"The Language of New Media"
by Lev Manovich
MIT Press, 2001

Lev Manovich is an admirer of the "Soviet Montage" filmmakers who were
active during the first decades of the Twentieth Century. One trademark
of these filmmakers is known as "the Kuleshov effect." In this editing
technique, one image acquires meaning in relationship to those around
it. For example, if an image of a man's face is combined with an image
of a bowl of soup, the man looks hungy. Yet if the man's face is
combined with an image of a dead body, the same face looks sad. In The
Language of New Media, Lev Manovich performs his own Kuleshov effect,
the ultimate art historical feat, in making new media not only more
understandable but arguably more valuable, by virtue of its relationship
to the history of image-making.

The Language of New Media takes on the interfaces, operations,
illusions, and forms of new media. Unlike some of his predecessors in
media theory, Manovich is careful to designate the object of his study,
and to spell-out that which he does not consider new media. For
instance, converting analog work to digital does not make it new media,
in Manovich's book. Readers will find clearly-written definitions of the
forms and functions of new media, from menus, filters, and plug-ins to
database algorithms. Transitions in modes of representation and
interpretation, reading and writing, from print to network culture are
also explored, under the aegis of bringing classic theory to
contemporary work.

The Language of New Media also breaks ground in piercing the semantics
of new media's lexical accoutrements, positing a vocabulary with which
to discuss new media. The author revisits the efforts of George Landow,
Jay Bolter, Peter Lunenfeld, and others, while discussing artists from
Vincent Van Gogh to Mies Van der Rohe, Jenny Holzer to Issey Miyake.
Yet, Manovich's title becomes a double entendre when he exceeds this
possibly banal charge by discussing the way in which new media is itself
a language: a system of representation. Such a claim seems entirely
obvious, yet the author works to ask what such systems mean, and to
classify the rules by which the language "new media" signifies and is
interpreted. Using explicit examples and making great efforts to define
the forms over which the "new media" umbrella shadows, Manovich
outshines previous critics in engaging art historical and literary
theory adopted as doxa before new media was "new media"; that is, when
this proto-media medium was but a digital glimmer.

In utterly approachable prose, Manovich pits Sigmund Freud, Jacques
Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Walter
Benjamin, and others against each other and contemporary critics in
taking up some of the key questions of contemporary visual culture:
voyeurism, identity politics, reality-construction, hegemony, and more.
While the book spans vast art historical epochs, the predominant
metaphor for Manovich's history of the evolution of new media is that of
cinema. The author links the two not only along the lines of creation
but also in terms of cultural and personal reception

Attempting to describe new media in terms of an old cinematic paradigm
is the one area in which Manovich's book might fall short; yet the
author almost surpasses film studies in taking on, in particular, issues
of form, narrativity, interface/reception, spatiality, and temporality.
Beyond turning this established vocabulary back upon new media, Manovich
supplements discussions of avant garde filmmaking with vernacular
anecdotes–Jim Carrey movies and The Matrix included–to identify new
terms for the production, circulation, and, indeed, "speech" of new
media.

It is strangely ironic that Lev Manovich learned computer programming
the same way that the Soviet Montage filmmakers perfected their craft:
on paper. Manovich's school lacked computers, so the artist hand-wrote
code, whereas pupils at the famed VGIK film school lacked film stock and
so "spliced" papyrus. Perhaps it is to this lack of physical resources
that Manovich owes his copiously inside-out knowledge of digital media.