NAVIGABLE SPACES

I. Lev Manovich The Language of New Media

 

Navigation = moving through mediated and unmediated spaces

Navigation = organizing, linking, searching, sequentializing using computer technologies

 

1929 Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera

 

1. Cinematic way of seeing the world, visual esperanto: we all speak the language of the interface (e.g. run applications, send email)

2. Directing the virtual camera creates a new mobility and unusual points of views

3. Editing: strings of images and images within images

4. Realities get fabricated through the image

5. Layering of images

6. Cameraperson penetrates all kinds of new spaces

7. Disruption of physical space and matter, turning objects into 'mobile signs' (telecommunication)

8. Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but another reality

9. Database imagination

10. Texts/Metatexts eg. audience watching a text

11. Movies do not create a coherent language, but endless, unwinding techniques and 'effects'

12. The effects are not just effects but they require meaning

13. MTV is 'mannerism' ... we are looking for a 'metafilm'

14. The person who walks through a city - the datacowboy who zooms through pure data. Going beyond simple human navigation

15. Avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software

16. Cinema was born from a loop - camera moves around and records what it sees

17. Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?

18. Spatial montage plays an important role

19. Multiple windows

20. Density of contemporary information displays

II. Synthetic Pleasures

 

1. Do you think that 3D space is a meaningful or overrated evolution in the history of computer programming? What kinds of applications are meaningful articulations of new notion of navigation?

2. Have you ever entered an immersive VR installation? How was this experience? Could a VR installation ever be anything else besides an aesthetic environment ?

3. Do you agree with the movie Synthetic Pleasures that we engineer synthetic environments because we have become dissatisfied with other ones? Are we just affected and conditioned by new technologies or do we have an uplifting ideology accompanying our creation of synthetic pleasures?

4. Manovich p. 262-263 Navigable spaces should reflect the anthropological space of navigators (their human subjectivities) and simluated new spaces. Do you know of any programs that accommodate this double viewpoint? eg. Cronenberg movie Existenz

5. Manovich p. 267-268 Manovich emphasizes the importance of navigable art works. Why is this case?

6. The flaneur (equals the net user) is a subjective person whose gaze picks up bits and pieces of surrounding urban people and realities. In this way s/he also gets in touch with communities. The flaneur differs from the wilderness hero or heroine (equals the virtual space navigator) Discuss the two characters.

7. Manovich 270-271 How would you describe the 'data dandy'?

III. STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

IV. Timothy Leary - Cyberpunk personalities and collectives

eg. RT Mark! http://www.rtmark.com/