Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media - Voiceover - Brief Article

Afterimage, May, 2002 by Trebor Scholz

TREBOR SCHULZ is an East-Berlin-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and curator who studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He exhibits, lectures and curates widely in Europe and the Americas.

The focus on aesthetics and cinema in Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media was already pointed out as being troubling in an earlier contribution to the Voiceover by Rachel Greene. How can the social context in which new media developments and reflections exist be overlooked when rendering a history or building a collection of new media? Artists have used these new tools to refuse and resist social violence for many years, starting before video offered broader dissemination of information in the 1970s. Web-based projects by Serbian groups like Skart articulated their protest to the 78 days of NATO bombings in the spring of 2000. Conversely, Kosov@ Albanians had little access to the Internet to talk about atrocities committed by Serbian paramilitary commandos. There were no means to create and broadcast responses to it. Serbs in Serbia, however, reported on bridges bombed by NATO in real time. Today, Israeli peace activists such as the net artist Horit Herman Peled and the pro-Palestinian initiatives Palest inian.org, Virtualpalestine.org and Electronicintifada.net mount their resistance online. [pi]

For artists, new media created opportunities for online community building, collaboration and play, integrating new and old media for potentially subversive responses to political issues. How can Lev Manovich historicize new media, formulating a new language centered around screen culture, databases, narrative structures, cinema, computer animation, interactivity and software as art, with terms such as commodification, privacy, enhanced reproduction, cloned trees, genetically engineered food, race, gender, age, class and geographical location being absent from the index? The possibilities of the Internet have empowered many artists in Eastern Europe for instance to make their cultural contributions visible across international borders that they would otherwise not be able to bridge. [pi]

Who is surprised today that only 0.4% of the population in developing countries has a telephone line and 0.05% has online access? (See http://www.bytesforall.org/5TH/arunl.htm.) It is widely known that the Internet is overwhelmingly American-based, English-speaking and Western-focused. A computer costs the average Bangladeshi more than eight years of income, compared with one month's wage for the average American. Within the United States it is a known fact that only a few sit on the country's wealth, accounting for huge, predominantly racial, inequalities with African Americans, Hispanics and some Caucasians living in poverty. This divide cannot be left out of the discussion, but should also not lead to complete techno-pessimism. The communities of web-based artists in the U.S. are embarrassingly white and male (and so am I for that matter). Even useful search engines for net art such as Verybusy.org (http://verybusy.org) do not proactively look for more diversity. [pi]

In the past three years alone we witnessed countless conflicts: from Kosov@ and Macedonia to East Timor; from September 11 to the thousands of dead in Afghanistan; from human rights violations by the Australian government against asylum-seekers to the absolutely catastrophic situation in Palestine and Israel. Global political events and economical disparities, as much as new media projects responding to these pressing realities, need to be included in the already cross-disciplinary debate about new media that includes art history, film theory, literary theory and computer science. [pi]

In November 2001 I realized a project at the Bauhaus University and Gallery ACC that aimed to integrate platforms such as radio, web-based artwork, the gallery, street demonstrations, posters and the university to create debate and long-lasting collaborations (http://www.molodiez.org/acc/). Initiatives such as this one, integrating new and old media need to be considered when thinking about how we progress. Net strikes, online demonstrations and all forms of media activism need to be at the center of this conversation along with museum directives such as the current Variable Media Initiative at the Guggenheim Museum.