Software Takes Command

Lev Manovich

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623562618
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Scienze della comunicazione

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Software has replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before 21st century to create, store, distribute and interact with cultural artifacts. It has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination - a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st century. Offering the the first theoretical and historical account of software for media authoring and its effects on the practice and the very concept of 'media, ' the author of The Language of New Media (2001) develops his own theory for this rapidly-growing, always-changing field. What was the thinking and motivations of people who in the 1960 and 1970s created concepts and practical techniques that underlie contemporary media software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, Final Cut and After Effects? How do their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a 'medium' after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Lev Manovich answers these questions and supports his theoretical arguments by detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and the projects in motion graphics, interactive environments, graphic design and architecture. Software Takes Command is a must for all practicing designers and media artists and scholars concerned with contemporary media.

INTERNATIONAL TEXTS IN CRITICAL
MEDIA AESTHETICS

VOLUME #5

Founding Editor

Francisco J. Ricardo

Associate Editor

Jörgen Schäfer

Editorial Board

Roberto Simanowski

Rita Raley

John Cayley

George Fifield

Software
Takes
Command

Lev Manovich

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

1385 Broadway	50 Bedford Square
New York	London
NY 10018	WC1B 3DP
USA	UK

www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2013

© Lev Manovich, 2013

This work is published open access subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). You may re-use, distribute, reproduce, and adapt this work in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manovich, Lev.

Software takes command : extending the language of new media / by Lev Manovich.

pages cm (International texts in critical media aesthetics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62356-745-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-62356-817-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Computer software--Social aspects. 2. Social media. 3. Computers and civilization. 4. Mass media--Technological innovations. 5. Computer graphics. I. Title.

QA76.9.C66M3625 2013

006.7--dc23

2013002685

ISBN: 978-1-6235-6261-8

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

To Hyunjoo

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Understanding media

Software, or the engine of contemporary societies

What is software studies?

Cultural software

Media applications

From documents to performances

Why the history of cultural software does not exist

Summary of the book’s narrative

PART 1 Inventing media software

1Alan Kay’s universal media machine

Appearance versus function

“Simulation is the central notion of the Dynabook”

The permanent extendibility

The computer as a metamedium

2Understanding metamedia

The building blocks

Media-independent vs. media-specific techniques

Inside Photoshop

There is only software

PART 2 Hybridization and evolution

3Hybridization

Hybridity vs. multimedia

The evolution of a computer metamedium

Hybridity: examples

Strategies of hybridization

4Soft evolution

Algorithms and data structures

What is a “medium”?

The metamedium or the monomedium?

The evolution of media species

PART 3 Software in action

5Media design

After Effects and the invisible revolution

The aesthetics of hybridity

Deep remixability

Layers, transparency, compositing

After Effects interface: from “time-based” to “composition-based”

3D space as a media design platform

Import/export: design workflow

Variable form

Amplification

Conclusion

Software, hardware, and social media

Media after software

Software epistemology

Index

Acknowledgments

The ideas and arguments in this book are the result of the author’s interactions with hundreds of people over many years: students in classes, presenters at conferences, colleagues over email. I especially want to thank everybody who responded to my posts related to the ideas in this book on Twitter and Facebook as I was working on it from 2007 to 2012. They asked provocative questions, told me about relevant resources every time I asked, and encouraged me to go forward by asking when the book will be published.

The following people at a number of institutions played particularly key roles in the book’s evolution and publication, and I would like to thank them individually (they are listed alphabetically by institution):

Bloomsbury Academic (the book publisher):

Katie Gallof, Acquisitions Editor, Film and Media Studies.

Jennifer Laing, Copy-editing.

Francisco J. Ricardo, Editor, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics.

Clare Turner, Lead Designer.

Software Studies Initiative (my lab established in 2007 at Calit2):

Staff:

Jeremy Douglass, Post-doctoral researcher, 2008–2012 (now Assistant Professor, English Department, UCSB).

Jay Chow, stuff member, 2012– (design, visualization, and programming).

Collaborators:

Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD.

Elisabeth Losh, Director of Academic Programs, Sixth College, UCSD.

California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2):

Hector Bracho, media services.

Doug Ramsey, Director of Communications.

Ramesh Rao, Director, UCSD Division, Calit2.

Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2.

Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA):

Sheldon Brown, Director; Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD.

Lourdes Guardiano-Durkin, MSO.

Todd Margolis, Technical Director.

The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY):

Matthew Gold, Associate Professor; Director, CUNY Academic Commons.

Tanya Domi, Director of Media Relations.

Chase Robinson, Provost and Senior Vice-Chancellor.

Jane Trombley, Executive Director for Communication and Marketing.

Software Studies Series (The MIT Press):

Matthew Fuller and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (series co-editors).

Douglass Sery, Editor, New Media, Game Studies, Design.

Finally, I want to add special thanks to Larry Smarr, Director of California Institute for Telecommunication and Information who invited me to participate in the Institute activities, helped to start my lab, and made it possible for me to work with the next generation of computing technologies being invented at Calit2 and the people inventing them.

Large parts of the book were written and edited in my favorite cafes and hotel lobbies, and I would like to thank their staff:

The Standard, West Hollywood, California.

Mondrian, West Hollywood, California.

L’Auberge Del Mar, California.

Del Mar Plaza, Del Mar, California.

Starbucks, Del Mar, California.

Sheraton Tribeca Hotel, New York.

Micki Kaufman did a great job of proofreading the manuscript at the last moment and catching many mistakes.

The book cover uses a part of a visualization created by William Huber using ImageJ software and our custom plug-ins. The visualization consists of 22,500 frames sampled at 1 frames per 3 seconds from a 62.5 hour video of the complete game play.

The book was written on Apple laptops (MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) using Microsoft Word. I used iPhone for email and social networks, and for occasional note taking.

For communication with the colleagues and the publisher, I relied on Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Twitter, and Facebook.

The book illustrations were prepared by me and Jay Chow using the same popular software applications analyzed in this book: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects.

I am grateful to thousands of programmers and engineers who developed the software products mentioned above, and continue updating them with new features.

Introduction

Understanding media

I called my earlier book-length account of the new cultural forms enabled by computerization The Language of New Media (completed in 1999, it came out in 2001). By that time, the process of adoption of software-based tools in all areas of professional media production was almost complete, and “new media art” was in its heroic and vibrant stage—offering many possibilities not yet touched by commercial software and consumer electronics.

Ten years later, most media became “new media.” The developments of the 1990s have been disseminated to the hundreds of millions of people who are writing blogs, uploading photos and videos to media sharing sites, and use free media authoring and editing software tools that ten years earlier would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Thanks to the practices pioneered by Google, the world is now used to running on web applications and services that have never been officially completed but remain forever in Beta stage. Since these applications and services run on the remote servers, they can be updated anytime without consumers having to do anything—and in fact, Google is updating its search algorithm code a few times a day. Similarly, Facebook is also updating its code daily, and sometimes it breaks. (Facebook’s motto expressed in posters around its offices is “Move Fast and Br...