DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2019
Volume 13 Number 1
Volume 13 Number 1
Velvet Evolution: A Review of Lev Manovich's Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)
Abstract
Lev Manovich presents a theory of software as simulation. To form the user interface for modern media software, older media are metaphorized, and then new features are added to the media by virtue of their being simulations, and finally the original media are combined to create new forms of cultural expression. Movies that seamlessly combine lens photography and 3D computer graphics are the best example of new cultural forms created by software.
When I started writing this review, a story had just gone viral in social media and
then moved to traditional media: a teacher in Kenya had to prepare his students to
take a standard exam that included using computers, but had no computers in his
classroom, so he drew the user-interface of Microsoft Word on the blackboard, in
exquisite detail [Gharib 2018, 1]. This story caught attention
because it pointed out the digital divide of course, but we were also fascinated by
the detail - striking, how we are all able to check the accuracy of his drawing from
memory. It suggests a central claim of Lev Manovich's Software
Takes Command: we now live in “a software society and our culture can be justifiably
called a software culture — because today software plays a central role in
shaping both the material elements and many of the immaterial structures
that together make up ‘culture’”
[Manovich 2013, 33]. To argue for this claim and follow through on its implications, his work
spans categories such as visual arts, media studies, and software studies.
Manovich combines three rhetorical threads in this book. First is an encomium to
software as something close to a force in human evolution: at the end of the
twentieth century humans have added a fundamentally new dimension to everything that
counts as “culture”
[Manovich 2013, 32]. Second, within the historical trajectory leading from Xerox PARC to the
Macintosh to iPads, Manovich studies the writings of some of the better-known
computer scientists involved to discover ideas of remediation that are central to
his analysis. Third, he produces close reading of two pieces of software that are
products of that school of thought: “desktop applications for media authoring most widely used
today,”
[Manovich 2013, 48] namely Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
We think it is entirely fitting that a text like Frankenstein, so germinal in our culture that we see signs of it
everywhere, should be the subject of so much scholarly attention, read by multiple
schools of criticism. A text like Microsoft Word is no less central to our lived
experience and ephemeral and lasting culture, and deserves scholarly attention as
well. Manovich coined the term “software studies,”
[Manovich 2001] in his earlier important work, Language of New
Media, and he fully explores it here.
A budding academic field has branched off to do “software studies,” which we
might generalize as centering on the study of code as writing. Manovich follows his
own path here: software as a force in culture. He makes the case strenuously that we
cannot consider any aspect of contemporary culture — from art to entertainment to
work and the economy, to the production, distribution, and use of knowledge — without
considering software, because software as a movement has brought with it an
aesthetic and epistemology. And Manovich is interested in software, not code: “I am interested in how software appears to users—i.e. what
functions it offers . . . the interfaces used to present these functions,
and assumptions and models about a user, her/his needs, and society encoded
in these functions and their interface design”
[Manovich 2013, 29].
To cite an example he keeps returning to: many examples of software include the
functions of select, copy, cut, and paste. Manovich has the technical sophistication
to know that the algorithms behind these functions can have nothing to do with each
other. In fact, when I use them in a program like Adobe Illustrator, I might be
invoking entirely different modules of code if I select and copy a block of text or
the outline of a building or a bit-map image. Manovich would have us dispense with
these distinctions. What is important for his argument is that they create the same
experience for the user, the same way of dealing with information and with the
world; and the conventions that unify the movement of software in expressly the same
way as a particular linear perspective can unify a school of visual art. He is most
comfortable dealing with the visual user interface as a seamless surface and he
provides virtuoso close readings reminiscent of New Critics like Cleanth Brooks or
I. A. Richards.
Manovich's survey of the history of ideas centers on the computer as simulation.
Computers are “remediation machines”, borrowing the term remediation from Jay
Bolter and Richard Grusin: “the representation of one medium in another”
[Manovich 2013, 59]. Older media are metaphorized in the visual interface of software. Files are
viewed inside images of manila folders that we can drag them into and out of, and we
add color to a shape with an image of a paint bucket. This is the central aesthetic
and the germinal idea animating all the software Manovich focuses on. Software has
made computers into a metamedium, “a wide range of already-existing and
not-yet-invented media.”
Most important to Manovich's narrative, the innovators at Xerox PARC and then Apple
Computer developed “applications for media manipulation and creation” that
incorporated representations of older media (e.g, scissors, paint brushes,
envelopes) into their graphic user interfaces. He moves from one well-known
historical episode to another — Douglas Engelbart's “mother of all demos,” Alan
Kay and others at Xerox PARC (the direct ancestor of the Macintosh's interface) — and
suggests a genealogy that leads us to the present of Photoshop and After Effects and
Terminator II. Although these writers’ texts are readily available and Engelbart's
demo is on YouTube, any serious attention paid to them is worth praise. Manovich
points out the continuity of ideas and argues that they culminate in the software
that media professionals use in the present.
Diving into the recent history of software is still rare enough to always be worth
reading, and I hope Command inspires more and deeper
work. What alternative ideas of computing died on the vine? Is it significant that
all the figures Manovich touches on are white men with similar educational
backgrounds and institutional positioning? How did economic and institutional
pressures affect the ideas these figures chose to pursue? Did anything connect these
figures aside from ideas? Other than theories of modern art, were there any ideas
circulating in the 1960s and 1970s that may have found their way into their
thinking? The writers he surveys were interested in hardware as well as software
(and not just because software was not unbundled in the way that it is now;
Engelbart spends a good deal of time on office furniture); can we really speak of
one without the other? He asks why these writers did not find more interest in the
academy and why capital is more interested in these media technologies — an excellent
question! — but quickly hedges: “The systematic answer to this question will require its own
investigation”
[Manovich 2013, 85]; that question would indeed make for an interesting study.
The Potential of Softwarization
It is through close readings of “cultural software” that Manovich fleshes
out his ideas of software as re-mediation. When a medium undergoes the process
of softwarization, it is first metaphorized from the physical. E.g., reading a
book on an iPad, we can flip pages and leave a bookmark much as we can with a
physical codex. Then by virtue of the software simulating the bound paper book,
new features are added. We can zoom in on details of a page and copy and paste
text directly rather than having to do it manually, and the creators can add
features like hyperlinks. Thus the simulation both reproduces and augments the
older forms. It is a process he demonstrates in his close reading of the
interface of Photoshop. A paintbrush is simulated, but the simulation software
gives greater control than any artist ever had.
Manovich effectively refutes the facile premise most of us, myself included — have
probably voiced, that capabilities are added to media — greater ease of creation,
manipulation, duplication, distribution and so on — by virtue of their being
digital. Rather, our new capabilities with new media arise from the software we
use. It is not by virtue of being “digital” that I can string-search a
digital copy of Frankenstein or copy it without
effort or loss in quality. Rather, I can search the text and copy it because
software allows me to.
But wait, there's more. The next stage in the process of softwarization is when
chunks of code simulating different tools and different media communicate with
each other behind the scenes and are presented to us in the same interface, so
that media combine seamlessly. In his reading of the After Effects interface to
serve as illustration, Manovich argues that now since one can author in multiple
media at the same time, combining video, 3D animation, textual effects and so
on, the end result is not simply “multi-media.” Rather, “the new media of 3D computer animation has ‘eaten
up’ the dominant media of the industrial age — lens-based photo,
film and video recording”
[Manovich 2013, 293], and a new medium is created where live-action video is not separable
from animation: “the most fundamental assumptions of different media
forms and traditions, are brought together resulting in new media
gestalts. That is, they merge together to offer a coherent new
experience different from experiencing all the elements
separately”
[Manovich 2013, 167]. This process of softwarization is described in the terms of biological
evolution: “The already simulated mediums started exchanging
properties and techniques. As a result, the computer metamedium came to
contain endless new species”
[Manovich 2013, 181].
To name the process of simulation and softwarization and remediation he adopts
the term “Velvet Revolution,” from Czechoslovakia's nonviolent political
change, to refer to the revolution of software, and although he never follows
through, he asserts, “Although it may seem presumptuous to compare political
and aesthetics transformations . . . it is possible to show that the two
revolutions are actually related”
[Manovich 2013, 253]. This is the point in the book I most needed Manovich to flesh out. He
goes on to rely on the term, but never returns to define what the political
implications are. It's hard to guess at what the parallels are. Of course, we
should note that Manovich grew up and received his first training in art in the
Soviet Union, where in recent history aesthetics had very clear political causes
and effects. But if he sees political effects of this movement in software, he
does not explicitly explore it. What are the political implications of this
Velvet Revolution?
Manovich views films like Terminator 2, The Matrix, 300, and
television commercials as the apotheosis of Velvet Revolution: the “logic is also the same as that which we observe in the
creation of new hybrids in biology. That is, the result of the
hybridization process is not simply a mechanical sum of the previously
existing parts but a new ‘species’—a new kind of visual aesthetics
that did not exist previously”
[Manovich 2013, 259].
Software has enabled filmmakers to combine 3D graphics with live photography so
that they are indistinguishable, and characters played by actors interact
seamlessly with computer-generated characters, looking just as realistic so that
we can forget about the difference between them. We can extend the argument into
the present with films like Guardians of the Galaxy
and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The 2016 film
Rogue One created some controversy [Shoard 2018] for blurring the line until it is meaningless,
imposing the faces of a young Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing on other actors.
Thus Carrie Fisher could have a simulated cameo as a younger version of herself
and Cushing, the deceased legend of stage and screen who died in 1994, could
play a crucial supporting role in this film, in 2016.
Software and Human Progress
Manovich's greatest contribution is an ode to software: “our contemporary society can be characterized as a
software society and our culture can be justifiably called a software
culture—because today software plays a central role in shaping both the
material elements and many of the immaterial structures that together
make up ‘culture’”
[Manovich 2013, 33] [Manovich 2013, 33].
His voice is as strong as it was in The Language of New
Media. Manovich's work is indispensable for the language he
provides, an optimistic — ecstatic even-view of the progress already achieved
and the further promise of digital technologies, unmoderated by critical
perspectives but also unsullied by the tendency of voices centered in Silicon
Valley to view the potential for profit as grounds for praise.
Software is a force in human evolution: “In my view, this ability to combine previously separate
media techniques represents a fundamentally new stage in the history of
human media, human semiosis, and human communication, enabled by its
‘softwarization’”
[Manovich 2013, 46]. Additionally, software follows its own teleology, best described as a
virus released in the wild: “The makers of software used in media production usually
do not set out to create a revolution. On the contrary, software is
created to fit into already existing production procedures, job roles,
and familiar tasks. But software applications are like species within
the common ecology — in this case, a shared environment of a digital
computer. Once ‘released’, they start interacting, mutating, and
making hybrids”
[Manovich 2013, 323—324]. Human agency, collective or individual, is not important to this
narrative.
Speaking broadly, we can view those who, analyze technology in the world as
divided between those whose first impulse is to celebrate every innovation of
technology as historic progress, and those whose first impulse is to be
critical, skeptical, suspicious. Many of those in the former group, if they are
not directly associated with venture capitalists, often tend to see the
economics of technology as itself justifying it. Try to imagine praise for
Facebook that makes no reference to market success. This is not true of
Manovich. He is ecstatic about progress demonstrated and the further potential
of new information technologies, without relying on facile economic
justifications. His work needs to be read, as it serves as a corrective to
critical approaches to our digital environment. He writes like a visionary and a
user of computers, not like a venture capitalist.
He gives us the language to discuss the promise of software, but no help
criticizing it. To return to Manovich's central point about software and the
aesthetic of The Matrix, we might reflect on recent
history and the importance of recordings made public. During the last
presidential campaign (2016), a recording (whose veracity was confirmed)
surfaced of the future President confessing to sexual assault. There is talk of
him possibly being blackmailed with a tape involving prostitutes in a foreign
country. In the campaign for Governor in my home state of Illinois, a recording
(also confirmed) was leaked of a Democratic candidate having a conversation with
a past corrupt governor. A video claiming to show the Democratic nominee for
President is circulating now on the internet in conservative circles. That one
is obviously fake, but the examples cited above show that a “fake” video can
look very real. Rogue One is entertaining fiction but it is not hard to imagine
dangerous fictions flowing from the Velvet Revolution. How do we cope with the
same techniques used to bring Peter Cushing back from the dead being used to
show Barack Obama or Robert Mueller committing a crime? Manovich's work
celebrates the software that makes possible such a dangerous falsehood, but
leaves it to us to decide how to deal with the consequences.
Manovich's comfort with software as a sealed commodity, as shown in the example
of copy and paste as a topos rather than code, would seem at odds with the
approaches of many in the audience of this journal. There is a very different
ethos valued by many digital humanists that stresses the transparency and
comprehensibility of the software tools we use, e.g., their ideal is to publish
not just the visualized product, but also the raw dataset and the code that
produced it and the version of R it ran on, in case a bug is discovered by the R
community in the future. Commitment to the work of understanding the software
tools used is not fun, but is generally considered empowering and honest.
Manovich is clear that he is interested in the experience of most users, and we
know that most users are happy to use seamless black boxes. This leads to an
honest question: is it a problem if most users don't have an empowered attitude
toward the software they rely on?
Works Cited
Gharib 2018 Gharib, Malaka. “Computer Teacher with No Computer Chalks Up Clever Classroom Plan.”
NPR All Things Considered. (March 2018).
Manovich 2001 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media MIT Press, Cambridge
(2001).
Manovich 2013 Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command Bloomsbury Academic, New York
(2013).
Shoard 2018 Shoard, Catherine. “Peter Cushing is dead. Rogue One's resurrection is a digital
indignity.”
The Guardian (December 2018).