Week 1
Understanding metamedia – Lev Manovich (what is media after software?)
Formalist analysis you look of the form of media, how to use it, the relationship with other media
etc..
Media is nowadays accessible to a great number of people because of an increase in the capacity and
decrease in prices. It also became cheaper to create your own media instead of consuming the ones
on the market. Web based distribution channels made the computer a universal media machine
with the focus on consuming media created by others.
Medium specificity: can be traced back to modern art (1910-1950). All the art forms were
mediums so people started questioning the paintings as medium themselves and their dimensions.
Mcluhan approached the topic “the medium is the message”. We also started creating our own
mediums (memes, collages etc..).
Kay and Goldberg (1977): computer as a metamedium (media after software) whose content is a
wide range of already existing and not yet invented media.
The computer metamedium contains 2 types of media:
1) Simulations of prior physical media extended with new properties. A simulation is not just a
picture but the medium acquires new properties. eg: electronic paper
2) New computational media that has no physical precedents eg: those media listed with their
inventor like hypertext and hypermedia (Ted Nelson)
The building blocks of these simulations of previously invented media and newly invented media are
different type of media data and the techniques for generating modifying and viewing data.
- Media data: text, vector, images, audio, 3D models, geo-spatial data.
- Techniques for data manipulation:
o Media creation, manipulation, and access techniques specific to a particular type of
data (referred lately as media specific).
Eg 1: Image-editing software include techniques like “blur” that can work on images
only and not on 3D models.
Eg 2: techniques that do not have historical precedents in physical media like
algoritms
Eg 3: techniques that refer to prior physical tools or machines, like brushes
o New software techniques that can work with digital data in general that are media
independent.
Eg: view control, hyperlinking, copy/paste
Difference between media specific and media independent techniques: it works teorically but
practically it is difficult to distinguish which technique a medium belongs to.
The author calls out McLuhans’ Understading Media to make a comparison between old-new media
and media specific- media independent.
Media independent techniques are general concepts translated into algorithms, which can operate
on a particular data type. The fuctions and effects are the same but algorithms work differently.
1) Cut and paste
2) Search, all types of media content acquire a common property called searchability that
matches particular user-defined criteria
3) Information visualisation (infovis): take anything and map it into image to reveal patterns and
relationships in the data. Wattenberg made examples of translating data into visual forms.
,Jean Epstein and Greenberg were picturing the media as a specific technique (Eg: the cinema is
cinematic, the poetry poetic etc)
Only after 1960 they started formulating that aesthetic principles relate to each other ->
synaesthesia. (Eg: Zola books and Manet paintings belong to naturalism)
The difference between earlier artistic works on establishing media correspondences and the
software techniques that work across different media relies on:
- Art is responsible for content and style, referring to what is going to be created and
interpreted in the first place, and applies its objects to selected bodies of the artistic world.
On the other hand, the software imposes common media properties equally on every media
it is applied to, and shapes our understanding of media in general. These techniques are
ubiquitous and universal. (Eg: naturalism can be found in literature and paintings but not in
architecture vs cut and paste are properties present in every media)
- The independent techniques can be applied to any media work regardless aesthetics and
authorship, leading to remixing.
Negroponte defined in 1996 the difference between old and new media with the word digital. What
made the media digital is the software, which is a product defined by human characteristics and
choices. Software mutations are indeed social.
The terms “digital media” or “new media” do not capture the digital revolution, because the
qualities of digital media stay outside as commands and techniques if media viewers. “Being digital”
comes from software.
Referring to a digital medium as having properties: what we users experience as properties of the
media content comes from the software that allow us to create, edit, present and access the content.
(Eg: Photoshop, mobile browser).
Properties definition: software techniques defined to work on particular types of media
ecologies, content, and media data. The new properties come from interactive software that
presents a set of operation typical of every media type (searchability, hyperlinking,
findability…)
For users who only interact with media content through application software, the properties
of digital media are defined by the particular software as opposed to be contained inside
digital files.
Digital media is the result of the gradual development and accumulation of a large number of
software techniques, algorithms, data structures, interface convention and metaphors.
Because of the variety of these techniques, we cannot reduce “digital media” to a small set of
new properties, otherwise hierarchy will mislead us. These techniques change the identity of
any media type they are applied to, does not matter if they are independent or specific; they
are equally important in terms of quality rather than quantity.
Nowadays it is also difficult to distinguish and group these techniques because we are
experiencing a gradual integration of these functions.
The fact we are experience the media through many applications instead of reading it
directly is due to adoption of a universal numerical code. However, since looking at these
huge numbers in meaningless we need some technologies to translate them in analog
representations acceptable to our senses, which is why coding is so effective.
New media refers to the fact that software develops constantly and will always be new as long as
new techniques continue to be invented. Permanent extendibility. (Eg: cinema)
, On software, or the persistence of visual knowledge by Chung
Command -> Execution -> result
Execution has been erased, people talk about software only and not about execution. What she calls
hardware is illegible, invisible.
Computer has fostered “visual culture” and “transparency” which starting from the machine design. The
software through programming languages disciplines its programmers and users creating an invisible
system of visibility.
Software definition: a set of instructions that direct a computer to do a specific task.
Some opinions regarding the definition:
- Ceruzzi: software as an onion because its structure is made of codes that use other codes. Software
and hardware cannot be separated
- Broy: software is complex, vast and difficult to comprehend and its representations are just a
simplified version
- Kittler: there is no software
Pre-automaton programming: computing before ww2 was human computers (mostly woman). There were
problems with calculating and they had to gather to achieve the final result. It was a chain of calculation
Historic facts:
- 1946: the ENIAC controlled the sequence of actions needed to solve a problem numerically
- 1947: ENIAC converts the procedure of solving problems from starting from the beginning each
time to programming solutions; reducing time for programming and increasing time for
computation. The new machine uses paper tape with Harvard Mark invention.
- 1949: EDSAC is the first to use the computer to translate between more humanly readable code
and machine language. -> realisation that the computer us a new communication machine
Automatic programming definition: it is what we call programming today and means designing programs
that produce other programs. These programmes can be reused and make the computer work on
operations by itself.
Direct programming definition: while early machine language could be iterable only on the same machine,
engineers developed a software that could be used, reused on the same or different machines.
Programming was a niche practice (black art), so a significant selling campaign led to the democratisation of
programming, pushing higher level languages and production of new and more powerful hardware.
Sammet defines this selling campaign as a revolution because scientists started working on their own
problems without intermediary professionals. Lot of people learnt FORTRAN language. FORTRAN also
released a monitor system, which made computer installation more efficient. Computer liberation
The demoralisation of programming brought to questions like: is programming a clerical activity or
an act of mastery?
While at the beginning programming was a gender balanced activity, the participation of women in
it was buried and made it become an academic field and so a profession.
Plant: Programming is feminine because of the historical and theoretical ties between programming and
the quintessentially feminine invention of waving. Women have been the simulators, assemblers and
programmers of the digital machines.
