In the 1990s, the technological shift of all cultural communication to computer media gets under way. We may think that finally the avant-garde techniques of the 1920s will no longer be sufficient and that fundamentally new techniques will start to appear. But, paradoxically, the "computer revolution" does not seem to have been accompanied by any significant innovations on the level of communication techniques. While we now rely on computers to create, store, distribute and access culture, we are still using the same techniques developed in the 1920s. Cultural forms which were good enough for the age of the engine turned out to be also good enough for the age of the "geometry engine" and the "emotion engine". ("Geometry engine" is the name of a computer chip introduced in Silicon Graphics workstations a number of years ago to perform real-time 3D graphics calculations; "emotion engine" is the name of the processor used in Sony's Playstation 2, introduced in 1999; it allows real-time rendering of facial expressions.) In short, as far as the cultural languages are concerned, new media is still old media. Why? If historically each cultural period (Renaissance, Baroque, and so on) brought with it new forms, new expressive vocabulary, why is the computer age satisfied with using the languages of the previous period, in other words, that of the industrial age?
During its history, the identity of a digital computer kept changing almost every decade: a calculator (the 1940s); a real-time control mechanism; a data processor; a symbol processor; and, in the 1990s, a media distribution machine. This latest identity has very little to do with the original one, since distribution of media does not require much computation. As computing became equated with Internet use during the latter half of the 1990s, the computer, in its original sense, became less and less visible; its identity as a carrier for already established cultural forms, more and more prominent. Music and films streamed over Internet; MP3 music files to be downloaded and played using stand-alone MP3 players; books to be downloaded into stand-alone electronic book devices; Internet telephony and faxing—all these applications use the computer as a communication channel, without requiring it to compute anything.
The reader may ask how the computer's other new post-Internet role, that of a communication link between individuals (as exemplified by chat, newsgroups and email), fits into this analysis. In my view, we can understand "person-to-person communication channel" identity as a subset of "media distribution channel" identity. For what is being sent by email or posted to a newsgroup is simply another form of media—one's thoughts formatted as text, i.e. human language. If this perspective may appear strange, it is only because during the history of modern media, from photography to video, a media object was usually
- (1) created by special types of professional users (artists, designers, filmmakers);
- (2) mass reproduced;
- (3) distributed to many individuals via mass printing, broadcasting, etc.
In 1920s communication techniques acquire a new status. New media represents a new stage of the avant-garde. The techniques invented by the 1920s left-wing artists became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from the dream-existence of bourgeois society (constructivist design, new typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing, photo-montage, etc.) now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: interaction with a computer. For example, the avant-garde strategy of collage re-emerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on any computer data. In another example, dynamic windows, pull-down menus, and HTML tables all allow a computer user to work simultaneously with practically unrestricted amounts of information despite the limited surface of the computer screen. This strategy can be traced to Lissitzky's use of movable frames in his 1926 exhibition design for the International Art Exhibition in Dresden.
The avant-garde of the 1920s developed a particular approach to visual communication which refers to as visual atomism. This approach is based on the idea that a complex visual message can be constructed from simple elements whose psychological effects are known beforehand.
The atomistic approach to communication reappears with new force in computer media. But what was a particular theory of visual meaning and emotional effect grounded in psychology now became the technological basis of all communication. For instance, a digital image consists of atom-like pixels, which makes it possible to automatically generate images, to automatically manipulate them in numerous ways and, through compression techniques, to transmit them more economically. A digital three-dimensional space has a similar atomistic structure—an agglomerate of simple elements such as polygons or voxels. A digital moving image also consists of a number of separate layers, which can be separately accessed and manipulated.
In computer culture, a media object is typically assembled from ready-made elements such as icons, textures, video clips, 3-D models, complete animation sequences, ready-to-use virtual characters, chunks of JavaScript code, Director Lingo scripts, etc.
When a computer user interacts with a Web site, navigates a virtual space, or examines a digital image, he is therefore fulfilling the wildest atomistic fantasies of Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Eisenstein and other "atomists" of the 1920s. The digital image is made up from pixels and layers; the virtual 3-D space is made from simple polygons; the Web page is made up from separate objects represented by HTML statements; the objects on the Web are connected by hyperlinks. In short, the ontology of computer data space as a whole and the individual objects in this space is atomistic on every possible level.
The key feature shared by all modern human-computer interfaces is overlapping windows, which were first proposed by Alan Kay in 1969. All modern interfaces display information in overlapping and re-sizable windows arranged in a stack, similar to a pile of papers on a desk. As a result, the computer screen can present the user with a practically unlimited amount of information despite its limited surface.
The 1920s saw a revolution in typography and graphic design. Traditional symmetrical layouts appropriate for the old age of slow reading and private engagement with the book were replaced by new principles: the clear hierarchy of type sizes, the economy of block type against clean white background, the energy of simple geometric elements designed to grab the attention of the viewer and then to lead him through the message, step by step. All these principles received further development in computer interfaces. On the most simple level, the graphical style of Windows 2000 or MAC OS perfectly follows Tschichold's thesis that "the essence of the new typography is clarity."
But GUIs also take new typography to the next level. The task of the interface designer is no longer to simply present a limited amount of information in the most efficient way, as it was for the designer of an invitation card, a magazine layout or a poster. The new task is to create an efficient structure and tools for working with arbitrary information, information which is always changing and always grows. Therefore if a modernist designer broke a message into a clearly defined hierarchy—main heading, sub-heading, and so on—GUI provides the user himself with tools for hierarchical organization of arbitrary data. The examples of these tools are nested folders and nested menus; outline display options of word processing applications; zoom and pan controls which can operate on any data, from 3-D spaces to text (Pad++ interface). In this way, the principles of new typography and modernist design have become the principles of what can be called meta-design: the creation of tools which are employed by a user himself to organize the information on-the-fly.
The idea of visual epistemology received a new life in a computer age. It justifies a computer version of the avant-garde defamiliarizing points of view: interactive 3-D computer graphics. This technology allows a computer user to observe any object from an arbitrary viewpoint in order to understand the object's structure. Similarly, any quantified data can be turned into a 3-D representation which the user can examine in order to uncover the relationships between visualized data. From chemistry and physics to architectural and product design, from financial analysis to pilot training, 3-D visualization is an essential tool of the post-industrial labour of information processing. Defamiliarization now involves simply a movement of a computer mouse to change the perspective, thus producing a new view of the scene.
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