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Title: The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books) by Lev Manovich ISBN: 0-262-63255-1 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 07 March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.91 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Highly recommended
Comment: (Planeta.com Journal) -- About a century ago the early years of cinema witnessed the creation of veritable masterpieces. For more than a generation (1980s-1930s) filmmakers produced seminal works that defined the very language of the medium. So at the turn of this century, how do we recognize the equivalent works in "new media" -- computers, the web and other digital compositions? A scientist and theoretician, Lev Manovich guides the way in his exceptional book.
New media links content and interface, providing an unlimited number of ways of accessing a work. This is the norm of the digital age. Manovich argues "modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative." (p. 234) But new media does not begin with the Web. In fact, there's no better place to begin than with the 1929 avant garde film classic, Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera," which serves as a guide in an innovative prologue.
Later Manovich sums up the achievement of this classic film: "Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers still have to learn -- how to merge database and narrative into a new form (p. 243).
The Language of New Media offers a rigorous theory of new media. The author discusses new media's reliance on traditions, such as the use of the rectangular frame. He also demonstrates how concepts from film theory and art history play a vital role in understanding where we stand today. This book is highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Critical Thinking about New Media
Comment: That Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media is a risk-taking and stimulating contribution to the discourse surrounding new media is evident even before page one. The book's prologue consists of short extracts indicating Manovich's central premises that will be fleshed out in the text. As short polemical notes, the quotations serve to engender argument as well as energize, performing the new thinking hinted at in Manovich's remarkable treatment of new media. By the time Manovich has thanked the various Internet mailing lists where he regularly shared excerpts of his text prior to its publication, and the hardware he used when writing The Language of New Media, the reader is attentive to the original way in which Manovich intends to deal with his vast subject. Given this book's title it bears asking what comprises the new media? Manovich enumerates them early on-"Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces" (8-9). What, then, are the new media's "language"? By language, Manovich intends both the diverse conventions used by new media practitioners to organize data and structure the user's experience, and the various discourses that surround the new media. Grounded in an analysis of the ways in which new media have appropriated the forms and conventions of older art and communications media, Manovich's central concern, and that of his book's first five chapters, is the influence of cinema's language on the new media; the final chapter examines the inverse. (The link to cinema should not be over-stated however, as Manovich never fails to include other relevant precedents ranging from Renaissance oil painting to Marey's photographic gun to WWII radar technology.) Each chapter concludes with compelling case studies that serve to define and elaborate the theories advanced. The contribution this remarkable book makes to the existing literature on new media and related topics is a product of the author's wide-ranging expertise and intellectual rigor. (Manovich holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture and has been working with computer media for almost twenty years as an artist, designer, animator, computer programmer, and teacher.) In assessing "new media objects" (his term), their technologies, and their style, Manovich is always mindful of how social, economic and cultural considerations inform and are informed by the very technologies and styles which they consider. Manovich studiously avoids ahistorical generalizations by asking what is different between more recent technologies and those preceding them; fortunately he does not hesitate to frequently conclude "not much." Overall, it is hard to over-estimate the importance of The Language of New Media to the field of the same name, as it is the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject. Readers from expert to novice will almost certainly be thankful for Manovich's studious attention to definitions, both those commonly (mis)used and those coined by the author. The Language of New Media is required reading not only for those concerned with the discourses surrounding new media, but also for anyone critically engaged with contemporary art and culture.
(A longer version of this review was first published in CAA.Reviews, August 2001.)
Rating: 3
Summary: An Unfortunate Classic
Comment: The language of the book is unneccessarilly opaque, and in it's attempts to tie the author's descriptive language with the language of current digital technology it is strained and often veers toward inaccuracy in desperation.
Ok, I said it. Sorry.
That said, the book offers a powerful theory of new media, and introduces a very useful vocabulary.
Bleah.
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Title: The New Media Reader by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Nick Montfort ISBN: 0262232278 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 14 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (Leonardo Books) by Peter Lunenfeld ISBN: 0262621371 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin ISBN: 0262522799 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Expanded Edition by Randall Packer, Ken Jordan, William Gibson ISBN: 0393323757 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 16 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Information Arts : Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology by Stephen Wilson ISBN: 0262731584 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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