Repeating Manovich

Well, since some of my ideas on Manovich were put out inadvertantly, I'll
run with it a bit.

First of all, I think he _is_ doing important work that's of merit, as in
general it's my belief that traditional scholars are still working through
Formalism and Conceptualism, and New Media is beyond the capacity of about =
90% in regards to
understanding of the culture, the infrastructural issues/practice of
computational media, let alone modes of representation. I don't look for
any meaningful work from any traditional art historians for at least ten
years. Therofre, it's up to those in the trenches - us.

As for Manovich, the pieces I'm most familiar with are LoNM, and a piece he
did in SMAC called "MetaMedia". For the first seminal book, he makes a lot
of good points regarding the elements of new media qwhich echo the classic
essay by Antin on video. However grounding it in film and video theory, as
well as taking those aspects and using them as a form of progressivist
timeline only addresses certain forms of new media (of which there are
many), and suggests that screen-based new media is an extension of film and
video, which only has elements of truth, as there are far more historical,
conceptual, and technical components which need to be addressed than Manvich
is doing.

I hear the argument that this would unfocus the argument and that some posi=
tion
needs to be made clear. I agree with the latter, and only with the former
in regards to the framing of Manovich's thesis, which is my point of
contention. Perhaps if a more culturally-based, nonlinear approach to a
criticism of New Media might create a more cogent narrative, but of course
this is much less accessible to the genre of formalized art history. At
least it's a good first step.

Second, in the MetaMedia argument, Manovich suggests that one of the unique
components of New Media is its quality of MetaMedia, in that it is a medium
which is composed of numerous other media to create a synthetic whole.
Although I agree with the basic thrust of the argument, to say that this is
a unique model is far from accurate. One could say that from a historical
sense theatre has been a surpeme form of metamedia, as well as the
performative experiments by Wagner, Kandinsky, Dadaists, Futurists, the
Bauhaus, and the Wooster Group, not to mention Duchamp's Valises and
rotograms, which on occasion used. Perhaps one could say that the way the
media are brought together in a more dynamic random access fashion woudl to
put it in a stronger context, but there have been MetaMedia for over two
thousand years, but not in the representational mode specific to computatio=
nal media.

I think you can see that I'm not a Fukuyama adherent who believes that New
Media is a radical break with history, nor do I feel that New Media is a
linear extension of traditionalism. My approach is that there is a real
discontinuity or irregularity in the development of the different new media
and their modes of representation which are specific to their given context
and moment of execution which are often specific. Furthermore, since New
Media has not superceded all previous forms of praxis, I would also assume
that the cultural model of a historiography of New Media would be accretive
as well as discontinuous. By this, I mean that New Media culture, or now
not-so-new-media-because-other-media-will-be-bound-to-be-newer-than-new-medi
a-but-that-would-infinitely-complicate-aestetic-discourse-at-this-time,
would represent an additional ring on the tree of cultural practice, or at
least additiona clades/strata/sodalities in the architectonics of same. Of
course, this is a less linear approach, which is not as accessible to the
traditional historian's mindset.

As for Lev being the new Clement, seems to be the case for the moment, which
I'm a bit leery of. For his time, I feel that Greenberg had a broader
understanding of his milieu than Manovich does at this time, but then we're
talking about placing one man's ouevre against another at opposite ends of
their career tracks, which is grossly unfair. Lev's doing excellent and
valid work, I merely think that he is addressing a far narrower range of
subjects than people percieve, and offers only one possible critical
framework for the theorizing of a relatively narrow genre of New Media,
which I feel is only one of many, one that I have other ideas on.

But bravo for saying that techne does not supercede content.
This has been my contention for a long, long time - at least a decade.