In Manovich’s “Principles of New Media”, Manovich describes five Principles that make new media art. The five Principles are Numeric Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability and Transcoding. The Principle that mostly stood out to me was Modularity. It stood out for me because in a way I’m currently focusing on using aspects such as “Images […], shapes and behaviors” in my project, which ultimately can be reduced to even smaller components. Projects that we have and are working on demonstrate the idea behind modularity, the fact that .psd files can only be read through Photoshop and how each project we do is made up of smaller pieces. The Idea behind modularity is that everything can be reduced to shapes sounds and even pixels. Additionally, for every item certain other items can read it. You wouldn’t use Microsoft word to open a movie file for example. It would be made to only play with certain programs. So for example the movie you may have downloaded can be reduced down to dozens of images creating a scene and even sound files giving it audio. Everything can be reduced to its most basic form; another example is how Internet web pages can be shrunk down to basic html code. To break it down even further there are scripts that have to run on nearly everything including programs that provide Internet service.

Everything can be broken down to its most basic elements. This is what Modularity focus on, being a key component to the more tech-thrived new media such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. Modularity is what new media art thrives on.