User:Manetta/Lev-Manovich-the-database-as-symbolic-form

ANNOTATIONS

text: Database as a Symbolic Form (1999)

@ 14,15,16 nov 2014

The Database Logic

What is the relationshop between database (DB) and narrative (NT)?

—> NT is a form that dominated human culture

different types of databases:

- hierachal

- network

- relational

- object orientated

—> all have different models to organize

the user performance on databases:

- view

- navigate

- search

a database is "a way to present the world"

"if after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard) and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database."

databases and new (1999) media:

- CD ROM

- Web Page

(HTML = sequence of elements)

"Web pages are computer files which can always be edited"

—> open nature of the web

All this further contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story.

Data and Algorithm

Games are not databases in themselves, and can be experienced as a narrative.
All elements in it are motivated (NT) —> but databases keep being editable.
Other games are based on algorithmics (like Tetris). Playing a game is like an interaction between

- the user's input descisions

- and computers algorithmic feedback

(which is a loop)

ontology:

- physics world :

atoms

- genetics world:

genes

- software objects world :

data structures (f.e.: array, linked lists, graphs)

+ algorithmics

"The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm:

reality —> media —> data —> database."

"There is hardly a Web site which does not feature at least a dozen links to other sites, therefore every site is a type of database."

"Jorge Luis Borges’s story about a map which was equal in size to the territory it represented became re-written as the story about indexes and the data they index. But now the map has become larger than the territory. Sometimes, much larger."

—> due to copies and links

Database and Narrative

DB : no order
NT : cause-and-effect trajectory

data-structures (Web, HTML, CD ROM) —> database

"In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database."

hyper-narrative: multiple trajectories through an database

—> digital / technological narrative

narrative criteria:

"To qualify as a narrative, a cultural object has to satisfy a number of criteria, which literary scholar Mieke Bal defines as follows: it should contain both an actor and a narrator; it also should contain three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story, and the fabula; and its “contents” should be “a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors.”"

"In summary, database and narrative do not have the same status in computer culture."

new media objects are all databases (in 1999, still so?)
Why do narratives still exist in new media?

The Semiotics of Database

the relation between DB and NT is compared with

- a digital image

- and visual culture:

"The dynamics which exist between database and narrative are not unique in new media. The relation between the structure of a digital image and the languages of contemporary visual culture is characterized by the same dynamics."

Montage is the "visual language dictated by the composite organization. What needs to be explained is why photorealist images continue to occupy such a significant space in our computer-based visual culture."

—> as it (the organization of techniques nowadays)

is not about representation anymore

Database – narrative opposition is the case in point.

model by Saussure:

- syntagm : a linear sequence in space (f.e.: sentence)

- paradigm : a set of related elements (f.e.: nouns, verbs, etc.)

explination:

"in the case of a written sentence, the words which comprise it materially exist on a piece of paper, while the paradigmatic sets to which these words belong only exist in writer’s and reader’s minds."

"Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit;

—> one is real and the other is imagined."

applied on the DB:

"the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is implicit; while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit."

but in an interface where a user can choose from a set of buttons,
the paradigm is limited by its designed interface

—> "In other words, she is selecting one trajectory from the paradigm of all trajectories which are defined."

about 'interaction' :

"New media takes “interaction” literally, equating it with a strictly physical interaction between a user and a screen (by pressing a button), at the sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification – which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all – are erroneously equated with an objectively existing structure of interactive links."

—> interactive is not really interactive, more a given set of options where the user can choose from

New media actually follows the NT when it tries to be culture. Otherwise, it is an interface to information, showing multiple elements of information at once.

A Database Complex

To what extend is a type of media specialized on a form of content (DB/NT)?

DB and NT are two competing forms, but are not that strictly seperated through history.

"The computer seems to be the perfect medium for the DB form."

Through working on a computer, the logic of culture becomes:

- to produce endless variations of elements

- and to act as a filter

video artists that worked from a DB logic:

- John Witney ('60s) (the father of graphic computer effects)

- Catalog (?)

- Permutations (1967)

- Peter Greenaway (1980 - 2000 - now?)

- Vertov

- Man With A Movie Camera (1929)

Database Cinema: Greenaway and Vertov

"Although database form may be inherent to new media, countless attempts to create “interactive narratives” testify to our dissatisfaction with the computer in the sole role of an encyclopedia or a catalog of effects."

+ nowadays, FB, Twitter (social media), blogs, newssites,

and many more, tell us narratives on the web

How can narrative and database work together?
"cinema already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative."

—> Peter Greenaway's "favorite system is numbers. The sequence of numbers acts as a narrative shell which “convinces” the viewer that she is watching a narrative."

"Eventually, Greenaway’s desire to take “cinema out of cinema” led to his work on a series of installations and museum exhibitions in the 1990s. No longer having to conform to the linear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialized within a museum or even the whole city."

—> "So the only way to create a pure database is to spatialize it,

distributing the elements in space."

Film editing in general can be compared to creating a trajectory through a database. As a film is never made in its 'narrative order', and the act of editing is closely related to the form of a database.


'The Man With A Moviecamera' (1929) is created from a database method:
it shows

- groups of categories,

- shot at different locations at different times.

It both presents

- 'the communist decoding of the world',

- and 'a catalog of film techniques'.

about the "Man With A Movie Camera":

"But the man with a movie camera is infused with the particular thought that he is actually seeing the world for other people. Do you understand? He joins these phenomena with others, from elsewhere, which may not even have been filmed by him. Like a kind of scholar he is able to gather empirical observations in one place and then in another. And that is actually the way in which the world has come to be understood.

Therefore, in contrast to standard film editing which consists in selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a pre-existent script, here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them in order to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film’s method."

Was this brave attempt successful? The overall structure of the film is quite complex, and on the first glance has little to do with a database. Just as new media objects contain a hierarchy of levels (interface – content; operating system – application; web page – HTML code; high-level programming language – assembly language – machine language), Vertov’s film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a progression of one day:  waking up – work – leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of as its meta-texts. 30 Vertov goes back and forth between the three levels, shifting between the text and its meta-texts: between the production of the film, its reception, and the film itself.  But if we focus on the film within the film (i.e., the level of the text)  and disregard the special effects used to create many of the shots, we discover almost a linear printout, so to speak, of a database: a number of shots showing machines, followed by a number of shots showing work activities, followed by different shots of leisure, and so on. The paradigm is projected onto syntagm. The result is a banal, mechanical catalog of subjects which one can expect to find in the city of the 1920s: running trams, city beach, movie theaters, factories ...

"Man with a Movie Camera never arrives at anything like a well-defined language"

- - - - - -

IN SUM

- - - - - -

"the new techniques to obtain images and manipulate them" "can be used to decode the world"

"Along with Vertov, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov’s goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitement, his gradual process of discovery of film’s new language."

"in the hands of Vertov, a database, this normally static and “objective” form, becomes dynamic and subjective"

—> Vertov merges a DP and a NT into a new form.