"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.
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Manovich offers an important insight which distinguishes the computer as an interface to film - its accessibility. This is extremely important for the purpose of my research in the modular, open-source camera, as it is an "Esperanto," also, that hybridizes the ease of the computer interface with the more tactile visualization of the cinematic medium.
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