The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, II

"Eisenstein's authoritatrianism, demonstrated in his dream to control over the viewer's processes of conceptualization and emotion, does not extend to the removal of the artist's body from the process of art production. If you do this, ten you get merely assemblages, mechanical organisms. And yet, that is precisely what digital imagery promises us: not just the liberation of the image from its connection with 'nature,' with the physical world, but the removal of all traces of the body in favor of the protocols controlled through comptuer codes and software packages." p. 23

Rieser, Martin, and Andrea Zapp. The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (Bfi Film Classics (Paperback)). British Film Institute, 2002.

The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, I

"There is no need to dwell on silly notions such as the digital media's alleged development of some form of non-linear narrative: narrative constatly loops back and branches out, condenses and proliferates uncontrollably, which is precisely why the 'meaning' of a story can never be fixed once and for all...

In the same vain, interactivity has always been a feature of any representational media from religious rituals to painting, novels and cinema. Indeed, pen and papaer constitue an 'interactive' mediun, and interactivity has been a significant eature from classical Chinese poetry to the call-and-response structures of gospel and jazz music, to Surrealism's 'exquisite corpses' and to just about all forms of commercial verbal and imaged discourses in which feedback machanisms have played a determining role for at least a century." p. 14

Rieser, Martin, and Andrea Zapp. The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (Bfi Film Classics (Paperback)). British Film Institute, 2002.

The Language of New Media, V

"And this is why Vertov's film has aparticular relevance to new media. It proves that it is possible to turn 'effects' into a meaningful artistic language. Why is it that in Witney's computer films and music video effects are just effects, whereas in the hands of Vertov they acquire meaning? Because in Vertov's film they are motivated by a particular argument, which is that the new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them, summed up by Vertov in his term 'kino-eye', can be used to decode the world. As the film progresses, straight footage gives way to manipulated footage; newer techniques appear one after another, reaching a roller-coaster intensity by the film's end - a true orgy of cinematography. It is as though Vetov restages his dsicovery of the kino-eye for us, and along with him, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov's goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitementm, as he discovers a new language for film. This gradual process of discovery is films main narrative, and it is told through a catalog of discoveries, Thus, in the hands of Vertov, the database, this normally static and 'objective' form, becomes dynamic and subhective. nmore important, Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and artist still have to learn - how to merge database and narrative into a new form." p. 243

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2002.

The Language of New Media, IV

"Whose vision is it? it is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the furue, when it will be augmented by computer grapcis and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality." p. 202

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2002.

The Language of New Media, III

"Dynamic, real-time, and interactive, a screen is still a screen. Interactivity, simulation, and telepresence: As was the case centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat, rectangular surface, existing in the space of our body and acting as a window into another space. We still have not left the era of the screen."

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2002.

The Language of New Media, II

"A hundred years after cunema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. In this respect, the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto - a goal that preoccupied many film artists and critics int he 1920s, from Griffith to Vertov. Indeed, today millions of computer users communicate with each other through the same computer interface. And in contrast to cinema where most 'users' are able to understand cinematic language but not speak it (ie make films), all computer users can speak the language of the interface. They are active users of the interface, employing it to perform many tasks: send e-mail, organize files, run various applications, and so on." pp. 78~79

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2002.

The Language of New Media, I

"...his interface was a film camera, that is, an anthropomorpic simulation of human vision - not computer algorithms. Thus, Vertov stands halfway between Baudelaire's flaneur and today's computer user. No longer just a pedestrian walking down a street, but not yet Gibson's data cowboy who zooms through pure data armed with data-mining algorithms[...] In his research on what can be called the 'kino-eye interface,' Vertov systematically tried different ways to overcome what he thought were the limits of human vision. He mounted cameras on the roof of a building and a mvoing automobile; he slowed and sped up film speed; he superimposed a number of images tofether in time and space (temporal montage and montage within a shot). Man with a Movie Camera is not only a database of city life in the 1920s, a database of film techniques, and a database of new operations of visual epistemology, but also a database of new interface operations that together aim to go beyond simple human navigation through physical space." pp. 275~276

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2002.