Databases and Non-linear Representations Narratives and Arrays

“ After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – database. ” Lev Manovich (Database as Symbolic Form)

The database can be understood extension of earlier forms  The encyclopedia  Scientific collections and archives  Industrial organization and management of labor and production

New media objects don’t tell stories don’t have beginning or end don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise to organize their elements into a sequence they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.

Fluidity in the Apprehension of Cultural Objects Process and procedure take on new significance New relationships to authorship and ownership (intellectual property) Works are produced with an understanding that finished products are also raw material for reuse and remixing Forms are conceived as conglomerations of fragments

syntagm vs paradigm Manovich suggests that with the shift from the narrative to the database as central cultural pardigm there “a redistribution of weight” from the importance placed on the semiotic terms of syntagm and paradigm. Syntagm: ordered and spatial relationships Paradigm: sets, groups, categorical relationships

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

Data and Algorithms The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects which are complementary to each other: data structures and algorithms. Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm, a final sequence of simple operations Any object in the world – be it the population of a city, or the weather over the course of a century, a chair, a human brain – is modeled as a data structure, i.e. data organized in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval. The more complex the data structure, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vice versa.

Together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer. The computerization of culture involves the projection of these two fundamental parts of computer software – and of the computer’s unique ontology – onto the cultural sphere.

Is there a new media aesthetic? We can see the effects of new paradigms of media use on the aesthetics of cinema: Compositing: layering and combining elements using mats, filters, etc (rather than sequencing) Representations of time/space as complex and interpenetrating Emerging forms of spatial organization that involve trans-media experience rather than reconstruction of perspectival or cinematic space. Non-camera based cinema (modeling, simulation, animation)

Examples from Cinema Run Lola Run (German title: Lola rennt) 1998, German screenwriter / director Tom Tykwer Fight Club,1999 by David Fincher. adaptation of the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Natural Born Killers, 1994, by Oliver Stone (screenplay by Quentin Tarantino) TX Transform: demodemo

Online Examples (involving transmedia, and shifts in the valence of media components; audio, image, text, etc) Youtube Jumpcut Delicious and social bookmarking sites Social networking : MySpace, Facebook, etc John Osh They Rule Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents (Bust down the Doors)

More Online Examples The Sheep Market: The Sonic Memorial Project Termite TV, Life Stories

“Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new media, the database supports a range of cultural forms which range from direct translation (i.e., a database stays a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself – a narrative. More precisely, a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself which would foster its generation.” Lev Manovich