The Language of New Media

Brilliant observations on the role of art and design in digital media. Interesting examples, fascinating conclusions, and a very clear method of writing. Loved every page.

confusing!

It’s certainly interesting to read a book-length exploration of such an idiosyncratic and hyper-personal theory of media art (clearly largely built off of Manovich’s coming of age in the Cold War-era Soviet Union), but what was “new media” in 2001 is no longer remotely new, and Manovich seems primarily interested in its novelty, to the exclusion of tons of relevant information. Jurassic Park is certainly a milestone work in combining animated creatures with live action actors, but Windsor McKay interacted with an animated dinosaur named Gertie 60 years earlier, which gets no mention, presumably because it doesn’t approach photorealism or Manovich’s pet idea of virtual reality. Stan VanDerBeek is briefly complimented for his skill at cinematic montage, but his groundbreaking computer animation isn’t mentioned at all, and Lillian Schwartz doesn’t get any reference whatsoever. David Blair’s Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees is discussed as an early example of internet-based cinema (it was presented in hyperlink form and streamed over the internet over a decade before that was “a thing”), but its commentary on virtual reality and military simulators is completely ignored, making it fairly clear that Manovich has only read about it and never actually engaged with it directly. How do you constantly cite Benjamin and talk about the flâneur as someone who assembles a database and analyzes a space through experiencing its usage without discussing his Arcades Project???? He starts this book by claiming he doesn’t plan on predicting the future, so it’s not like I can really judge this book for being immediately dated (“street view” both negates and supports several claims in this book, but it didn’t exist yet!), but he seems to be here primarily to prognosticate all the same - this is a book about “the future aesthetics of the macrocinema” that claims that one day we will all have high resolution VR chips implanted in our retinas. Factual errors abound, too, to the point where I wondered if I was reading an advance copy that hadn’t gone through a final round of editing, but nope - Tomb Raider isn’t a first person shooter, Karel Zeman wasn’t named Konrad and Stan didn’t spell his last name Brackhage, but you wouldn’t know any of these things from reading this book! As a critic, Manovich can be fairly sharp - when Peter Greenaway’s career is over, I can’t think of anyone better to write the retrospective book on his work - but as a theoretician I’m far less convinced of his insight.

All of this would be a lot easier to deal with if Manovich had tolerable prose, but unfortunately, he is the most annoying stylist I have ever encountered. Within 3 pages of the intro I could instantly clock that 25 years later Manovich was a hardcore NFT/AI guy, and all of his loving references to Gibson may have done irreversible damage to my estimation of that author. He fancies himself a super cool cyberpunk data cowboy, but he’s primarily engaged with high end, expensive mainstream culture, analyzing the films of James Cameron or haute couture and leaving vast swaths of (frankly, better, more enduring AND more relevant) art behind in a rush to write an important, groundbreaking work that’s first to formalize “the language.” If only he wrote a valuable or continually-relevant one instead!

Muy bueno, una lectura que marcará mis próximos trabajos.

though some opinions have been out of date ,it's still worthy of reading
A helpful book in writing the review for the new media art in current China

I read it for academic reasons.
Interesting, but not so easy to understand.

Good stuff but very entry-level in terms of what it analyzes. Manovich only brings up the topic of new media distribution in the final section, and as far as I'm concerned, this is the dominant issue in contemporary visual culture, new media studies, and film studies. I did think it was interesting how he predicted that the loop would become dominant, and it has; I don't see how the spatialization of images has become a dominant form in cinematic language, which is another prediction he makes towards the end. Despite how all books on new media become dated almost as soon as they are published, this one isn't: the constant references to Myst, Doom, Quake, Titanic and CD-ROMs is a little dated, but the analysis occurs at a level abstract enough that the book, by-and-large, is still entirely relevant. It just doesn't address the question of distribution, because in 2003 the web was still a wild, open zone.

Manovich presents very fascinating ideas, in a style not so compelling.