III. The Operations

Lev Manovich

The Language of New Media

Operations & Three Examples

• I will call these typical techniques of working with computer media operations.

• This chapter will discuss three examples of operations: selection, compositing, and teleaction.

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Social world & Ways

• They are employed not only within a computer but also in the social world outside of it. but also outside the computer.

• They are not only ways of working with computer data but also general ways of working, ways of thinking, and ways of existing in a computer age.

2

Becoming & Understanding

• As we work with software and use the operations embedded in it, these operations become part of how we understand ourselves, others and the world.

3

Selection, Compositing, Telaction

• “Selection” is the operation employed by both professional designers and end users. “Compositing” is used exclusively belongs exclusively by the designers. The third operation, “teleaction,” is an example of operation typically used by users.

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The Logic of Selection

• According to Ernst Gombrich, the realist artist can only represent nature by relaying on already established “representational schemes”.

• As Roland Barthes puts it, "the Text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.“

• Electronic art from its very beginning was based on a new principle: modification of an already existing signal.

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The Logic of Selection

• New media is the best available expression of the logic of identity in these societies: choosing values from a number of pre-defined menus.

• How can a modern subject escape from this logic? In a society saturated with brands and labels, people respond by adopting minimalist aesthetics and hard-to-identify clothing style.

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The Logic of Selection

• The private living space has taken on the guise of objectivity: neutral, value-free, as if this were a found space, not an impeccably designed one.

• The world outside, meanwhile, has become subjectified, rendered into a changing collage of personal whims and fancies. This is to be expected in a culture dominated by the distribution system. That system, exists, after all, not to make things but to sell them, to appeal to individual impulses, tastes, desires. As a result, the public realm has became a collective repository of dreams and designs from which the self requires refuge.

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The Logic of Selection

• Paradoxically, by following an interactive path one does not construct a unique self but instead adopts already pre-established identities.

• Similarly, choosing values from menu or customizing one’s desktop or an application automatically makes one participate in the “changing collage of personal whims and fancies” mapped out and coded into software by the companies.

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“Postmodernism” and Photoshop

• "The logic of selection" is a good example of this. But what was a set of social and economic practices and conventions now became encoded in the software itself.

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“Postmodernism” and Photoshop

• Invoking the metaphor of Plato’s cave, Jameson writes that post-modern cultural production “can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real word but must, as in Plato’s cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls.”

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