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Diferencia entre revisiones de «2008 - INFOAESTHETICS MANIFESTO - Lev Manovich»

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-LEV MANOVICH,
-“Introduction to Info-Aesthetics” (2008)
-THE PROBLEM
-I would like to introduce a new paradigm for understanding contemporary culture: infoaesthetics.
-Unlike concepts such as modernism or postmodernism, this paradigm does not aim to
-be all-inclusive. In other words, I do not have the ambition to understand all new features of
-contemporary culture as manifestations of a single logic, or a small set of principles.
-Nevertheless, as I will try to show in my forthcoming book Info-aesthetics: Information and
-Form, if we adopt an info-aesthetics filter, this will allow us to relate together a wide range of
-cultural phenomena, including some of the most interesting and important projects in a variety of
-areas of contemporary culture: cinema, architecture, product design, fashion, Web design,
-interface design, visual art, information architecture, and, of course, new media art. So while
-info-aesthetics should not be the only tool you would want in your conceptual toolbox, it comes
-in very handy. This essay, then, may be read as an introduction to the future book and, at the
-same time, a summary of some of the key ideas of the info-aesthetics project that has
-preoccupied me since 2000.
-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.” For
-some time now social theorists, economists, and politicians have been telling us that we are
-living in a new “information society.” The term was first used in the 1960s, even before the
-computer revolution got under way. I will discuss below certain theories of information society,
-as well as related concepts of postindustrial society, knowledge society, and network society.
-Since this project is about the culture of information society, the arguments of economists and
-sociologists are no more important than the changes in people's everyday lives. What we do,
-what objects we use, how we communicate and interact with others and the kind of spaces we
-dwell in or pass through—all this is bound to change existing cultural patterns and aesthetic
-preferences as well as create new ones. The fact that we can observe significant changes in all
-these dimensions of everyday human experience, and that they are converging around
-“information,” requires us to explore corresponding cultural responses.
-When the term “information society” was first introduced in the 1960s, few people, even
-in the United States, had ever seen a computer. (In my own case, having grown up in Moscow in
-the 1970s, I came face to face with a working computer only after I came to New York in 1981.)
-Of course, a few perceptive artists such as Jean-Luc Godard in his brilliant Alphaville had
-already understood that the computer was becoming a new god of our times, but they were
-exceptions. Even such a visionary as Marshall McLuhan—who seemed to predict with precision
-most features of contemporary cyberculture about three decades before they came into
-existence—ignored computers. In Understanding Media (1964), which presents a systematic
-analysis of all key historical and modern media technologies, McLuhan does devote the very last
-section to data processing, but in general computation plays no role in his theories. This is so,
-probably, because McLuhan was thinking of media as above all a means of communication
-and/or representation. In the 1960s computers were not yet involved in any of these functions in
-a way that would be visible to the public.
-If in that decade only a very small number of computer scientists—Ted Nelson, Alan
-Kay, and a few others—understood that the computer was bound to become an engine of culture
-rather than remain merely a data-processing machine, similarly, only a few social scientists were
-able to perceive that dealing with information was replacing industrial manufacturing in
-importance. Today, however, what was once an academic hypothesis has became an everyday
-reality that can be easily Observed by the majority of citizens living in the developed and the
-developing countries. All kinds of work are reduced to manipulating data on one's computer
-screen, that is, to the processing of information. As you walk or drive past office buildings in any
-city, all offices, regardless of what a company does, look the same: they are filled with rows of
-computer screens and keyboards. Regardless of their actual profession, financial analysts, city
-officials, secretaries, architects, accountants, and pretty much everybody else engaged in whitecollar
-work are doing the same thing: processing information.
-When we leave work, we do not leave information society. In our everyday life, we use
-search engines, we retrieve data from databases, and we rely on “personal information appliances
-and personal information managers.” We complain that there is too much information to keep
-track of, to make sense of; meanwhile, libraries and museums around the world constantly add to
-the global information pile by systematically digitizing everything they have. We turn our own
-lives into an information archive by storing our emails, chats, smss (short message services),
-digital photos, GPS data, favorite music tracks, favorite television shows, and other “digital
-traces” of our existence. One day, we get tired of all this so we start planning to take “email free”
-holidays. But even this requires information work: for example, searching for the best deals on
-the Internet, comparing fares, inputting credit card information into a reservation Web site, and
-so forth. Even on a largely activity-free vacation, the moment we open a cell phone to make a
-call or check messages, we enter the world of information. In short, the “information society” is
-where most citizens of the developed and developing world live today, experiencing it in their
-everyday practice. While those living outside this world themselves are not using computers on a
-daily basis, the companies, NGOs, and governments of the developed countries, which play the
-decisive role in deciding what happens in fourth world countries, are all of course computerized.
-Information processing shapes the lives and fates of citizens of these countries even though they
-themselves may not experience it directly.
-Information processing has, in these and other ways, become the key dimension of our
-daily lives. Yet, since we are physical beings, we have always required and continue to require
-various physical forms in order to house and transport our bodies, our information-processing
-machine, and information itself. These forms range from those that are very large (buildings,
-bridges, airplanes) to those that are very small (iPods, mobile phones), from the rarely changing
-(architecture) to the periodically updatable (clothes). Just as a person needs clothing, a computer
-needs a case to protect its insides and to allow us to enter and manipulate information in a
-convenient way (that is, a human-computer interface, typically a keyboard and a screen). Text
-needs to be displayed in ways suitable for us to be able to read it, be it on a screen, paper, or epaper.
-Therefore, although the word “information” contains the world “form” inside it, in reality
-it is the other way around: in order to be useful to us, information always has to be wrapped up in
-some external form.
-We need to design forms for ourselves, and also for information that we create, record,
-and manipulate. We may have become an information-processing species, but we also remain a
-form-creating species as well. If, for Marx, humans separated themselves from other species
-when they first designed tools for work, we can add that humans became humans by becoming
-designers, that is to say, the inventors and makers of forms.
-INFORMATION AND FORM
-If information processing is the new defining characteristic of our world, what is the effect of
-this situation on the forms we design today? This is the question in which I have been most
-interested after finishing my book The Language of New Media in 1999. It is important to
-differentiate between two lines of influence in the ways information shapes the forms we design.
-On the one hand, we may think about how the centrality of dealing with information in our daily
-lives may affect our aesthetic preferences as manifested in trends in architecture, industrial
-design, graphic design, media design, cinema, music, fashion, theater, dance, exhibition design,
-and other cultural fields. On the other hand, we also need to remember that most forms we
-encounter today are designed on computers. This, of course, is likely to have at least as much of
-an effect on what forms the designers are going to come up with. In sum, information processing
-acts both as a force outside a form, so to speak (that is, the new habits of perception, behavior,
-work, and play), as well as being the very method through which the forms are designed.
-There is another fundamental effect that is worth articulating immediately. In the
-information society the design of forms becomes intricately linked with the concept of interface.
-As I mentioned above, we need to give some visual form to what will appear on the screens of
-computers, mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), car navigation systems, and other
-devices-as well as to buttons, trackballs, microphones, and various other input tools. Humancomputer
-interfaces that involve a set of visual conventions—such as folders, icons, and menus
-(the graphical user interface), audio conventions (as in voice recognition interface), and
-particular material articulations (such as the shape, color, material, and texture of a mobile
-phone)—represent a whole new category of forms that need to be designed today. Even more
-important, as computation becomes incorporated into our lived environment (a trend described
-by such terms as “ubiquitous computing,” “pervasive computing,” “ambient intelligence,”
-“context-aware environments,” “smart objects”), the interfaces slowly leave the realm where
-they have lived safely for a few decades (think of stand-alone computers and electronics devices)
-and start appearing in all kinds of objects and on all kinds of surfaces, for example, interior
-walls, furniture, benches, bags, clothing, and posters.1 Consequently, the forms of all these
-objects that previously lived “outside of information” have now to address the likely presence of
-interfaces somewhere on them.
-This does not mean that from now on “form follows interface.” Rather, that the two have
-to accommodate each other. Beyond the traditional requirements that the material forms had to
-satisfy—a chair has to be comfortable for sitting, for example—their design is now also shaped
-by new requirements. For instance, we have been accustomed to interacting with text that is
-presented on flat and rectangular surfaces, so if a screen is to be incorporated somewhere, a part
-of the object needs to be reasonably flat. Which is easy to do if an object is a table but not as
-easy if it is a piece of clothing or a section of Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in Los Angeles, a
-building that was specifically designed not to have a single flat area. Of course, given that new
-technologies such as rapid manufacturing may soon enable easy printing of an electronic display
-on any surface of any object while it is being produced, it's possible that we will be able to
-quickly adjust our perceptual habits, to the point that moving and shape-changing display
-surfaces will be accepted much more readily than I can imagine. In fact, computer-controlled
-graphic projections onto the bodies of dancers, as in Apparition by Klaus Obermair or in the
-Interactive Opera Stage system by Art+Com, already show the aesthetic potential of displaying
-information over a changing, nonflat, nonrectangular form.2
-''October 18, 5:04 p.m.-5:33 p.m.''
-I am looking at the show of student projects from the Department of Industrial Design at
-Eindhoven Technical University in Netherlands. The department is only three years old, so
-instead of designing traditional objects, students are working on “smart objects.” Every project in
-the show starts with an everyday familiar object and adds some “magical” functions to it via
-electronics and computers—more examples of solid objects and media/interface surfaces coming
-together. In one project, a canopy placed diagonally over a child's hospital bed becomes an
-electronic canvas. By tracking the position of a special pen that does not need to touch the
-drawing surface, the canvas allows the child to draw on it without having to move from the bed.
-In another project, a special mirror allows one person to leave a message for somebody else-for
-instance, a different member of a household. A rectangular block containing a camera is built
-into a mirror frame. You take the block out, record a video message, and place the block back
-into the frame. After the video is automatically “loaded” into the magical mirror, a small picture
-appears somewhere on the mirror surface: when you click on the picture it plays the message.
-Yet another project adds magical interactivity to a vertical plastic column. The lights inside the
-column turn it into an ambient light source. The column is covered with a special interface: a net.
-Depending on how you touch the net, the position, quality, and tint of the light changes. How
-exactly the light will change is not directly predictable, and this is what makes interaction with
-the light column fun.
-Together, these three projects show us different ways in which an object, an interface,
-and a display can be put together. The first two projects rely on already familiar behaviors—
-drawing with a pen or making a recording with a video camera. The last one calls for the user to
-develop a new vocabulary of movements and gestures to which the light will respond. And the
-ways in which each of these “smart objects” talks back to us are also different: a canvas canopy
-shows a drawing, a mirror plays video, and a light glows in different ways. In short, the surface
-of an object can become at once an output and input medium, bringing the physical and the
-screen-like—that is to say, form and information—together in surprising ways. There is, indeed,
-magic in these “smart objects”: we see familiar, usually passive objects literally coming to life
-and responding to our interactions with them.
-''Screen Forms''
-The forms used in design and architecture are not only material in character, but they are also
-ways to structure data in order to make it meaningful and useful for human users by presenting it
-on some kind of display. A cinematic narrative, an interactive information visualization, a Web
-search engine, the user interface of Nokia phones, or Spotlight (a new search/file management
-tool in Apple OS X) are also forms, which organize data, whether audiovisual recordings in the
-case of a film, or documents on a hard drive in the case of Spotlight. To distinguish these kinds
-of forms from the material ones, I will refer to them as “screen forms”—keeping in mind that the
-actual displays can also include paper (as in illustrations and graphs that appear in journals), as
-well as augmented reality displays where information is seen superimposed against the real
-world.
-Since the info-aesthetics project is about form and information, I am focusing on the new
-screen forms that either offer us fundamentally new ways to manage information or respond to
-the dramatic increase in its quantity. This last fact may appear trivial: we all know that every day
-fifteen thousand new blogs are created.3 And that is not all (insert your own favorite statistic that
-is likely not to get completely obsolete soon). All this is familiar and therefore not very
-interesting; and yet our daily habits of work and entertainment, the ways in which we understand
-ourselves, others, and the world around us are being deeply reshaped through this purely
-quantitative growth of information being produced, exchanged, stored, and made available.
-This is another reason why I chose the term “information society” over any other as
-indicating most acutely the context for this inquiry. I believe that the exponential growth of
-information available to us is one of the main pressure points on contemporary culture and that
-this pressure will only continue to increase. The cultural effects of this information glut are
-diverse. By situating my investigation within the context of the “information society” I want to
-highlight a new cultural dimension that so far has not been part of our critical vocabulary: scale.
-In other words, while normally we think of culture using qualitatively different categories such
-as authorship, collaboration, reception, media type, ideology, and so on, we also now need to
-start considering something purely quantitative: the dramatic increase in the amount of media
-available. We no longer deal with “old media” or “new media.” We now have to think through
-what it means to be living with “more media.”
-Some effects of this quantitative change are already visible. Our new standard interface to
-culture is a search engine. Although by now we have become completely used to this, imagine
-your reaction in the early 1990s if somebody had told you that soon, if you wished to access
-information, you would first search through millions of documents, and only then begin
-listening, watching, or reading. A related development is the shift from a single media object—
-usually one that physically existed as an entity and was appreciated in isolation—to a sequence
-or a database of digital media. For instance, rather than fetishizing a particular physical music
-record or a particular photographic print, we now deal with music playlists or catalogues of
-digital photographs.
-But what do these effects mean? Will the increase in the amount of available mediums,
-and the advent of new tools and conventions used to access them, lead to a new aesthetics in
-artworks themselves and to new patterns in their reception? These kinds of question are much
-harder to answer. There are some new cultural practices, even new fields, that address the
-exponential growth in the quantity of information in creative ways. I see this growth of
-information not as a cultural threat but as an opportunity. New cultural strategies are often
-invented as a response to a real social crisis or simply a perceived change in social order.
-Industrialization during the nineteenth century provoked a number of creative responses such Art
-Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. World War I and revolutionary fever in Europe led
-to Constructivism, the development of the Russian montage school in cinema and photomontage,
-Surrealism, and so on. Today, “informationalization” puts pressure on society to invent new
-ways to interact with information, new ways to make sense of it, and new ways to represent it.
-Social software such as Wikipedia, work in information visualization and information design
-such as the projects by Benjamin Fry, exceptional database narratives such as Bleeding Through:
-Layers of Los Angeles by Norman Klein, Rosemary Camella, and Andreas Kratky, and cultural
-analysis such as Rhythm Science by DJ Spooky are all examples of approaching the new
-information environment creatively. Instead of trying to defend ourselves against an information
-glut, we need to approach this situation as an opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our
-world. In short, we need to invent info-aesthetics.
-METHOD
-I began by observing that the word “information,” which defines our era, contains within it the
-word “form.” What are these forms? Or, to put this differently: what is “the shape of
-information”?
-This formulation may sound cute but not in itself informative. Let me, therefore, unfold it
-into a set of more specific questions. Has the arrival of information society been accompanied by
-a new vocabulary of forms, new design aesthetics, new iconologies? Can there be forms specific
-to information society, given that software and computer networks redefine the very concept of
-form? After all, instead of being solid, stable, finite, discrete, and limited in space and time, the
-new forms are often variable, emergent, distributed, and not directly observable. Can information
-society be represented iconically, if the activities that define it-information processing,
-interaction between a human and a computer, telecommunication, networking-are all dynamic
-processes? How can the superhuman scale of our information structures—from sixteen million
-lines of computer code making Windows OS, to the forty years it would take one viewer to
-watch all the video interviews stored on the digital servers of the Shoah Foundation, to the Web
-itself, which cannot even be mapped as a whole—be translated to the scale of human perception
-and cognition? In short, if the shift from industrial to information society has been accompanied
-by a shift from form to information flows, can we still map these information flows into forms
-meaningful to a human?
-When I started looking at contemporary culture from the perspective of these questions, I
-decided that I needed a term to label my future findings. I adopted “info-aesthetics” as this term.
-The info-aesthetics project scans contemporary culture to detect emerging aesthetics and cultural
-forms specific to a global information society. I do not want to suggest that there is some single
-“info-aesthetics style” that already exists today or may emerge in the future. Rather, “infoaesthetics”
-refers to those contemporary cultural practices that can be best understood as
-responses to the new priorities of information society: making sense of information, working
-with information, producing knowledge from information. While I think that these practices
-already occupy a prominent place, and that it is one that will steadily grow, I should make it clear
-that the whole ecosystem of diverse styles and forms in contemporary aesthetics should not be
-simply correlated to the shift to information society and the key role played by information
-management in the social, economic, and political life of contemporary societies. Various other
-factors are all equally important: these include economic globalization, global aging, the ideas of
-complexity, emergence, and evolution, the ecological thinking manifested in such paradigms as
-“cradle-to-cradle” manufacturing, recyclable and sustainable design, new materials and
-manufacturing processes, new distributed production networks and logistics of their
-coordination, and even the changing political and social climate of different decades (the post-
-Cold War euphoria of the 1990s versus the obsession with security after 9/11).
-The method that I decided to use in my research is comparative. I look at the culture of
-information society by comparing it with the culture of industrial society. The period that is
-particularly relevant here is the beginning of the twentieth century, when modernist artists
-formulated new aesthetics, new forms, new representational techniques, and new symbols of
-industrial society. I believe that by systematically asking what can be their equivalents in
-information society, we can begin to see more clearly the specificity of our own period.
-This method is different from the one used in my book The Language of New Media.
-There my question was “What is new about computational media?” I analyzed new media
-primarily in relation to post-Renaissance visual culture including Modern art, and so-called old
-media, that is, the dominant media technologies of nineteenth and twentieth centuries
-(photography, cinema, video.) My use of history in that book was pragmatic and deliberately
-varied: since each chapter focused on a particular technique or convention of new media, I
-constructed the particular historical trajectory that I felt was best to illuminate this technique. In
-this way, every chapter traced a different path through the modern history of visual culture and
-media.
-In the info-aesthetics projects both my subject matter and my use of history are different.
-Rather than approaching the question of computational media specificity in relation to the
-histories of various media, I am looking at the key differences between the cultural logic of our
-computer-based culture and that of the earlier cultural period: Modernism. I hope that such an
-approach will help to bring the emerging discipline of media studies closer to other fields in the
-humanities: art history and criticism, literary studies, cinema studies, as well as architecture and
-design history. All these fields rely on a concept of Modernism that is by now very familiar and
-well understood, but they have only begun to seriously deal with contemporary computer-based
-culture. I hope that by showing how the problems that animated the work of modernist artists can
-also be seen at work in contemporary information culture a bridge will be built between the
-people focused on these seemingly unrelated domains of study.
-Another standard concept widely used in recent humanities and cultural criticism—the
-idea of postmodernism—also appears in info-aesthetics, although in ways that may displease
-many of its users. I suggest that some of the new aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s, which were
-at the time described as “postmodern,” were in fact only an intermediary stage between the
-Modern and the informational. In other words, in the cultural sphere, postmodernism represented
-only the very beginning of the computer and information revolution. It did not constitute a
-fundamental paradigm as important as that of Modernism.
-Info-aesthetics does not require us to use the term “new media.” Why is this so? In The
-Language of New Media I was interested in the emerging languages of “new media,” which I
-defined as the cultural forms that required a digital computer both for their production and
-consumption: computer games, Web sites, CD-ROMS, virtual environments, interactive
-installations, and so on. In other words, if you want to know if something is “new media” or not,
-simply ask if you require a computer to experience it. If the answer is yes, you are dealing with
-“new media.” Regardless of your particular experience, what you are really doing is interacting
-with a software program that is currently running. If the user is navigating an interactive
-multimedia presentation in a museum, browsing the Web, or playing a computer game, some
-program or programs make it all possible: a director program generating multimedia screens, a
-Web browser interacting with the server to pull the data and put it on the screen, a code
-controlling NPCs (non-player characters) or calculating the physics necessary to represent a
-realistic collision between two cars in a computer game, and so on.
-Since finishing my analysis of software-based media forms I have started to expand my
-investigation “horizontally” to include as many other areas of culture as I am able. It was clear
-that the adoption of digital networked computers in almost all cultural areas was to continue, and
-therefore in a few years the distinction I was still able to maintain in The Language of New
-Media between “new media” and other cultural practices would become less and less useful. At
-the same time, as both computer-based design and production techniques were becoming more
-standard in the fields responsible for our material culture—industrial design, architecture,
-fashion, experience design, brandscaping—these fields started to attract me more and more. If
-the “new media” of the 1990s, as all the examples in the preceding paragraph illustrate, was
-primarily “screen media,” from now on computers were likely to have equally significant effects
-on the aesthetics of our material environment. Add to this the slow but steady rise in importance
-of the new computing paradigms of ubiquitous computing/ambient intelligence/ smart objects,
-and it was becoming clear to me that if we are to follow the effects of computers on culture, we
-need to seriously start looking outside the screen. In the years that followed, I spent endless
-hours in airports, visited many cities on four continents, attended numerous media festivals,
-architecture reviews, design exhibitions, and industry events, met so many people that my brain
-now often refuses to release even the names of my friends, and spent more time on orbitz.com
-and hotel.com than on any other Web sites. I do not think I could have done my research in any
-other way, and certainly not by Web surfing alone.
-Info-aesthetics, therefore, does not examine “new media” specifically. Rather, it
-examines the various cultural fields (as many as I can keep track of) where the use of computers
-for design and production gives rise to new forms. Some of these forms are “screen-based”—for
-instance, information visualization—but many others are material. In the end, I feel that my own
-shift of interests parallels the shift to where what was once called “new media'.” really happens
-today. Ten years ago, an interaction designer would produce something that played on a
-computer screen alone. Today the common understanding of this profession is very different:
-according to Wikipedia, interaction design “examines the role of embedded behaviors and
-intelligence in physical and virtual spaces as well as the convergence of physical and digital
-products. “4 The cultural sites where the digital and the physical meet is also the key subject of
-info-aesthetics. But rather than think only in terms of convergence, as a cultural historian of the
-present I am also thinking about other relationships: those of conflict, contradiction, borrowing,
-hybridization, remix.
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