Manovich section 3

Manovich touches on some important overarching concepts at the beginning of section three. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the role of operations in computer use and in a larger cultural context. Much like he argued in the interface section, he seems to be saying that culture has an effect on operations and vice versa. “
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. Strategies of working with computer data become our general cognitive strategies. At the same time, the design of software and the human-computer interface reflects a larger social logic, ideology, and imaginary of the contemporary society (118).
I think this was an important concept in terms of the human-computer interface and I was interested in looking at how it can be applied to the operations.

The first concept Manovich talks about is selection. In this section, he talks about how much of what is created using new media is done so by assembling pre-existing elements into a new object. He uses movements in modern art to illustrate the move from creation to construction as shown through photomontage, but points out that the traditional form of art creation was still the “main operation of modern art.” He juxtaposes this with the modes of creation in the digital age, and argues that “electronic art from its very beginning was based on a new principle: modification of an already existing signal” (126). He likens the digital artist to a technician rather than aligning him with the romantic ideal of creator. What I took from this is that with the advent of software that supplies libraries of pre-existing objects and effects, the cultural objects from which an artist draws have changed. Given this, the objects a new media artist creates further change the perception of culture for the viewer. “The practice of putting together a media object from already existing commercially distributed media elements existed with old media, but new media technology further standardized it and made it much easier to perform” (130).

In the compositing section, Manovich shows the progression from montage into compositing. He shows the difference between the two and how technology has made this move an easy one. “Montage aims to create visual, stylistic, semantic, and emotional dissonance between different elements. In contrast, compositing aims to blend them into a seamless whole, a single gestalt” (144). Just as the computer has changed the way art is created by making selection a more standardized practice, it has enabled artists to create a false reality through the use of compositing. This use of technology to blur or in some cases erase the lines of reality further alters the way viewers see new media objects.

While the selection section covers the way new media objects are created and the compositing section covers the way we view these objects, the teleaction section goes a step further and talks about how we interact with the world around us through the use of computers. Not only can we passively view objects at a distance, we can now manipulate them. I most easily identified with the concept of long-distance hunting. In a research project I did, I found information on an internet hunting site that would allow users to actually shoot animals from their computers. The idea that technology has made it possible for people to interact with and manipulate the world around them from a distance is a very tangible way to understand how operations are effecting culture and vice versa.