Lev Manovich: public lecture

Public Lecture: Lev Manovich, Art After Compression
Date: Tuesday 15th November
Time: 18.00hrs
Place: Collegezaal, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam
Entry: Gratis, all welcome



Art After Compression

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/


This event is organised by Media Design Research, Piet Zwart
Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam.

http://www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
http://www.wdka.hro.nl/

Comments

, Jim Andrews

> 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.

Really? What has happened over time is the size of the hard drives have
increased and so have the sizes of the entities we save. A film can easily
take up more than a gigabyte. And a typical hard drive can hold then about a
hundred movies. And I imagine that part of the response to yet bigger hard
disks will be yet bigger entities. Some games, for instance, that you play
over the net are forever expanding their storage space on your hard drive
with new levels and environments and so on.

I don't think there are no limitations to data storage now, given that what
we store changes in response to the amount of storage space available. And
the net bandwidth. And whatever else.

Computer Science tells us that most computing problems are intractable and
that there are infinitely many of them. Which is to say we can always max
out whatever computer we have if it addresses the types of tasks it's
capable of. Film is not the end of the road.

Let's suppose that we ourselves operate at about 24 'frames per second' at
the visual level (never mind sound and touch and other sensory data). And in
a moment we take in, say, an area that is 4000x4000 in distinguishable
'pixels'. And that we can distinguish about 66666 different colours. Round
that to 65536=2^24 which would take 3 bytes to code. I'm not sure if those
numbers are right but I suspect they're in the ballpark.

3 bytes * 24 * 4000 * 4000 = 1,152,000,000 bytes per second = 1.152 Gb/sec.
of visual information.

Then there's sound and touch and smell and taste. As a rude approximation,
let's just say each of these is half the bandwidth of the visual.

So that'd put the whole critter at about 3.5 Gb/sec of sensory information.
CPU's can't handle that yet.

If the typical hard drive is about 100 Gb, that gives us about 33 seconds
per hard drive of full sensory storage.

ja
http://vispo.com