$#!% I Say

Manovich lists his five principles of new media as being: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and cultural transcoding. The means by which visual new media is created, its very essence, as Manovich puts it, is divided into the continuous and the discrete, or digitized, formats. Manovich purports that Jacqurd’s loom had first developed a discrete form of the visual image while Daguerre developed a continuous image with the daguerreotype.

            Manovich gives a somewhat adequate representation of what visual media consists of. He describes the means by which it developed and, I believe, rightly bunches them into two categories. By describing digital images as discrete structures, Manovich provides a good breakdown as to what the visual image is in digital format. He also describes the format of photographic and motion film as being continuous since there are no breaks within the visual image (to the naked eye at least).

            After considerable thought I believe that Manovich is on to something when discussing the two forms of visual image. I am an artist and tend to view things in their aesthetic dimension. What I am good at is taking the whole image and breaking it down into its most basic parts. But I haven’t thought of a binary means of viewing an image. By binary I mean either there are breaks in the lines or there are not. Digitizing an image causes these breaks due to the quadrant manner in which the computer must render the image. The grid format in which the computer renders the image is what causes pixilation. It works on a pixel at a time rather the entirety of the image.

            Film on the other hand is continuous, as Manovich puts it. Lines are fluid without any breaks that are visible to the human eye. What film does is replicate what the eye sees. It superimposes the light which our eyes are subject to and imprints that light, or lack of it, into the film. Our eyes see what we basically would have seen had we been looking at the image itself. The only thing which is an issue with this is that the ability of the camera and its lens may limit certain light from being picked up. So there may be certain images which will not fully replicate reality.

            Manovich then further states that there is a melding of the two formats in moving pictures. There is the continuous format in the still image taken by the video camera but when placed into motion by juxtaposing the frames one after the other there is a discrete nature which causes breaks not in the lines of the image but in the lines of movement of the image. A great observation by Manovich in my opinion. It may not sound so profound to the layman but to me as an artist it is eye-opening in its simplicity and insight.

            When I first thought of Manovich’s claim that numerical representation was a principle of new media I balked at accepting it. Yet, after much thought, I came to realize that numerical representation was meant to denote the zeros and ones which computers use to generate the image and not whatever else was running through my mind trying to grasp the expression. It was a more literal representation and thus more fitting.

            The means by which the image is produced is a principle of new media—the computer generates an image which is in a discrete format. The two formats, continuous and discrete, will soon become harder to discern with the advent of newer technologies.