(David Bowie in) Space
This chapter was really difficult for me to understand this week. I think it was mostly due to the various references he makes to gaming that I have absolutely no experience or basic knowledge of. So, I am going to try to help myself make sense of this chapter… Or at least some of the main ideas he discusses. Please forgive me if I skip portions that seem important, as I can only process so much!
I am seeing more and more the connections Manovich tries to make between culture and media. Often he begins backwards from the introduction into the chapter. We see this with his initial discussion about Razorfish and how the company has tried to create its physical space to mimic the digital space. Moreover, the change they ultimately wanted to make was a one-stop user experience, where not only could users interact with digital buttons, but also find real buttons. This example sets up Manovich’s discussion about virtual space and how we, from modernists to post modernist, then to super modernists create and understand space.
Manovich begins again by continuing along his original premise that media, or in this chapter, database, is a “cultural form of its own” (219). He reiterates his original premise that just like the other parts of computer/ digital media, each media presents a different model of the world, or the time in which it was created. He then suggests that the database can be seen as a “new symbolic form of the computer age” (219). Whereas we used the narrative to drive our thinking and ordering (or experience) of the world, now we have the database, which too, illustrates how we experience and understand the world we live in. Just like in previous chapters, Manovich demonstrates how media influences culture and vice versa. So, just as narrative was the dominant social form for modernity to access data, the creation of the database begins to rival it so that narrative “becomes just one method of accessing data among many” (220). Therefore, the old hierarchies inherent in modernity are flattened (to use Manovich’s term) and we learn to see knowledge not as a linear progression, but as miscellaneous, and equal. So, since narrative and database compete for territory within human culture, Manovich concludes that they are natural enemies since “each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (225). Therefore, just as narrative was illustrative of modernist culture and the hierarchy of knowledge, now database demonstrates the belief of knowledge as absent from authority.
The second main idea that Manovich discusses is found in tracing the progression of the idea of space through the lens of each cultural shift, namely gaming. What he calls “Navigable space” is among media, which Manovich considers a cultural form. “In other words it something that transcends computer games and in fact…computer culture as well” (248). He begins in the 1980’s with “road movie” and motion simulators which simulate traveling in a vehicle. Eventually he leads us through cinema to virtual reality. What first begins as a series of photos every 3 meters, becomes a series of pictures then a virtual experience where the viewer does not only see out of her own eyes, but out of the eyes of the person experiencing the virtual reality. (I know I am skipping through about 20 pages, but it is needed to make a concise point) So, just as modernity informed those who created media at the time, super modernity informs the current (2000) experience of new media. Now, the experience is far more complex than simply playing a shooter on a screen, but you begin to experience new media from a variety of viewpoints. Thus in virtual gaming “visitors are confronted with a subjective and partial view…they are literally limited by this person’s point of view (283). The space you navigate becomes an alternate reality, not only for you, but once removed. As the user, you are not watching a film that already happened (and was filmed last year), but you watch through the eyes of someone else as it happens. You experience their experience play by play as the camera on top of their head acts as an eye. Specifically Manovich draws a line of progression within media as it goes from the man walking through a crowd, or physical space, in hopes of disappearing in the mass of people, to Vertov’s camera, then to a virtual simulator. Each new media is then reflective of (and limited by) the time in which it was made and thus the way that culture understood how to navigate through space. Therefore, arriving at super modernity, “traditional places are replaced by equally institutionalized non-places, a new architecture of transit and impermanence”, and therefore, “non-place becomes the new norm, the new way of existence”(280) reflecting the culture and the media. Each new media is a product of the time it was made, and at the same time, works to influence the culture at large.
Manovich ends with an interesting analogy. He compares cultural history to a river that “cannot suddenly change its course; its movement is that of a spline rather than a set of straight lines between points” (285). Manovich traces the outlines of new media past our linear understanding to one that naturally branches from the past to the present in a way that seems more miscellaneous and unpredictable, but firmly rooted in “what came before.” (285).
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