Oh yeah! There is this website that I showed in class when my group presented Hamlet one the Holodeck. It was rpa.com. I just wanted to let y'all know again, because it really shows what Manovich has talking about in terms of the two privileged forms of new media: database and navigable space (214). Seriously, this website (as well as another one called 360degrees.org) are my favorite conceptual websites right now, and you should all love them too!

The database logic is very relevant to my thesis topic of the digital biography. I discuss the two main benefits of this new biography as being all of the multimedia content it can hold, as well as its ability to let users decide how they experience the biographically presented life. Manovich acknowledges this new format: “Another example of a database form is a multimedia genre that does not have an equivalent in traditional media—CD-ROMs devoted to a single cultural figure such as a famous architect, film director, or write. Instead of a narrative biography, we are presented with a database of images, sound recordings, video clips, and/or texts that can be navigated in a variety of ways” (220). He later says that the Internet holds this same function (220). I feel affirmed that he agrees with me that the digital biography is fundamentally something new.

“Indeed, if after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of Grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database” (219).

I was thinking about Manovich’s discussion of remixing in “Models of Authorship in New Media,” when I remembered a really interesting example that I encountered in one of my classes last semester. DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) is a writer and DJ who recently created a project called “Rebirth of a Nation”. This piece is basically a remix of the technically brilliant yet horribly racist film “Birth of a Nation”. DJ Spooky remixes both the images and the sound, providing his own soundtrack. He says that, “By remixing the film along the lines of dj culture, I hoped to create a counter-narrative, one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out the ashes of that explosion.” To me, this approach seemed very much in line with Manovich’s view of remix. DJ Spooky aims to engage with the film in deeper, more deliberate manner than is implied by a term like “appropriation”. As Manovich says, "'remixing' is a better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which 'appropriation' does not have."

In his article "Models of Authorship in New Media," Manovich brings up "interactivity as collaboration between the author and the user" as another model of authorship. He uses focus groups as an example of this. However, in the last few years, these types of interactions are increasing and becoming even more collaborative. One particular example is the rise in prominence of fan culture. Snakes on the Plane, for instance, is an interesting case of viral marketing, as you all know. The most infamous line from the film, was shot afterwards based on a popular fan created internet video. There was also a music content, where the winners would be featured on the soundtrack of SoaP.

For the time being, I will write out the questions I had for one Lev Manovich in response to “The Forms”

On page 215, Manovich writes that within computer culture “the user navigates through a virtual space both to work and play, whether analyzing scientific data or killing enemies in Quake”. While I can understand the main point behind this, my first reaction was – that doesn’t exactly add up. In games, there is a created “world” and sphere that is virtual and navigable – with databases and scientific information, I get the vibe that there is not so much of a difference between the virtual experience and the real experience of looking at pure information. I’d think the graphs tables and such would be just on a screen as opposed to within a book – and while that is indeed different in many wanys, it didn’t seem so comparable to computer game worlds, personally.

I wrote this post back in September as I mistakenly reviewed Manovich earlier, but I'd like to post it again since this time it's more relevant to our upcoming discussion (yes I can be a little bit slow times).

Being a videogamer since I was a wee little kid, it was really nice to read about the scholarly merits of computer games as a true form of "new media". Manovich writes how "In short, the computer database and the 3-D computer-based virtual space have become true cultural forms- general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world" (215).

Within the context of this class and this blog, it seems that the real time, face to face interaction of in-class discussion is best for the development of a collaborative discourse on the readings, whereas this blog, by virtue of it's participants and the constraints placed upon it, seems to priveledge or atleast reward insubstantial and incomplete musings on unrelated or only tangentially related topics.

Therefore, I will herein discuss, not the salient points of the reading, but a stylistic element that stuck out to me, namely Manovich's use of "she" as the generic pronoun. I am not sure if Manovich is a man/woman/other/unspecified, I had the impression that Lev was a male name, but I'm not totally sure, but I find the unmarked use of "she" as the generic to be an interesting one.

I don't pretend to be hipster enough to know really anything about this, but isn't the type of remix that in the New Media article DJ Tim Simenon is talking about now called a mash-up? Is that what we're calling it these days?

Anyhow, from what I've heard, mash-ups are kind of amazing and kind of rock my world. They aren't much different from what Manovich is describing except instead of manipulating a single track with an anonymous extra beat or mixing around one artists' track and turning it into a more upbeat or slower version, mash-ups instead mix two tracks by usually very very different artists in ways that present the best of both tracks. The first one I heard was on the radio this summer and it was Gnarls Barkley and the Raconteurs, a mash-up of "Crazy" and "Steady as she Goes" and named, appropriately, "Crazy as she Goes". So I heard this and thought, you know, that this was just a crazy and kind of cool endeavor one DJ embarked upon until I discovered Girl Talk. Girl Talk is a little bit different because he [yeah, it's just this one dude, crazy right], as Pitchfork so succintly put it, "crams six or eight or 14 or 20 songs into frenetic rows, slicing fragments off 1980s pop, Dirty South rap, booty bass, and grunge, among countless other genres. Then he pieces together the voracious music fan's dream: a hulking hyper-mix designed to make you dance, wear out predictable ideas, and defy hopeless record-reviewing". Sooo it's a few more than two songs, but it's still equally incredible. If you want to see a video of this man in action (who will also be in action next semester in Dom's Social Room!!!), check out this video.

Peter Greenaway complains that “the linear pursuit – one story at a tie told chronologically – is the standard format of cinema”(Manovich 237). Do you think that films with multiple narratives such as Closer or Love Actually are approaching the road where Joyce, Eliot, and Perec have already arrived or do films need to adopt even more experimental styles (Man with a Movie Camera) to fully reach a place where they could be considered on par with these masters of experimental narrative?