LANGUAGE OF NEW MEDIA

From Lev Manovich

Interface
-Ridley Scott commissioned to make Apple Mac GUI offered powerful visions of the future.
-With the progressively of the internet computer moved from being a technology to being a filter for all culture.
-Last 10 years the image has changed the form of computer interface.
-Everything on the internet passes through interface of browser.
-Learning interface is learning new language of code.
-The interface shapes how the computer user conceives of the computer.
-Cut and Paste
Makes scale irreavent makes spatial temporal media irrelevant.
-We use the same interface for Work and Play

-In 1980s many critics described one of the key effects of "postmodernism as that spatialization.
-The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know.
-Th printed word tradition that initially dominated the language of cultural interfaces is becoming less important, while the part played by cinematic elements is becoming progressively stronger.
-The computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto. The orignal Esperanto never truly popular. Cultural interfaces in contrast, are widely used and easily learned
-Users are able to acquire new cultural languages, weather cinema a hundred years ago, or cultural interfaces today. Cultural interfaces in turn draw an older cultural forms such as ciema and the printed word. Important case of cinema's influence on cultural interfaces the mobile camera. it beacme an accepted way of interacting with any data represented in three dimensions.
-The Gutenberg galaxy turns out to be just a subset of the lumieres universe.
-Since the renaissance, the frame has acted as a window onto a larger space that it assumed to extend beyond the frame.
-The onscreen space is habitually perceived as included within a more vast scenographic space.
-Virtual Reality interface, often promoted as yhe most"natural" interface of all, utilizes the same framing, As in cinema.
-This frame creates a distinct subjective experience that is much closer to cinematic perception that it is to unmediated sight. VR interface, are often discussed a sthe logical successor to cinema and potentially the key cultural form form of the twenty-first century as cinema was the key cultural form of the twentieth century.
-But the undoubtedly can be observed is how virtual technologys dependence on cinema's mode of seeing and language is becoming progrewssively stronger.
-The designer of a virtual world is thus a cinematographer as well an architect.
-With a VRML interface, nature is firmly subsumed under culture
-A particularly important example of how computer gamesuse-and extend-cinematic language of a dynamic point of view.
-The incorporation of virtual/camera controls into the very hardware of game consols it truly a historic event.
-Element by element, cinema is being poured into a computer: first, one-point linear perspective; next, the mobile camera and rectangular window. Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface. What was cinema is now human-computer interface.

HCI: Representation versus Control
-The development of the human-computer interface, until recently, has had little to do with the distribution of cultural object.
-Today as the computer is beginning to host very different applications for access and mainpulation of cultural data and cultural experiences, their interfaces still rely on old metaphors and action grammars.
-The history of the human-computer interface is that of borrowing and reformulating, or, to use new media lingo.
-The computer screen also functions both as a window into an illusionary space and as a flat surface carrying text labels and graphical icons.
-Cultural interfaces try to create own language rather than simply usingthe general -purpose HCI
-We are witnessing the emergence of a new cultural metalanguage.

The Screen And The User
Contemporary human-computer interfaces offer radical new possibilities for art and communication. VR, telepresence, and interactivity are made possible by the recent technology of the digital computer. The screen has been used to preesent visual information for centuries.
-What are the ways in which computer displays both continue and challenge the tradition of the screen
-Rather than being a neutral medium of presenting information, the screen is aggressive.
-In television the act of viewing is often integrated with other integrated other daily activities until recently. This stability has been challenged by the a rrival of the computer screen.
Some television sets enable a second channel to be watched with a smaller screen perhaps TV sets will adopt the window metaphor of a computer.
Both situations - window interface and VR - disrupt the viewing regime that characterizes the historical period of the dynamic screen. Thus the era of the dynamic screen that began with ciema is now ending.
-The principles and technology of radar were worked out independently by scientists in the USA, England, France, and Germany during the 30s. Next to photography, radar provided a superior way to gather information about enemy locations.
-The screen becomes an all-encompassing concept that covers the functioning of even non visual representation.What is the price the subject pays for the mastery of the world, focused and unified by the screen?.
-The imprisonment of the body takes place on both the conceptual and literal levels
-With perspectival machines, the imprisonment of the subject also happens in a literal sense.