ART 272 Spring 2009, Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Manovich, Deleuze questions here:
12 comments:
Anonymous
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Under the Database Logic section Manovich proceeds to talk about the creation of databases, however can one really call it creating? Manovich says the “creation” of databases includes collecting data and organizing it, creating it from scratch. Moreover texts need to be written, photographs need to be taken, video and audio material need to be recorded or digitized from already existing media. The main point is that databases are generated more so than created, so are they rather an imitation as discussed by Young in the Raymond Williams article. In that article Young stated that imitation was works wrought up out of pre-existing material, and one cannot make a database out of nothing.
In addition is there a difference between a person organizing the information/objects in a database and the avant –gardiste who rearranges fragments as stated in Burger’s reading? Or is the only difference is that databases can hold more info and is done with technology and not so much the artist’s hand?
Manovich describes the role of digitalization in the craze of archiving and digitalizing all forms of media-- books, videotapes, photos, audio, etc-- into huge databases. How is this related to the way written language allowed a memory based on written records, making accessible information to those far removed from its original source?
Manovich tends to treat narrative and database as two separate entities in media-- "two competing imaginations... two essential responses to the world". Is the popularity of databases really something new that comes out of new media... and why are databases and narratives necessarily competing? doesn't the interaction of database and narrative mirror the way we process information in our brains... it seems human nature is to try to construct narrative in order to aid understanding, but narrative must inevitably come from a database?
1. Manovich writes, "If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?" (410). Manovich implies that databases, in the sheer amount of information they contain, can detract from narrative. However, particularly in the field of journalism, "new media" is all about finding new ways to tell stories. It's not about getting rid of narrative, but making narrative more interactive and accessible, similar to the video games Manovich mentions. Audio slideshows, videos, photo galleries and the like appear all over news outlet Web sites. Some serve to illustrate written stories, while others take the place of articles and attempt themselves to tell the story of a certain person, an event, etc. How do these things operate in the world of the database? Do these things actually bolster narrative like they're supposed to, or do they end up undercutting it by replacing written articles?
Manovich says computer games are experienced by their players as narratives. The game requires a participant to play it out and reveal a story, and that participant's choices change the direction of the story. Where is the narrative? Is it in the game or in the participant or do they share roles? Or is it just the way the game is experienced? This relationship of narrative to participant seems unique.
Some history might be helpful in the section on Database Logic. He is talking about New Media, and while that refers to digitization, I doubt that it's a unique movement. What other technological movements from the past are similar to this or could shed light on it? The development of writing comes to mind - while it allowed us to preserve memories, it likely hurt our ability to remember. Could epic poetry and works such as the Iliad have been possible in an age with the printing press? Maybe that's irrelevant, and isolating New Media is actually appropriate.
Deleuze mentions that, "We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others." He ends the essay using the same serpent/mole metaphor. I'm a little confused about how this relates to the bigger picture of the individual being controlled via different mechanisms of industry. Is it the individual who has become the serpent or the control mechanism?
Deleuze also writes about how Guattari imagines a world in which a computer tracks each person's position--either allowing or forbidding access through various barriers. In this extreme society of control we give up all sovereignty. This is seen in many science fiction films such as Minority Report. Is this the direction in which our "democratic," American society is going or is it an exaggeration of what is already in place? What would Manovich believe in the case of the database generation?
As Deleuze writes, "Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by the specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center of the 'soul of the corporation.' . . .The operation of markets is now the instrument of social cntrol. . .Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous." I immediately remembered this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/contemporary-art-is-a-fraud-says-top-dealer-1628929.html If what Deleuze and Johnson write is true, has the art world become a space of elitist commodification with an avant-garde facade? Is contemporary art sincere? How does our understanding of worth change over time?
1) Deleuze makes a point in his essay that enclosed institutions as the family, school, hospital, and factory, are already acknowledged as "finished" and are in no need of reforms. How has he decided this? Does any created organization even have a finite term of completion? Society progresses because of the acknowledgment that there is more to be accomplished. If Deleuze is correct in his assumption, then should hospitals, for instance, stop making reforms to their medical practices/improvements? Is Deleuze suggesting we settle at the current situation?
2) In making rivals of disciplinary societies and societies of control, Deleuze uses the example of the corporation replacing the factory. He argues that "the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, diving each within," thus, demeaning the concept of "salary according to merit." In inferring that within a factory, all individuals, working as a single, unified body, are treated equally, he fails to account for equal opportunity. Within a factory imposed system, isn't the force of suppressing all individuals to the same level (treating them all as equal pawns) not also divisive, since individuals are not all born with the same capabilities? And unrest is stirred when the chance to rise and improve is not plausible. Therefore, corporation-based societies seem inevitable, especially since hierarchy exists in all aspects of life. Take for instance, the animal kingdom. It seems to be the case that whether society is factory-based or corporation-based, individuals lose out on both ends.
How does Manovich's database/narrative pair relate to writerly and readerly texts that we talked about with the Barthes essay? They aren't exactly the same, but I see some parallels in the closed nature of a narrative. How does this relate to the New York Times article we looked at which discussed the new demands on television shows to create not just a narrative, but a franchise with an interactive website and spin offs and a whole line of related products? What is the difference between "wrapping a narrative around a database" and manipulating the narrative into a database itself? Why are these two treated as opposing forces, with so much effort to bring them together? Deleuze's "perpetual training" is a strong image for someone who is leaving one university system only to enter another next fall. my friend said to me just yesterday that her grades in high school were more important that she thought. "highschool grades effect where you go to college, where you go to college effects where you go to grad school, and that effects the possibilities open to you at the end of it all." it is possible to see everything as setting up more dominoes for the next stage, as a "closed system" we have no control over, a rigid, readerly format that we just follow until we die. So what is the "writerly" equivalent? Where do we get to have input? I hear Deleuze's plea for this, but I am not sure that his proposed system is plausible. It seems as though he is bending over backwards to keep institutions which necessarily need to be demolished in order to adopt this entirely different philosophy.
Deleuze describes our society in terms of control and enclosed spaces. Does art represent an "escape" from this control due to themes of expressionism, freehandedness, and abstraction, or does it represent an example of this control due to the institutions associated with art? Manovich contrasts the database with the narrative, describing one as inventory and the other as cause and effect. In art, is it possible to create a database without any semblance of a narrative? Does the artist's decisions, arrangements, or subject choices in themselves constitute a form of narrative or cause and effect?
Like several other essays we have already read, Deleuze begins discussing the concept of prescribed spaces in which individuals move between in a disciplinary society. Assuming for a second that we agree with the notion that the people who work in these environments do not receive the equality of their labor, does that only refer to the people working at the bottom of the labor force? How does that relate to the individuals that invested their personal capital into creating a profitable enterprise? Do they see more of their earned profit, then? Or are they, too, just a cog in the metaphorical machine of capitalism?
Also, I'm not sure that I agree with Manovich in that database and narrative are natural enemies. There have been several artists, including Jeanne Dunning, who have explored the notion of narrative as it pertains to database. In her Tom Thumb project, she utilized research databases to retell, in a web-based format, a traditional narration. Databases and narration are perhaps more acutely opposed in that they directly represent written versus oral communication, respectively, and the dichotomy between the two.
One issue I had with Manovich's argument is his idea that the database as a creative center. I would argue that the database is an accumulation of things and information that already exists and though there may be a creative way to sort and present in the information, its source material is not original. I realize that Manovich might be referring more specifically to digital databases, but I started to think of the artist's entire body of work as a kind of archive, or database. What does this mean for physical archiving of objects, performances, and public art? Can the digital archive ever do these things justice? Are these things collected as a database, or are do they serve more as a narrative because they reference a human's life and life's work?
Deleuze paints a very bleak pictures of the modern day corporation and what it does to the individual. Capitalism for the product is now so far away from the factory, humans are losing even more of a connection between what they do, produce, and consume. Deleuze believes this can arguably be attributed to the move towards the digital. The market is now social control. So how does art fit in as a vehicle for social change when itself is subject to the market changes? Funding dips with the economy, which closes gallery spaces and museums. Will all art now have to be public art in outside spaces? Where will this force art to move?
According to Manovich, one of the principal features defining traditional cinema is a fixed and linear narrative structure. However, the computer age has introduced the concept of the database, as well as new media as collections of discrete items coming from the database, lacking a beginning or an end. What else other than the computer might trigger a switch from a fixed narrative, a vertical structure, to a horizontal? How might this relate to the globalization, increasing mobility, flexibility, etc, in today's world? Are there any other mediums in which one can detect these two contrasting forms of organization? Would a collage be considered an example of new media formed from a database? Could one argue that traditional still lifes still consist of elements drawn from a database, only more seamlessly sewn together than one finds in a collage?
The semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm seems to help Manovich define the relationship between the database-narrative opposition. In this theory the syntagm is a linear stringing together of elements while at the paradigmatic each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements. In this case, the elements in syntagm dimensions are defined by their presence, ie the flow of words we hear. On a paradigmatic dimension the elements are defined by their absence, they exist in our minds or in a database. However, isn't a paradigm somewhat related to TS Eliot's concept of the canon of tradition? What could it mean to have something defined by its absence, versus its presence?
12 comments:
Under the Database Logic section Manovich proceeds to talk about the creation of databases, however can one really call it creating? Manovich says the “creation” of databases includes collecting data and organizing it, creating it from scratch. Moreover texts need to be written, photographs need to be taken, video and audio material need to be recorded or digitized from already existing media. The main point is that databases are generated more so than created, so are they rather an imitation as discussed by Young in the Raymond Williams article. In that article Young stated that imitation was works wrought up out of pre-existing material, and one cannot make a database out of nothing.
In addition is there a difference between a person organizing the information/objects in a database and the avant –gardiste who rearranges fragments as stated in Burger’s reading? Or is the only difference is that databases can hold more info and is done with technology and not so much the artist’s hand?
Manovich describes the role of digitalization in the craze of archiving and digitalizing all forms of media-- books, videotapes, photos, audio, etc-- into huge databases. How is this related to the way written language allowed a memory based on written records, making accessible information to those far removed from its original source?
Manovich tends to treat narrative and database as two separate entities in media-- "two competing imaginations... two essential responses to the world". Is the popularity of databases really something new that comes out of new media... and why are databases and narratives necessarily competing? doesn't the interaction of database and narrative mirror the way we process information in our brains... it seems human nature is to try to construct narrative in order to aid understanding, but narrative must inevitably come from a database?
1. Manovich writes, "If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?" (410). Manovich implies that databases, in the sheer amount of information they contain, can detract from narrative. However, particularly in the field of journalism, "new media" is all about finding new ways to tell stories. It's not about getting rid of narrative, but making narrative more interactive and accessible, similar to the video games Manovich mentions. Audio slideshows, videos, photo galleries and the like appear all over news outlet Web sites. Some serve to illustrate written stories, while others take the place of articles and attempt themselves to tell the story of a certain person, an event, etc. How do these things operate in the world of the database? Do these things actually bolster narrative like they're supposed to, or do they end up undercutting it by replacing written articles?
2. Deleuze writes, "the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within...just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation" (5). I find the "perpetual training" idea intriguing. Over time, the level of education needed to get hired for a job has increased dramatically. It's almost impossible to get a decent job without a college degree, and now, a Bachelor's degree isn't even enough. A Master's degree or a Ph.D. seem to be the hiring requirement for many places. "Perpetual training" is a necessary resumé item. How has the corporation managed to dictate these criteria? Is this evidence of the merging of the university and the corporation?
Manovich says computer games are experienced by their players as narratives. The game requires a participant to play it out and reveal a story, and that participant's choices change the direction of the story. Where is the narrative? Is it in the game or in the participant or do they share roles? Or is it just the way the game is experienced? This relationship of narrative to participant seems unique.
Some history might be helpful in the section on Database Logic. He is talking about New Media, and while that refers to digitization, I doubt that it's a unique movement. What other technological movements from the past are similar to this or could shed light on it? The development of writing comes to mind - while it allowed us to preserve memories, it likely hurt our ability to remember. Could epic poetry and works such as the Iliad have been possible in an age with the printing press? Maybe that's irrelevant, and isolating New Media is actually appropriate.
Deleuze mentions that, "We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others." He ends the essay using the same serpent/mole metaphor. I'm a little confused about how this relates to the bigger picture of the individual being controlled via different mechanisms of industry. Is it the individual who has become the serpent or the control mechanism?
Deleuze also writes about how Guattari imagines a world in which a computer tracks each person's position--either allowing or forbidding access through various barriers. In this extreme society of control we give up all sovereignty. This is seen in many science fiction films such as Minority Report. Is this the direction in which our "democratic," American society is going or is it an exaggeration of what is already in place? What would Manovich believe in the case of the database generation?
As Deleuze writes, "Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by the specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center of the 'soul of the corporation.' . . .The operation of markets is now the instrument of social cntrol. . .Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous." I immediately remembered this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/contemporary-art-is-a-fraud-says-top-dealer-1628929.html If what Deleuze and Johnson write is true, has the art world become a space of elitist commodification with an avant-garde facade? Is contemporary art sincere? How does our understanding of worth change over time?
1)
Deleuze makes a point in his essay that enclosed institutions as the family, school, hospital, and factory, are already acknowledged as "finished" and are in no need of reforms. How has he decided this? Does any created organization even have a finite term of completion? Society progresses because of the acknowledgment that there is more to be accomplished. If Deleuze is correct in his assumption, then should hospitals, for instance, stop making reforms to their medical practices/improvements? Is Deleuze suggesting we settle at the current situation?
2)
In making rivals of disciplinary societies and societies of control, Deleuze uses the example of the corporation replacing the factory. He argues that "the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, diving each within," thus, demeaning the concept of "salary according to merit." In inferring that within a factory, all individuals, working as a single, unified body, are treated equally, he fails to account for equal opportunity. Within a factory imposed system, isn't the force of suppressing all individuals to the same level (treating them all as equal pawns) not also divisive, since individuals are not all born with the same capabilities? And unrest is stirred when the chance to rise and improve is not plausible. Therefore, corporation-based societies seem inevitable, especially since hierarchy exists in all aspects of life. Take for instance, the animal kingdom. It seems to be the case that whether society is factory-based or corporation-based, individuals lose out on both ends.
How does Manovich's database/narrative pair relate to writerly and readerly texts that we talked about with the Barthes essay? They aren't exactly the same, but I see some parallels in the closed nature of a narrative. How does this relate to the New York Times article we looked at which discussed the new demands on television shows to create not just a narrative, but a franchise with an interactive website and spin offs and a whole line of related products? What is the difference between "wrapping a narrative around a database" and manipulating the narrative into a database itself? Why are these two treated as opposing forces, with so much effort to bring them together?
Deleuze's "perpetual training" is a strong image for someone who is leaving one university system only to enter another next fall. my friend said to me just yesterday that her grades in high school were more important that she thought. "highschool grades effect where you go to college, where you go to college effects where you go to grad school, and that effects the possibilities open to you at the end of it all." it is possible to see everything as setting up more dominoes for the next stage, as a "closed system" we have no control over, a rigid, readerly format that we just follow until we die. So what is the "writerly" equivalent? Where do we get to have input? I hear Deleuze's plea for this, but I am not sure that his proposed system is plausible. It seems as though he is bending over backwards to keep institutions which necessarily need to be demolished in order to adopt this entirely different philosophy.
Deleuze describes our society in terms of control and enclosed spaces. Does art represent an "escape" from this control due to themes of expressionism, freehandedness, and abstraction, or does it represent an example of this control due to the institutions associated with art?
Manovich contrasts the database with the narrative, describing one as inventory and the other as cause and effect. In art, is it possible to create a database without any semblance of a narrative? Does the artist's decisions, arrangements, or subject choices in themselves constitute a form of narrative or cause and effect?
Like several other essays we have already read, Deleuze begins discussing the concept of prescribed spaces in which individuals move between in a disciplinary society. Assuming for a second that we agree with the notion that the people who work in these environments do not receive the equality of their labor, does that only refer to the people working at the bottom of the labor force? How does that relate to the individuals that invested their personal capital into creating a profitable enterprise? Do they see more of their earned profit, then? Or are they, too, just a cog in the metaphorical machine of capitalism?
Also, I'm not sure that I agree with Manovich in that database and narrative are natural enemies. There have been several artists, including Jeanne Dunning, who have explored the notion of narrative as it pertains to database. In her Tom Thumb project, she utilized research databases to retell, in a web-based format, a traditional narration. Databases and narration are perhaps more acutely opposed in that they directly represent written versus oral communication, respectively, and the dichotomy between the two.
One issue I had with Manovich's argument is his idea that the database as a creative center. I would argue that the database is an accumulation of things and information that already exists and though there may be a creative way to sort and present in the information, its source material is not original.
I realize that Manovich might be referring more specifically to digital databases, but I started to think of the artist's entire body of work as a kind of archive, or database. What does this mean for physical archiving of objects, performances, and public art? Can the digital archive ever do these things justice? Are these things collected as a database, or are do they serve more as a narrative because they reference a human's life and life's work?
Deleuze paints a very bleak pictures of the modern day corporation and what it does to the individual. Capitalism for the product is now so far away from the factory, humans are losing even more of a connection between what they do, produce, and consume. Deleuze believes this can arguably be attributed to the move towards the digital. The market is now social control.
So how does art fit in as a vehicle for social change when itself is subject to the market changes? Funding dips with the economy, which closes gallery spaces and museums. Will all art now have to be public art in outside spaces? Where will this force art to move?
According to Manovich, one of the principal features defining traditional cinema is a fixed and linear narrative structure. However, the computer age has introduced the concept of the database, as well as new media as collections of discrete items coming from the database, lacking a beginning or an end. What else other than the computer might trigger a switch from a fixed narrative, a vertical structure, to a horizontal? How might this relate to the globalization, increasing mobility, flexibility, etc, in today's world? Are there any other mediums in which one can detect these two contrasting forms of organization? Would a collage be considered an example of new media formed from a database? Could one argue that traditional still lifes still consist of elements drawn from a database, only more seamlessly sewn together than one finds in a collage?
The semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm seems to help Manovich define the relationship between the database-narrative opposition. In this theory the syntagm is a linear stringing together of elements while at the paradigmatic each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements. In this case, the elements in syntagm dimensions are defined by their presence, ie the flow of words we hear. On a paradigmatic dimension the elements are defined by their absence, they exist in our minds or in a database. However, isn't a paradigm somewhat related to TS Eliot's concept of the canon of tradition? What could it mean to have something defined by its absence, versus its presence?
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