Powerpoint on digital cinema

2. WHO IS LEV MANOVICH?
Our world, media, economy, and social relations all run on software.
~ LEV MANOVICH, SOFTWARE TAKES CONTROL -- RHIZOME MAGAZINE

3. DATABASE AS SYMBOLIC FORM
Following art historian Ervin Panofsky’s analysis of linear perspective
as a ’symbolic form’ of the modern age, we may even call the database
a new symbolic form of the computer age (or, as … Lyotard called it
in … The Postmodern Condition, ‘computerised society’), a new way
to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.

4. DATABASE AS MODEL OF REALITY
Indeed, if, after the death of God (Nietzche), the end of grand Narratives
of Enlightenment (Lyotard) and the arrival of the web (Tim Berners-
Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured
collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only
appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database.

5. LIVING THE DREAM
But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a
poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.

6. SOFT CINEMA
Photorealistic 3-D computer animation (that uses a
database]
http://www.softcinema.net/index.htm?reload

7. THE
•20th century filmakers are children of a machine
vision
• Live action narrative is the 20th century cinema
norm

8. PERFECT
•Soft cinema is true “art” :
• involves the painterly & the graphic (symbolic]
• maintains the discrete nature of space & vision [3-D]
• improves upon cinema’s convincing illusion of dynamic
reality [special effects, etc.]

9. MOVIE
•Live action narrative is an historical accident
•Soft cinema will take its place in history as the
proper - logical - form of cinema

10. COUNTER-ARGUMENT
Soft cinema +capitalist logic = flatties, organics & soft fuzzies
X bad
What do you think are the long term consequences for structuring
our experience of ourselves and of the world as “plastic art”?

11. BRIEFLY MCLUHAN
CULTURAL EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY
Cinema
Camera lens – eye, hand, leg
microphone – ear, voice
Electronic Media
Nervous system - McLuhan
Imagination - Manovich
New Media
Software – world, media,
economy & social relations
Database – memory
A technology extends one of our faculties
The effect of that extension changes [the scope] of our perception
MECHANICAL DIGITAL

12. Enhances
Design Process
VALUE: Quality of Image
Reverses Into
100% Digital Fabrication
VALUE: The Plastic Image
Retrieves
Discrete Nature of Space & Vision
VALUE: Manual Art (painterly &
graphic]
Obsolesces
Camera & Live Action
VALUE: Record of Life [naturalism]
Software
Cinema

13. VALUES?
I think Manovich’s article is a good example of human impoverishment when art is
equated with technique. But maybe I’m wrong.
What values and methods {from 20th century cinema} should we preserve in the
digital age?