Public Lecture: Lev Manovich

Public Lecture: Lev Manovich, 'Art After Compression'
Date: Tuesday 15th November
Time: 18.00hrs
Place: Collegezaal
Entry: Gratis, all welcome




Art After Compression

Abstract

All human art can be thought of as a form of compression - condensing
individual and collective experiences, memory, and knowledge into symbols,
icons, short narratives, and images. While there are many reasons for this,
even if humans ever wanted to create significantly more detailed
representations, the limitations of storage media would not allow this.

This situation fundamentally changed over the last few years as the
developments in IT now make possible for us for the first time to record
(and consequently organize and access) as much data as we want. How does IT
industry, computer science and engineering research, media design and art
are responding to this new 'post-compression' condition? What kind of media
art can we create today when we can capture the world without any
limitations.

I will discuss developments across these different areas pointing towards a
number of new cultural strategies which already becoming visible. The
examples discussed will include Sokurov's film 'Russian Arc,' interactive
virtual spaces by Masaki Fujihata, the rise of database art, visual search
engines, Microsoft's MyLifeBits project, work on metadata standards and sensor
networks.


BIO

Lev Manovich <www.manovich.net> is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the
Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT
Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media
history since Marshall McLuhan." He is a Professor of Visual Arts,
University of California, San Diego <visarts.ucsd.edu> and a Director of The
Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology <www.calit2.net>. He is Currently research
Fellow at Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de
Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. http://www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/