Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture.

He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His Ph.D. dissertation The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s.

This analysis is framed by a history of media's softwarization in the 1960's and 1970’s (‘the transfer of techniques and interfaces of all previously existing media technologies to software’ ).

The book includes a theoretical discussion of whether we can still speak about media as ‘a relatively small number of distinct mediums’, given software’s propensity to hybridize previously separate media and multiply.

After spending several years practicing fine arts, he moved to New York in 1981.

His interests shifted from still image and physical 3D space to virtual space, moving images, and the use of computers in media.

Manovich has worked with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984.

While in New York he received an M.A. in Experimental Psychology (NYU, 1988) and additionally worked professionally in 3D computer animation from 1984 to 1992.

Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-).

Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.

Manovich has taught new media art since 1992.

He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design Helsinki.

He then went on to receive a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in 1993 under the supervision of Mieke Bal.

In 1993, students of his digital movie making classes at the UCLA Lab for New Media founded the Post-Cinematic Society which organized some of the first digital movie festivals based on his ideas about new media such as database cinema.

His art projects include Little Movies, the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994-1997), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history (1999), and Anna and Andy, a streaming novel (2000).

He is also well known for his insightful articles, including "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001) and "Database as Symbolic Form" (1998).

In the latter article, he explains why the databases have become so popular, while juxtaposing them to concepts such as algorithms and narrative.

His works have been included in many key international exhibitions of new media art.

His book, The Language of New Media (2001), covers many aspects of cultural software: for example, he identifies a number of key tools or processes (he calls them 'operations') that underpin commercial software from word processing to video editing programs.

These include the conventions of 'cut and paste' copy, find, delete, transform, etc. The extracts we have chosen highlight significant 'new' aspects of the new media Manovich is concerned with.

He is often concerned with visual culture and especially with moving image, so the first sections, 'The Database' and 'Database and Algorithm', explore something of the distinct ways in which computers store and manipulate information (here, for example, moving image footage).

He compares this with traditional techniques of manipulating and editing film stock.

The 'Navigable Space' extract is also concerned with the moving image, but this is the moving image as a mapping or modeling of virtual space.

From architectural 'fly-throughs' to the visceral and violent pleasures of exploring the corridors of the videogame Doom, virtual space is discussed as a significant new cultural form that draws on pre-digital visual and cinematic culture.

In "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001), Manovich describes the eight definitions of "new media":

In 2002, Manovich presented his mini-retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London under the title Lev Manovich: Adventures of Digital Cinema.

His digital art project Soft Cinema was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002–03); traveling to Helsinki, Finland, and Tokyo, Japan, in April 2003.

"Although the films resemble the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives. Each Soft Cinema run offers a unique viewing experience for the audience; the software works with a set of parameters that allow for almost every part of a film to change."

Soft Cinema projects mine the creative possibilities that exist at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture.

Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualization, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDS.

Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016), which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics).

The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google, New York Public Library, and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

He is the author and editor of 15 books including The Language of New Media that has been translated into fourteen languages.

In 2007 Manovich founded the research lab Software Studies Initiative, which was subsequently renamed as the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2016.

On November 8, 2012, it was announced that Manovich would be joining the faculty of the City University of New York's Graduate Center in January 2013, with the goal of enhancing the graduate schools' digital initiatives.

Software Takes Command was published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic.

The book analyses in detail software applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, and how their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design.

Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.

Manovich was born in Moscow, USSR, where he studied painting, architecture, computer science, and semiotics.