media programs into their institutions.

Software design has had a great impact upon modern art. With the development of computer software, artists are able to utilize such technology in augmenting their artistic visions producing final works of art that would not have been made possible if it were not for computer software. Additionally, it is the computer programmers, the software developers. the graphic artists, web designers, cumputer game designers, DJs, etc., that are the true artists and innovators of our time.


When it comes to the question of "What is the new media?," Manovich provides 8 propositions:

The first distinguishes between new media and cyberculture. New media is centered on the new cultural phenomena enabled by computer technology, whereas cyberculture is primarily concerned with social networking within web communities.

The second proposition is that new media is a computer technology that is used as a means of distribution. It is hard to define new media in this way because it would have to be updated as more and more parts of culture come to use computer technology for distribution, most forms of media will come to use computer technology for distribution causing new media to take on a general rather than specific meaning, and it does not provide us with any information regarding how computer distribution can affect how media objects are perceived.

The third answer to the question is that new media is digital data that is controlled by "cultural" software. In other words, new media is broken down to mere digital data which can than be manipulated and changed to create different versions of that orginal data.

The fourth answer defines new media as a mix between existing cultural conventions and the conventions of software. New media takes old cultural data which are visual representations of human life and new data which is numerical data and then combines the two to produce new media manifestations such as image-maps, animated icons, etc..

The fifth definition proposes that new media is the aesthetics that accompanies the early stage of every new modern media and communication technology. According to this idea new media is every technolological advance in media and communication in history. Therefore, in the early stages, photography, film, telephones, and t.v., were all considered new media. When thinking about new media as a recurrence of aesthetic ideas over history rather than the computer-based technological advancements being achieved in recent times and today, it cannot be useful unless all aspects of history are studied alongside technologic innovation.

The sixth defines new media as a faster execution of algorithms preveiously executed manually or through other technologies. New media simply carries out the steps neccessary in accomplishing particular tasks that would take humans much longer to carry out without the use of new media. When thinking of this, however, one should not ignore that new media also provides real-time communication and real-time control, properties essential to the field.

The seventh defines new media as the encoding modernist avant-garde, meaning that new media software encodes 1920s avante-garde techniques. For example, collage in avante garde = cut and paste in new media. 1920s avante-garde, however, was about creating new ways of depicting reality and viewing the world. New media avante-garde, on the other hand is about developing and utilizing new methods of changing and manipulating pre-existing information. This is Manovich's concept of "meta media."

The final proposition is that new media is a parallel articulation of similar ideas in post-WWII art and modern computing. During the 1960s artists created pieces which they further developed in the 1980s with the use of interactive computer programming.

There are several other decades that are important in the development of digital new media discussed thoughout The New Media Reader in addition to the 1920s and 1960s.