philip pocock on Wed, 12 Feb 2003 21:40:01 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-bold] open letter to manovich - how soft?


lev manovich, there is a difference between a 'database' and a list, heap, archive or library. your text 'the language of new media' garbles the current distinguishing factor feature of a database, its realtime, open access, participatory dynamism, upon which net activism, political and cultural activism, and network media art counts to counter your retrograde database idea, as synonimous with a pile of film clips in a 20th C. editing room. your open definition of a closed database, makes the word useless and it could just as well be a synonym for garbage can or anything for that matter. it's dangerous to publish fallacious uniformed texts and pompously title them 'language of new media'. i returned the book and ward all my students from it. it sets back open access network media if anyone follows your ami-prop-style apparatus guidelines, which mirror simply stated a fbi dossier database idea, your GUI (Global User Interface) clone. Search manovich page for GUI at: http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm to catch my drift.

is soft cinema masquerading as a new media work when in fact it is giving american tv new style a digital technology facelift, co-opting dynamic database open participatory constructive knowledge bases as peripheral? seems so, as i cant find a trace of database cinema or narrative at your site or in your show?

your work, offered as videotape or dvd on the site, yes videotape, clearly exposes how little dynamics of databases appeal to you (suppose it diminishes your belt size as the only GUI since 1998 as you write on your page, URL above) and in doing so it blinds newbie new media workers from seeing the radical dynamics of open access database cinema and media activities (such as a simple threaded mailing list!)

your work as you yourself confessed in zkm is based on a fixed audiotape. standard usa propaganda basis, easily controlled, and even timed for insertion of decorating visuals a la gulf war one, or commercial sponsors, since the time is set and the message too.

i have since established this fact in soft cinema in zkm as well and it reveals this very disturbing fact. one that ought to be acted against. i protest! manovich's work operates like cnn does, by fixing a soundtrack (controllable by media and government executives) and then decorating that with images to help the propaganda messages go down. manovich borrows like the cosmetic firm clinique did some years ago, a mondrian signature, lovely, to help the misinformation medicine go down.

media politics in america is nothing new to me. i am a graduate of nyu filmschool, a canadian born irish citizen. and it is time to act and expose the ami-prop viruses like manovich masquerade.

that you do not distinguish or practice open audience dynamics in your database idea exposes the mistitle of your book 'language of new media'. where's the 'language' when a crucial new media term like 'database' is indistinguishable from 'film archive'. it can be any collection in your definition and as 'language' your term 'database' loses all meaning and in fact perverts its primary characteristices, hides them from new readers, and supports just more american style media control by closing the ports to open alteration and co-authorship of information and how is is computed in a dynamic database, the standard network media form, ie linux, apache, php, mysql, perl, or flash, action script and python...

your book 'language of new media' mr manovich is more appropriately called 'how to use new media to give the nightly news a digital facelift'.

i have studied your soft cinema site and installation at zkm. i live in karlsruhe. in both modes soft cinema does nothing more than dangerously conscript internet vernacular and open access networks to produce nothing more than yet another how-to build an ami digital propaganda bomb. and it bombs. your classic american propaganda machinery built from bolshevik agitprop torpes to close off network media as a prison containing labyrinths for passengers leaves the building walls in tact and the passengers/prisoners all go nowhere but in loops concocted fo optical pleasure by the only Global User Interface, self-proclaimed as you by you on your soft cinema url. oh no, not another net art protagonist!.

you send a fallacious message in writing and practise that a database is a closed loop. appealing to bolshevik cinema not surprisingly as it was the basis for 20th century propaganda style and technique, as pretty as it may be. well the cnn nightly war report trailers are also pretty so some. and look out here comes the database cinema version masqeurading as new media - soft cinema - for a soft sell of new media for an old meesage or 'massage'.

if anyone thinks i am off my rocker check it yourself -http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm
reads and looks not ironically unfortunately just like a homeowner's insurance site selling something that it is not.

and here's one for you lev. take IJ (Information Jockey) i wrote that in 96. DJ -Vj-IJ. more jargon. i said it at a net event for fun. your url term FJ Film Jockey has less surprise or stachastics than a tv remote. or is FJ an anagram for how some lonely souls ride films on the internet? that would at least be half a laugh. so much jargon and no art or media. advertising pure to conscript new media for ami-prop ends imho.

the notion of a dynamic database from what i can search on your website - http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm - or in your zkm tv room is not present. DYNAMIC DATABASE software, open access, two-way, user-dependent, participatory, co-authorial and so on database attributes, is completely left to the periphery in your hyper-american propaganda view of a static one-man closed labyrinthain imprisoned database, your idea of a database as something akin to how you embody in one person - you- what you call a GUI on your site. i quote:

"Texts used for narration in some Soft Cinema movies come from GUI (Global User Interface) a collection of short stories I have been working on since 1998."
- http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm

are you proposing yourself as the embodiment of all users worldwide? that would concur with your closed fbi-style database idea, of which you give only 1995 non-progressively loading quicktime snapshots online and some indication of 'rules', which are certainly as rudimentary as harrd-coded keywords and tags, independent of users (correct me if i am wrong) and as limiting as the ai algorithms 'rule-based' rather than learning scenarios can drive. its like colin powell showing us some windows on a what we are told is a mega intricate database of discovery. we too see only some unchangin screenshots or quicktime movies.

i am curious now about what you call algorithmic cinema? as you do not specify what algorithms you use other than mixing them up with 'rule-based' keyword searching, apparently there isnt much ai in your code there, and like the database you reduce the concept of an algorithm to something trivial, static and closed, like fingerprinting or checking credit card numbers, as rule-based logic (and america) proliferates all too much. why online? the jig is up. free to upload such propaganda building digital system design is as a firm belief of mine as the responsibility to expose it as exactly that. i think abe lincoln said that.

some excerpts from your soft cinema url to raise questions for anyone searching your site for the slightest hint of contemporary standards of online database-driven media or cinema. i find nothing more than a constructivist version of a media carousel, not much different from a 90s cd rom business presenation. pre-toasted by the big GUI for all to gawk at. why though pretend it is something that it isnt lev and confuse the 497 media students i have here just a few miles from the soft cinema installation.

and i do have a work also in the show displaying soft cinema ofr any patient consumers. but that is only to dispell any sour grapes motivation for this mail. i write it because it is time to act online again and expose such shabby misappriations of what we do here, borrow our terminology to set the clock back the the time of the cold war.

lev, three words, databases are dynamic.

and dynamic doesnt mean simply relational, it changed with OOP not OOPs.

from manovich soft cinema url:
"2. The second idea is database narrative. Rather than beginning with a script and then creating media elements which visualise it, I investigate a diffirent paradigm: starting with a large database and then generating narratives from it. In Soft Cinema, The media elements are selected from a database of a few hundred video clips to construct a potentially unlimited number of different short films."

the soft cinema (lite version, that is one monitor) displayed for visual consumers at zkm operates without meaningful human user or online participation or influence. instead soft cinema in zkm is based on a prerecorded female voice. it's not a live generated mp3 stream which could open up the system. but no, its static and prerocorded like a news report on the 6 oclock news in america. and you parade that as database cinema? its standard propaganda, american style for its high tech high priced attributes. it's as old as radio propaganda, nothing database about it.

the act is up. anyone else looking into your use of jargon and trying to find it in your media will realize that what you are doing is assisting the global broadcast media in how to dress up their bandwidth with closed coding and non-participatory, manneristic media tropes and have the public think it is how new media works. soft cinema does little but freshen up propaganda appeal and dangerously close minds as well to what linux, apache, php, mysql or any other dynamic database system can dream up as an alternative to manovichs at best 'pointlessness and click' digital tools for centralin contoling the time and information with a little psseudo-aesthetic game-like appeal thrown in.

i protest. i call for an embargo on american new media. soft cinema is poisoning my students minds with fallacious closed views on the radical potential of new media, and cultural politics is not far from washington politics. it ought to at least be exposed for what it is. gee, lev, why dont you do baghdad and kabul so we can really find out online what's going on? those fit your rule of places you've never been :-|

it' time to act. say yes to an embargo on any use of new media to further america's closed society (closed database) cultural politics now creeping into media art.

in our current context, like so many i am trying to find out in my world, the online world, where things are going wrong. soft cinema is not a scapegoat, it's the work of a major player who ought to know better, or work harder, to get the database dynamic before using it to illustrate a theory that itself needs an 80 year update.

philip pocock
gabelsbergerstr. 1 d-76135 karlsruhe germany
mobile/sms +49 1707 369 870
tel +49 721 845 715 fax +49 721 830 2714

the more we share, the more we have. - l.nimoy