NMA2050

After reading “The Language of New Media”, I’m getting to know more about the new media art. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich proposes five “principles of new media”—to be understood “not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization.” The five principles are numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. I focus on numerical representation.

Because all new media objects are composed of digital code, they are essentially numerical representations. That is, all new media objects can be described mathematically and can be manipulated via algorithms. According to Manovich, the key difference between old and new media is that new media is programmable. The closest we can get to the ‘materiality’ of a new media object is to talk about the numbers and formulas that constitute it. In new media compositions, the opposition between visual and verbal is bridged in the sense that both are code—both image and texts are programmed and programmable.

An example of this is an analog photograph sampled by a scanner in what we call a digitization process. This process turns a continuous surface into a set of discrete units (the photo and its points) but like letters in a word, these units construct the object are not the meaning itself. Some other mathematical patterns appear in the production side of new media objects. As a modern factory, the process can easily be split in small activities where different tools/people help to build the object. Here we find a clear difference between modern industrial processes and artisan procedures, and we can also extrapolate this from digital to analog.