Lev Manovich - Quotes

Is the replacement of mass consumption of commercial culture in the 20th century by mass production of cultural objects by users in the early 21st century is a progressive development? Or does it constitutes a further stage in the development of “culture industry” as analyzed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1944 book The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception? That is, they now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.
Manovich, Lev. The practice of Everyday (Media) Life. 2008.

To help us analyze AMV culture, lets put to work the categories set up by Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life.De Certeau makes a distinction between “strategies” used by institutions and power structures and “tactics” used by modern subjects in their everyday life. The tactics are the ways in which individuals negotiate strategies that were set for them. A tactic “expects to have to work on things in order to make them its own, or to make them ‘habitable'.
Manovich, Lev. The practice of Everyday (Media) Life. 2008.

But in the area of consumer economy, the changes have been quite substantial. Strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in an interactive relationship, and often their features are reversed. This is particularly true for “born digital” industries and media such as software, computer games, web sites, and social networks. Their products are explicitly designed to be customized by the users.
Manovich, Lev. The practice of Everyday (Media) Life. 2008.

In short, the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies now sold to them. If you want to “oppose the mainstream,” you now had plenty of lifestyles available – with every subculture aspect, from music and visual styles to cloves and slang – available for purchase.
Manovich, Lev. The practice of Everyday (Media) Life. 2008.

So what about Shanghai? Where does it fit in relation to design wave and design innovation, which have swapped the planet in the last ten years?The design of space and the design of food were both remarkable. And the most interesting café design I have experienced in this decade was Future Perfect in Shanghai.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

Given what I have seen in Shanghai, I expect that design, architecture, fashion, hi-level (as opposed to inexpensive and non-designed) cuisine, and media will start to be exported next.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

The actual design aesthetics are also different. The space design in the West - be in Madrid, Oslo, or Copenhagen - tries to projects images of dignity, exclusivity, and middle age sophistication, i.e. lots of grey, black, and white and monochrome surfaces with no images). But in China and South East Asia the aesthetics which in the West is reserved for youth culture - bright colors, dynamic geometric patterns and lots of large, wall-size photographic images - are used everywhere. As a result, rather than signifying stability and exclusivity, new spaces in Asia speak of youth, dynamism, energy, and readiness for change.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

A telling picture of how each county treats design is to compare the plastic trays used in its airports when you go through security. Another good way to see the difference in the use of design between East and West is to compare shopping malls.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

Smart design, of course, is not just about using good lighting and quality materials, and thinking about how to create comfortable spaces, which have ambience and atmosphere using variety of means. And it is definitely not about simply putting iconic design objects in the interior - be they lights, chairs, or glassware (of course, we all have seen enough designed spaces which only do this). Ultimately, smart design is about fresh thinking: not taking anything for granted, and re-thinking every convention and every detail of space, an object, or a process.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

But what ultimately makes these hubs stand apart from even most innovative consumer spaces in Shanghai and elsewhere is not just their creative architecture. It is their content. The buildings are animated by all the activity and creative energy of the inhabitants inside. Rather than wondering customers and bored sales personnel, you see people working on computers behind the glass walls intensively working on an architectural design. In cafes as well, you are sitting next to designers, architects, photographers, and model agents discussing their current projects. These people are there to work rather than to serve you, and the energy of creative work animates the spaces in a way which - I am sorry to say this - is beyond anything architecture and design could do on their own.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

With creative economy gradually becoming larger and larger part of the total economy, and designers being identified with the most important capital today - the ability to innovate - it will be only logical to imagine designers studios themselves being put on display.
Manovich, Lev. Designing Shanghai, or Why East of the New West. 2007.

It is a truism to day that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas - music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food - are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well.
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became diffused. Although precedents of remixing can be found earlier, it was the introduction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each element of a song – vocals, drums, etc. – available for separate manipulation, it became possible to “re-mix” the song: change the volume of some tracks or substitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually the term became more and more broad, today referring to any reworking of already existing cultural work(s).
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

If remixing implies systematically rearranging the whole text, quoting refers inserting some fragments from old text(s) into the new one.
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

To use the terms of Roland Barthes, we can say that if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.”
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

The question that at this point is really hard to answer is what comes after remix? Will we get eventually tired of cultural objects - be they dresses by Alexander McQueen, motion graphics by MK12 or songs by Aphex Twin – made from samples which come from already existing database of culture? And if we do, will it be still psychologically possible to create a new aesthetics that does not rely on excessive sampling.
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

And once again, only ten years later we seem to be back in the darkest years of Cold War, except that now we are being tracked with RFID chips, computer vision surveillance systems, data mining and other new technologies of the twenty first century.
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

I don’t know what comes after remix. But if we now try now to develop a better historical and theoretical understanding of remix era, we will be in a better position to recognize and understand whatever new era which will replace it.
Manovich, Lev. What comes after Remix? 2007.

How do designers of information technology understand the interaction between the users and devices? How do they design user interfaces?Contrary to ten years ago, today the designers no longer try to make the interfaces invisible. Instead, the interaction is treated as an event - as opposed to "non-event", as in the previous "invisible interface" paradigm. Put differently, using personal information devices is now conceived as a carefully orchestrated experience, rather than only a means to an end.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

Regardless of whether the designers realize this consciously or not, today the design of user interaction reflects this new reality. The designers no longer try to hide the interfaces. Instead, the interaction is treated as an event - as opposed to "non-event", as in the previous "invisible interface" paradigm.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

The interface engages the user in a kind of game. The user is asked to devote significant emotional, perceptual and cognitive resources to the very act of operating the device.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

The critical and commercial success of Apple products and the truly fanatical feelings they envoke in many people to a large extent has to do with the degree of this intergration which until now has not been seen in commercial products in this price range. In each new product or version, the details are refined until they all work together to create a rich, smooth, and consistent sensorial whole.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

In other words, I was referring to a variety of ways in which the current generation of mobiles responds to user actions in a surprising and often seemingly exaggerated manner.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

This is the stage of ubiqutious computing in which a technological fetish is dissolved into the overall fabric of material existence. The actual details of this potential future dematerialisation will most probably be diffirent from how it is imagined today, but the trend itself is clearly visible.
Manovich, Lev. Interaction as an Aesthetic Event. 2007.

In the second part of the 1990s, moving-image culture went through a fundamental transformation.
Manovich, Lev. Understanding Hybrid Media. 2007.

Such media hybridity does not necessary manifest itself in a collage-like aesthetics that foregrounds the juxtaposition of different media and different media techniques.
Manovich, Lev. Understanding Hybrid Media. 2007.

With computer software, however, designers can precisely control the transparency of each layer; they can also add different visual effects, such as blur, between layers. As a result, rather than creating a visual narrative based on the motion of visual elements through space (as was common in twentieth-century animation, both commercial and experimental), designers now have many new ways to create visual changes.
Manovich, Lev. Understanding Hybrid Media. 2007.

One way to understand how computerization changed the media we use to represent the world, record our ideas and communicate with others is to examine the work of the people who invented the paradigms and practical techniques of computer media. And one of the key figures in this history is Alan Kay.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

It was only Kay and his generation that extended the idea of simulation to media – thus turning Universal Turing Machine into a Universal Media Machine, so to speak.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

When we use computers to simulate some process in the real world – the behavior of a weather system, the processing of information in the brain, the deformation of a car in a crash – our concern is to correctly model the necessary features of this process or system. We want to be able to test how our model would behave in different conditions with different data, and the last thing we want to do is for computer to introduce some new properties into the model that we ourselves did not specify.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

Since new media theory and criticism emerged in the early 1990s, endless texts have been written about interactivity, hypertext, virtual space, cyberspace, cyborgs, and so on. But I have never seen anybody discuss “view control.”
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

The newness lies not in the content but in software tools used to create, edit, view, distribute and share this content. Therefore, rather than only looking at the “output” of software-based cultural practices, we need to consider software itself – since it allows people to work with media in of a number of historically unprecedented ways.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

The subsequent generations of computer scientists, hackers, and designers added many more properties – but this process is far from finished. And there is no logical or material reason why it will ever be finished. It is the “nature” of computational media that it is open-ended and new techniques are continuously being invented.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

What used to be separate moments of experimentations with media during the industrial era became the norm in a software society. In other words, computer legitimizes experimentation with media.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

If in modern culture “experimental” and “avant-garde” were opposed to normalized and stable, this opposition largely disappears in software culture.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

Of course we not dealing here only with the history of ideas. Various social and economic factors – such as the dominance of the media software market by a handful of companies or the wide adoption of particular file formats –– also constrain possible directions of software evolution.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

As theorized by Turing and Von Neuman, computer is a general-purpose simulation machine. This is its uniqueness and its difference from all other machines and previous media. This means that the idea that a new medium gradually finds its own language cannot apply to computer media.
Manovich, Lev. Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine. 2006.

Only when the Web absorbed enough of the media archives it became this universal cultural memory bank accessible to all cultural producers.
Manovich, Lev. After Effects, or Velvet Revolution - part 1. 2006.

Because of its affordability and length of time on the market After Effects is the most popular and well-known application in this area. Consequently, After Effects will be given a privileged role in this text as both the symbol and the key material foundation which made Velvet Revolution in moving image culture possible.
Manovich, Lev. After Effects, or Velvet Revolution - part 1. 2006.

Today such hybrid visual language is also common to a large proportion of short “experimental” (i.e. non-commercial) films being produced for media festivals, the web, mobile media devices, and other distribution platforms.
Manovich, Lev. After Effects, or Velvet Revolution - part 1. 2006.

Consider the following paradox. The same few decades of the nineteenth century that gave us the most detailed artistic representations of human emotions and inner feelings, including romantic love, also saw the rise of statistical and sociological imagination.
Manovich, Lev. "Social Data Browser." In: Tate Intermedia Art. February 12, 2006.

In general, representational art has depicted individuals rather than social groups, classes, and institutions.
Manovich, Lev. "Social Data Browser." In: Tate Intermedia Art. February 12, 2006.

But what if this limitation is simply a result of the representational techniques that artists had at their disposal? Can computer media be used to create artistic representations that link the individual and the social without subsuming one in the other, i.e. the particular in the general?
Manovich, Lev. "Social Data Browser." In: Tate Intermedia Art. February 12, 2006.

To explain what I mean by info-aesthetics, let me start by noting something simple but nevertheless quite significant: the word “information” contains within it the word ‘form.”
Manovich, Lev. The Shape of Information. 2005.

Designers, computer scientists, and artists working with information visualization create new forms which are no longer related to a human form (classical art) or abstract from it (modern art) – instead they represent quantitative data of all kinds, helping us to understand it – and sometimes simply anesthetizing it.
Manovich, Lev. The Shape of Information. 2005.

We turn our own lives into an information archive by storing all our emails, SMS, digital photos, and other “digital traces” of our existence.
Manovich, Lev. The Shape of Information. 2005.

And yet in the absence of new and more precise categories we still use figuration/abstraction (or realism/abstraction) as the default basic visual and mental filter though which we process all images which surround us.
Manovich, Lev. Abstraction and Complexity. 2004.

While computerization has “strengthened” the part of the opposition occupied by figurative images by providing new techniques to generate these images – and even more importantly, making possible new types of media which rely on them (3D computer animation, interactive virtual spaces) – it simultaneously had “blurred” the “figurative” end of the opposition.
Manovich, Lev. Abstraction and Complexity. 2004.

The easy availability of real-time information coming from news feeds, networks of sensors, surveillance cameras; more fragmented and limited access to the senses of any subject in a consumer economy – all this puts a new pressure on the kinds of images human culture already developed and ultimately calls for the development of new kinds.
Manovich, Lev. Abstraction and Complexity. 2004.

The computer interface is a cultural language that offers its own ways of representing human memory and human experience.
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

Do you see any such turn of events happening in Europe? What is the relationship between "theory" and art schools, or theoretical departments and new media?
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

In my own teaching, I tend to rely more on history - history of media, art, architecture.
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

All we can do for now is profit from all the failures and miseries of the past and the present. I strongly believe that we have a period of (digital) modernism ahead of us - if we approach it positively.
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

Just as Europe gave us Fellini and Greenaway, can it give us "art house" interfaces and programs themselves? (I'll be the first one to buy them ...)
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

I do hope that the new generation of students who are growing up with computers will use them as a true medium for the cultural expression of the generation - but not simply to make videos, arrange music or design clothes - but, rather, to design software and interfaces themselves. In other words, they might express themselves through software design the way previous generations expressed themselves through books and movies.
Manovich, Lev and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Digital Constructivism: What Is European Software? An Email Exchange with Lev Manovich" in: Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. MIT Press. 2002. Paperback, 390 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262122510.

Media technologies seem typically to move in one direction: toward “more.” More resolution, better color, better visual fidelity, more bandwidth, more immersion. Do digital media technologies simply mimic this pattern? After examining macro-media, I look at another important trajectory in media development: minimalist media or micro-media.
Manovich, Lev. Macro-media and micro-media 2000.

VHS quality is not the final frontier in the evolution of the Web media.
Manovich, Lev. Macro-media and micro-media. 2000.

Hyperlinks, automatic indexing, search, multiple resolutions and multiple frams – these new dimensions of digital video are waiting to be fully explored!
Manovich, Lev. Macro-media and micro-media. 2000.

What about micro-media? Is this a permanent phenomenon, or will it eventually disappear, with even the smallest displays offering high resolution and full color?If the evolution of microchips toward being more and more dense is limited by the atomic organization of matter, the limiting factor in the evolution of media toward more and more visual fidelity may be limited by the size of our physical body. I love my Ericsson T28 cell phone, but I do find it to be too small!
Manovich, Lev. Macro-media and micro-media. 2000.

The technological race towards packing richer media experience into the tiniest of packages is limited by the size of our hands and the resolution of our eyes and ears. So until some futuristic scenarios – i.e. projection glasses that shine the video image directly into the viewer’s retina or direct communication between the computer and the human brain – become reality, we are stuck with micro-media.
Manovich, Lev. Macro-media and micro-media. 2000.