So Many Pranks Made Possible By New Media Operations, So Little Time

Let me use the image of this gloriously painted house (and the accompanying story) to illustrate the main features of Manovich' chapter three.

At the beginning of this last summer my wife and I were visiting Jackson to see the place we were going to move into. My sister-in-law wanted us to check out the house (the one in this image) that she was going to move into while we were there. She was badgering us a little (and it was April Fools day), so we decided to play a prank--we took a picture, then edited it so it had these horrible colors. We texted her and told her that the landlady must have painted it since she last saw it. Little did we know, the landlady was a little strange and may have done something like this, so when my sister-in-law saw this image via email, she freaked out (more or less).

So, how does this fit into Chapter 3 and this week's reading? New media designers employ certain operations--"cut, copy, paste, search, composite, transform, filter" (Manovich 118)--as embedded in computer software (but also mirrored in culture) and using ready-made parts (software, digital resources, etc) to create new media objects.

I took an image I already had and applied software filters that I personally selected. I didn't make the digital camera or the software I used, yet I was the "author" of this new media object because I selected the filters and areas to apply them to. As Manovich says on page 127, "Anybody can become a creator by simply providing a new menu, that is, by making a new selection from the total corpus available."

Also, in manipulating this image I have created a virtual space (138) because the original, white painted house was replaced by a non-existent, freakish, easter-egg house. There is other more convincing compositing I could have done, especially if I had included 3-D virtual spaces and camera movements. The drawback of this image is that it doesn't really reflect Manovich' interesting montage discussion (although if I would have created a "temporal montage" (148) collection of edited photos, my sister-in-law would have really freaked out). But this image does reflect computers' emphasis of spatial dimensions as opposed to film's emphasis of temporal ones.

The third example of operations that Manovich gives deals with "tele" words--teleaction, telepresence, telecommunications--and isn't a mode of production as much as it is a mode of accessing that production. Setting up a live-feed video camera would have given my sister-in-law a sense of telepresence: "real-time communication with a physically remote location" (171). I'm not sure if my example sheds as much light on teleaction as does the hypertextualized "Xenaverse" dissertation example in the Hocks essay, but still.

In closing, here's two of the digital works of art that Manovich mentioned:

Hannah Hoch's "Cut With the Cake Knife"

and Paul Citroen's "Metropolis"