Questions: Stefania Garassini, Milan
Answers: Lev Manovich, San Diego

Date: December 31, 2002



Q. Regarding Architecture, you mentioned the work of
Frank Gehry as an example of the influence of computer
on finding new solutions. Can you give me some other
examples of architects whose work is in your opinion
affected by the use of computers and explain me the
nature of this influence?

A. Today, all leading architects and certainly all young architects are designing 
with computers. Just as in cinema and a number of other cultural fields, what 
was new and unusual ten years ago now completely taken for granted. It is 
impossible to summarize all the different ways in which the use of computers 
for design, construction, and presentation has affected the profession, but 
looking at it "from the outside" I would say that the most visible effect so far has 
been the wide adaptation of new "soft" forms. What is interesting is that these 
forms now appear in designs of architects of all generations, including mature 
architects who already developed their own personal languages such as Zara 
Hadid and Eric Moss. It is one thing to see these forms in the work of those 
who have actively been working and thinking about computers and information 
society throughout their careers such as Greg Lynn, Asymptote or UN Studio Ð 
but I was quite shocked to see Hadid and Moss going "soft" in their recent 
design proposals.  

For me, the question of new forms in architecture connects to another question 
that I will try to deal in detail in my new book Info-Aesthetics: how can 
information society be represented symbolically? In particular, are there any 
spatial forms that may successfully symbolize this society the way simple 
geometric, and later streamlined forms of modernism came to symbolize 
industrial society? Is it, for example, appropriate to read the "blobby" computer-
generated forms I just mentioned not simply as a reflection of new software-
based design processes and not as a negation of forms of modernism and 
post-modernism, but rather as symbols? 

As a way to reflect about this question, I gave the following assignment to 
students in a three classes and workshops conducted in 2000 in Helsinki and 
San Diego: design a monument to information society. The idea of this 
assignment was to highlight that a new "post-computer/post-network" form 
may not look like form in its familiar sense of something complete, stable and 
finite in space and in time Ð something which blobs, ribbons and other 
computer generated representations recently favored by architects still are.

The first question leads us to a second question: how does computer/network 
changes our very concepts of form and representation? In the book I plan to 
discuss a number of new concepts of form in information society: form as 
constantly mutable; form as a distributed representation; form as emergence; 
form as signal defined in opposition to noise. I derive these concepts by 
looking at the basic ways in which computers and networks represent, 
organize, and communicate information. 

While none of these new concepts of form may be fully realizable as a built, 
material architecture today, and therefore strictly speaking the attempts by 
contemporary architects to build such forms should be classified as failures, 
the result is some of the most interesting architecture being realized and 
imagined today. That is, the search of architects to do the impossible Ð to 
dematerialize architecture altogether, to make it constantly mutable, to turn it 
into a network distributed in space and time, etc. Ð results in a variety of 
innovative and inspiring aesthetic hybrids merging forms of traditional 
architecture and the characteristics of computer/network based 
representations.  


Q. From which domain will the  "Griffith", the "Fellini"
of new media come from? 

A. They have already come from all cultural domains. Many of the most 
celebrated cultural objects of our time are made with computers: for instance, 
Frank GerryÕs architecture, Merce CunninghamÕs choreography, Andreas 
GurskyÕs photography. These and countless other artists use computer as a 
tool, so they don't call their work new media Ð but nevertheless, without 
computer they would not be able to make their aesthetic discoveries. 


Q. How was Soft cinema accepted by the audience? Do you
plan new versions of this work? 

A. Soft Cinema (www.manovich.net/softcinema) is a practical project that 
shares a number of ideas with Info-Aesthetics book. The project consists from 
large media database and custom software that edits movies in real time by 
choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules. The 
software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; 
it also chooses music tracks. In short, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a 
semi-automatic VJ (Video Jockey)Ñor more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).
The screen design of Soft Cinema movies adapts the new interfaces of 
information culture such as financial TV programs and Graphical User Interface 
of a computer. No longer simply a means of accessing and manipulating 
information and news, these interfaces become a new way to present a 
narrative. While a voice over narrates a fictional story, smaller windows 
"augment" the narrative by showing character's memories, associations, 
narrative alternatives, and summaries. 

The project was commissioned for the exhibition Future Cinema at ZKM. Soft 
Cinema is designed to take a number of forms during the next few years, 
including linear versions, different installation versions, and a number of Soft 
Cinema catalogs. While the underlying software that drives the project remains 
the same, each movie presents different narratives and uses different subsets 
of my media database.

While working on the project I got more and more interested in designing the 
architectural solution for it. The presence of all kinds of electronic displays is an 
essential part of contemporary architecture. This new "screen architecture" 
already has its classics (for instance, Prada store in NYC by OMA/ Kram, or 
Facsimile project by Diller + Scofilio) but since in the near future every surface 
may become an electronic screen and/or a working computer, we are just at 
the very beginnings of what promises to become a whole new field. Working on 
a smaller scale of a media installation, many artists (Gary Hill, Doug Aitken, 
etc.) explore the similar issues of space/screen. The difference between two 
practices lies in the emphasis between the two elements: architecture and 
display. ArchitectsÕ first priority is to cover up and organize physical space; 
displays are typically treated as additions to this space. Media installation 
artists usually proceed in the opposite direction: they start with images in 
space and then they construct some structure to organize viewerÕs interaction 
with these images. 

Soft Cinema installation is a small experiment pointing towards the possible 
future when the merger between architecture and media would require us to 
have coherent strategies to deal with the new surface/screen. Referencing 
"brandscaping" (the three-dimensional design of brand settings), early 
algorithmic computer art, and the logic of modernist art movements (in which 
painting, graphic design, architecture, and industrial design were typically 
driven by a single aesthetic system), we used the same algorithm to generate 
the screen layouts, the layout of the Soft Cinema book, and the 3D layouts of 
the Soft Cinema installation. If Le CourbusierÕs system of proportions was 
based on the dimensions of a human body, our system takes as its origin the 
dimensions of a DV NTSC image: 720 x 480 pixels. In addition, the contrast 
between various types of images (video, 2D animation, etc.) used in Soft 
Cinema movies is translated into the contrasting materials used in the 
installation.

As for reactions, it is too early to tell. However, the prototype of the project 
finished in September 2002 received an honorary mention in Image category at 
Transmediale 03 festival (Berlin, February 2003), so of course I am happy 
about this. 


Q. Can you tell me something about your new book on
infoesthetics? (In "the language of new media" you say
that you intenionally don't want to use the word
esthetics. Why did you change your mind?)

A. I already mentioned one of the questions that motivates the book in my 
answer to your question about architecture. The goal of the project is to scan 
contemporary culture to detect emerging aesthetics and computer-based 
cultural forms specific to information society. Its method is a systematic 
comparison of our own period with the beginning of the 20th century when 
modernist artists created new aesthetics, new forms, new representational 
techniques, and new symbols of industrial society. How can we go about 
searching for their equivalents in information society Ð and does this very 
question make sense? Can there be forms specific to information society, 
given that very concept of form as something solid, stable and limited in space 
and time becomes redefined with software and computer networks? Can 
information society be represented iconically, if the activities that define it Ð 
information processing, interaction between a human and a computer, 
telecommunication, networking Ð are all dynamic processes? How does the 
super-human scale of our information structures Ð from 16 million lines of 
computer codes making Windows OS, to forty years which would take one 
viewer to watch all video interviews stored on digital servers of the Shoah 
Foundation, to the Web itself which cannot be even mapped as a whole Ð be 
translated to the scale of human perception and cognition? In short, if the shift 
from modernism to "informationalism" (the term of Manual Castells) has been 
accompanied by a shift from form to information, can we reduce information to 
forms, meaningful to a human?

There are a few reasons why I am using the term aesthetics in the title. On the 
one hand, I am using the term in the sense of an overall style or cultural 
zeitgeist Ð the way it is possible to talk about the aesthetics of modernism or 
aesthetics of post-modernism as something shared across all cultural fields. 
In this sense, info-aesthetics is simply an abbreviation for the aesthetics of 
information society, whatever it may be. It is not meant to refer to beauty. 

On the other hand, one of the assumptions in the book is that in information 
society, cognitive work and information interfaces to do that work (which at this 
point equals to interfaces of popular software applications and human-
computer interface itself) have become "contaminated" by the aesthetic in its 
traditional meanings of something beautiful and non-functional. Think, for 
instance, about OS 10 (the new operating system for Macintosh computers): 
icons pop up when you pass the cursor over them, windows open up with a 
little dance, etc. This interface is no longer driven simply by functional concerns, 
the ay the original interface of the first 1984 Macintosh still was.  Similarly, think 
of the recent emphasis in product design (including the design of information 
appliances and computers) on curvy, anthropomorphic shapes that are meant 
to invoke an emotional response in the users, the way one may respond to a 
work of art or a human being.  

The term "info-aesthetics" is meant to refer to this intimate relationship 
between information (information work, interfaces to do this work) and 
aesthetics that I think is one of the key characteristics of our culture.