Notes, Chapter 5

In the office of Razorfish, the design of the space reflects the themes of computer culture: interactivity, lack of hierarchy, modularity. Outside, design of physical objects has shifted to evoke the idea of the computer (reversing the original principles of GUI design). Manovich returns and emphasizes that the first form of digital media is the database (which includes structure and logic). The second form is “a virtual interactive 3-D space”.

The database is the metaphor to conceptualize both individual and collective memory. In this sense, social rules and values would be encoded as points of data within databases. Even appreciating Manovich’s extended interpretation and concept of the database, this seems very far of a stretch. Furthermore, computer culture supposedly uses 3D to represent every kind of information imaginable. Examples cited describe a few visualizations, but these visualizations are probably not used in abundance currently.

Using metaphorical terms: “…increasingly the same metaphors and interfaces are used at work and at home, for business and entertainment. For instance, the user navigates through a virtual space to work and to play, whether analyzing scientific data or killing enemies in Quake.” This captures a very strange semantic moment, where, as a culture, we are approaching vastly different subjects using the same ideas and metaphorical tools. But, surely, everything isn’t reducible to these core essences? Even as a mathematician, I don’t try to apply my mathematical tools (logic being the “core of reason”) to everything. Is the effect of digital media to universalize everything under the same vocabulary?

Manovich uses the metaphor of narrative and description to tie an interesting point around the dilemmas of the information age. Traditional culture provided well defined narratives for handling information, and now we have too much information and not enough coherent narratives to tie it together. As such, information access (in the raw sense of accessing bits of unrelated, unconnected data) is much more important. Manovich says that we need an aesthetics of information to guide information design, and that all design has turned to information design. A key subtlety of this is that traditional narratives unite information in the form of knowledge, and generally provide a sense of a knower. The new aesthetics would treat information as raw and without perspective.

The Database

Manovich’s database is significantly more complicated than the database of traditional computing. It may be subject to multiple and complex methods of arrangement and sorting, as well as having ontological classification and some degree of procedural interaction. However, all of these characteristics are minute and are outside of the central point which is the data.

Games are characterized by algorithms, what others might call rules. The rules Manovich dwells on are remarkably high level (ie, the directions that enemies come from in Quake), glossing over the the many deep steps needed to get any visual effects at all.

A database represents the world as a disorganized list, and narrative orders events via cause and effect. By this, the two means of representation are in conflict. Manovich explains in clunky language that an individual working through a text, (either reading a narrative or playing a game) must uncover the underlying logic that governs that text. Manovich calls this logic an algorithm.

Later, new media is distilled into an amalgamation of multimedia: “The new media object consists of one or more interfaces to a database of multimedia material.” (p. 227)

The differing pair, database vs narrative are examined in the sense of semiotic linguistics. In traditional narrative, the database is interpreted as as a paradigm, versus the narrative which is a syntagm. The database is implicit (as a set of elements which might comprise something), where the narrative is explicit in its actual construction.

In new media, the database is made to be the explicit paradigm (as the dominant feature of new media) whereas the narrative is dematerialized as the syntagm.

Database and narratives produce endless hybrids. Examples are epic poetry, encyclopedic texts. This issue is reminiscent of Aarseth’s Cybertext. Manovich looks at video art next, and examines some of the intense variations produced by experimental mathematical visualization. While this would seem to be more evocative of the procedural nature of media, it is the capacity of variation that is interpreted as tying back into the database. Rather than procedural variants, they are understood as data variants.

Navigable Space

Manovich brings in and compares the games Doom and Myst, as elements of spatiality in digital media. He maps narrative elements onto these, but in a slightly skewed manner: “Instead of narration and description, we may be better off thinking about games in terms of narrative actions and exploration.” With this, the player is responsible for moving the narrative forward. Exploration is an aspect of progressing through that narrative space, not just the dimensional space of the game world.

Manovich leaves these reasonable conclusions to assert something strange- that navigable space is common to all areas of new media, and that the motion simulator is the “new genre” of entertainment. This can be seen, especially with games, though not with most software or other digital media. Games too use space, but are not always about the space.

One odd characteristic of space in computers is that is representation is austere, utterly blank, and empty. 3D modeling programs present the user with a void, with only the coordinate system to situate construction. Furthermore, construction is out of nothingness, computer space lacks a medium (and this can be said for most computer modeling or art programs). It lends toward disembodied work, without ties to anything else. (p. 225)

Manovich claims that the trend is to progress towards an aggregate or systematic space. Such space ties together others in a rhizomatic manner. Manovich seems to be claiming something very literal, that the internet will transform into some massive heterogeneous chimera of 3D space a-la Second Life crossed with every other science fiction portrayal of the internet. This seems to be nonsense, but there is ground to be held on this argument at a symbolic level.

Further, among navigating space, and the narratives and philosophies thereof, Manovich looks again at computer games: “The dominance of spatial exploration in games expemplifies the classical American mythology in which the individual discovers his identity and builds character by moving through space.” (p 271) Beyond games, information access is seen in terms of navigation and traversal (which can be applied regardless of 3D).