III. the operation

1. III. The Operations
Lev Manovich
The Language of New Media

2. 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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3. 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.
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4. 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.
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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. “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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11. “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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