Lev Manovich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Lev Manovich is an author of new media books and a professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, U.S. where he teaches new media art and theory. His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and has been translated into Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Chinese. According to two reviewers, this book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject"[1] and "it places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan"[2].

Contents

[edit] Biography

Manovich was born in Moscow where he studied fine arts, architecture and computer science. He moved to New York in 1981, receiving an M.A. in Cognitive Science (NYU, 1988) and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester 1993. His Ph.D. dissertation The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s.

Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include little movies, the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history, and Anna and Andy, a streaming novel (2000). His works have been included in many key international exhibitions of new media art. In 2002 ICA in London presented his mini-retrospective under the title Lev Manovich: Adventures of Digital Cinema.

Manovich has been teaching new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design, Helsinki. In 1993, students of his digital movie making classes at the UCLA Lab for New Media founded the Post-Cinematic Society which organized some of the first digital movie festivals based on Manovich's ideas about new media, such as database cinema.[3]

Currently Manovich is working on a new book Info-aesthetics.[citation needed] One recent art project is Soft Cinema which was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002-2003; traveling to Helsinki and Tokyo in 2003-2004).

Manovich's awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara, Fellowship from The Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin, and Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts.

[edit] The principles of new media

In his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Manovich describes the general principles underlying new media:

  • Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data
  • Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently
  • Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically
  • Variability: new media objects exist in multiple versions
  • Transcoding: a new media object can be converted into another format

[edit] Works

  • Software Takes Command. Released under CC license, November 20, 2008. http://www.softwarestudies.com/softbook .
  • The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
  • Database as a Symbolic Form (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998).
  • Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ CAA reviews
  2. ^ Telepolis
  3. ^ http://pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu/

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich"
Personal tools
Languages