INTERNATIONAL TEXTS IN CRITICAL
MEDIA AESTHETICS
VOLUME #5
Founding Editor
Francisco J. Ricardo
Associate Editor
JÜrgen Schäfer
Editorial Board
Roberto Simanowski
Rita Raley
John Cayley
George Fifield
Software
Takes
Command
Lev Manovich
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
1385 Broadway | 50 Bedford Square |
New York | London |
NY 10018 | WC1B 3DP |
USA | UK |
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
Š Lev Manovich, 2013
This work is published open access subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). You may re-use, distribute, reproduce, and adapt this work in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manovich, Lev.
Software takes command : extending the language of new media / by Lev Manovich.
pages cm (International texts in critical media aesthetics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62356-745-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-62356-817-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Computer software--Social aspects. 2. Social media. 3. Computers and civilization. 4. Mass media--Technological innovations. 5. Computer graphics. I. Title.
QA76.9.C66M3625 2013
006.7--dc23
2013002685
ISBN: 978-1-6235-6261-8
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
To Hyunjoo
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Understanding media
Software, or the engine of contemporary societies
What is software studies?
Cultural software
Media applications
From documents to performances
Why the history of cultural software does not exist
Summary of the bookâs narrative
PART 1 Inventing media software
1Alan Kayâs universal media machine
Appearance versus function
âSimulation is the central notion of the Dynabookâ
The permanent extendibility
The computer as a metamedium
2Understanding metamedia
The building blocks
Media-independent vs. media-specific techniques
Inside Photoshop
There is only software
PART 2 Hybridization and evolution
3Hybridization
Hybridity vs. multimedia
The evolution of a computer metamedium
Hybridity: examples
Strategies of hybridization
4Soft evolution
Algorithms and data structures
What is a âmediumâ?
The metamedium or the monomedium?
The evolution of media species
PART 3 Software in action
5Media design
After Effects and the invisible revolution
The aesthetics of hybridity
Deep remixability
Layers, transparency, compositing
After Effects interface: from âtime-basedâ to âcomposition-basedâ
3D space as a media design platform
Import/export: design workflow
Variable form
Amplification
Conclusion
Software, hardware, and social media
Media after software
Software epistemology
Index
Acknowledgments
The ideas and arguments in this book are the result of the authorâs interactions with hundreds of people over many years: students in classes, presenters at conferences, colleagues over email. I especially want to thank everybody who responded to my posts related to the ideas in this book on Twitter and Facebook as I was working on it from 2007 to 2012. They asked provocative questions, told me about relevant resources every time I asked, and encouraged me to go forward by asking when the book will be published.
The following people at a number of institutions played particularly key roles in the bookâs evolution and publication, and I would like to thank them individually (they are listed alphabetically by institution):
Bloomsbury Academic (the book publisher):
Katie Gallof, Acquisitions Editor, Film and Media Studies.
Jennifer Laing, Copy-editing.
Francisco J. Ricardo, Editor, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics.
Clare Turner, Lead Designer.
Software Studies Initiative (my lab established in 2007 at Calit2):
Staff:
Jeremy Douglass, Post-doctoral researcher, 2008â2012 (now Assistant Professor, English Department, UCSB).
Jay Chow, stuff member, 2012â (design, visualization, and programming).
Collaborators:
Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD.
Elisabeth Losh, Director of Academic Programs, Sixth College, UCSD.
California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2):
Hector Bracho, media services.
Doug Ramsey, Director of Communications.
Ramesh Rao, Director, UCSD Division, Calit2.
Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2.
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA):
Sheldon Brown, Director; Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD.
Lourdes Guardiano-Durkin, MSO.
Todd Margolis, Technical Director.
The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY):
Matthew Gold, Associate Professor; Director, CUNY Academic Commons.
Tanya Domi, Director of Media Relations.
Chase Robinson, Provost and Senior Vice-Chancellor.
Jane Trombley, Executive Director for Communication and Marketing.
Software Studies Series (The MIT Press):
Matthew Fuller and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (series co-editors).
Douglass Sery, Editor, New Media, Game Studies, Design.
Finally, I want to add special thanks to Larry Smarr, Director of California Institute for Telecommunication and Information who invited me to participate in the Institute activities, helped to start my lab, and made it possible for me to work with the next generation of computing technologies being invented at Calit2 and the people inventing them.
Large parts of the book were written and edited in my favorite cafes and hotel lobbies, and I would like to thank their staff:
The Standard, West Hollywood, California.
Mondrian, West Hollywood, California.
LâAuberge Del Mar, California.
Del Mar Plaza, Del Mar, California.
Starbucks, Del Mar, California.
Sheraton Tribeca Hotel, New York.
Micki Kaufman did a great job of proofreading the manuscript at the last moment and catching many mistakes.
The book cover uses a part of a visualization created by William Huber using ImageJ software and our custom plug-ins. The visualization consists of 22,500 frames sampled at 1 frames per 3 seconds from a 62.5 hour video of the complete game play.
The book was written on Apple laptops (MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) using Microsoft Word. I used iPhone for email and social networks, and for occasional note taking.
For communication with the colleagues and the publisher, I relied on Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Twitter, and Facebook.
The book illustrations were prepared by me and Jay Chow using the same popular software applications analyzed in this book: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects.
I am grateful to thousands of programmers and engineers who developed the software products mentioned above, and continue updating them with new features.
Introduction
Understanding media
I called my earlier book-length account of the new cultural forms enabled by computerization The Language of New Media (completed in 1999, it came out in 2001). By that time, the process of adoption of software-based tools in all areas of professional media production was almost complete, and ânew media artâ was in its heroic and vibrant stageâoffering many possibilities not yet touched by commercial software and consumer electronics.
Ten years later, most media became ânew media.â The developments of the 1990s have been disseminated to the hundreds of millions of people who are writing blogs, uploading photos and videos to media sharing sites, and use free media authoring and editing software tools that ten years earlier would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Thanks to the practices pioneered by Google, the world is now used to running on web applications and services that have never been officially completed but remain forever in Beta stage. Since these applications and services run on the remote servers, they can be updated anytime without consumers having to do anythingâand in fact, Google is updating its search algorithm code a few times a day. Similarly, Facebook is also updating its code daily, and sometimes it breaks. (Facebookâs motto expressed in posters around its offices is âMove Fast and Br...