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Jan 10, 2024, 21 min read

Database as a Symbolic Form

“Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” (View Highlight)

  • “narrative” was the key form of cultural expression of the modern age which is what cinema demonstrated. The computer is now the digital correlate
  • Defining database…
    • in computer science, ”a structured collection of data”
    • but in the context of new media, ”collections of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search.”
      • they each “present a different model of what a world is like” even if the user experience is very different from more purely consumptive mediums of the past. they are interactive.
  • Most popular forms of new media are in this “database” form, specifically those that have cultural content
    • “Consider, for instance, the “virtual museums” genre — CD-ROMs which take the user on a “tour” through a museum collection. A museum becomes a database of images representing its holdings… Although such CD-ROMs often simulate the traditional museum experience of moving from room to room in a continuous trajectory, this “narrative” method of access does not have any special status in comparison to other access methods offered by a CD-ROM. Thus the narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others.”
    • A database form gives a lot of agency to the end-user to control how to navigate the artifact, rather than being subjected upon a narrative. you have the elemental material
  • Databases flourish on the Internet
    • everything is a collection, a list.
    • it is always possible to add a new element to a list by opening the file and adding a new line (in practice, not entirely true because of how closed-off authorship is but this is the feeling that people have—the limitlessness of the internet)
  • websites are never complete. Collection vs. story

    “The open nature of the Web as medium (Web pages are computer files which can always be edited) means that the Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. The sites always grow. New links are being added to what is already there. It is as easy to add new elements to the end of list as it is to insert them anywhere in it. 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. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?”

  • new media objects that are not databases
    • video games: these are experienced as narratives. all objects are justified, then. (but what about generated objects… maybe this was before huge open worlds with a bunch of generated objects?)
    • new media objects generally project “the ontology of a computer onto culture itself”
  • “storage mania” from an article in summer 1994 in Mediamatic journal
    • “everything is being collected” and cleaned up, organized, indexed
  • new cultural algorithm “reality -> media -> data -> database”
  • because of easy proliferation of data and the tendency to index and link, the “map became larger than the territory.” There are more links and indexes than original data
  • "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.”
  • “Web sites and other new media objects which are organized as databases correspond to the data structure; while narratives, including computer games, correspond to the algorithms.”
  • “In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database.”
  • semiotics: study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretations
    • syntagmatic is what is real and there and of the parts used to compose the whole
    • paradigmatic is what is implicit and could have been (the “official” set of possible things)
  • in cinema and traditional narrative media, te artifact is syntagmatic
  • in database media, this is reversed. The main thing is the collection of all possible elements (“(Macromedia Director calls this database “cast,” Adobe Premiere calls it “project”, ProTools calls it a “session,” but the principle is the same.)“)
    • The set of possible things is the center of the design process
  • the canonical media of the time has flipped between prizing linear narratives and spatial narratives.
  • encyclopedia vs. narrative (a parallel to database vs. story) are the two basic, opposing creative impulses
  • “minimalist artists” which creates works of art by systematically varying a single parameter
  • How can we both be compelling (which requires a narrative) while also demonstrating the vastness of possibilities (the paradigm and underlying collection)? I’m reminded of The danger of a single story and wondering how databases can become an everyday tool to counteract this force.
    • what is the evolution of modern-day cinema towards this more spatial, expansive format? Is it an internet-equivalent movie?

New highlights added July 6, 2023 at 4:36 PM

  • Multimedia works which have “cultural” content appear to particularly favor the database form. Consider, for instance, the “virtual museums” genre — CD-ROMs which take the user on a “tour” through a museum collection. A museum becomes a database of (View Highlight)
  • The open nature of the Web as medium (Web pages are computer files which can always be edited) means that the Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. The sites always grow. New links are being added to what is already there. It is as easy to add new elements to the end of list as it is to insert them anywhere in it. 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. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing? (View Highlight)
  • Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation which videotaped and then digitized numerous interviews with Holocaust survivors; it would take one person forty years to watch all the recorded material. The editors of Mediamatic journal, who devoted a whole issue to the topic of “the storage mania” (Summer 1994) wrote: “A growing number of organizations are embarking on ambitious projects. Everything is being collected: culture, asteroids, DNA patterns, credit records, telephone conversations; it doesn’t matter.”8 Once it is digitized, the data has to be cleaned up, organized, indexed. The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality-> media->data->database. The rise of the Web, this gigantic and always changing data corpus, gave millions of people a new hobby or profession: data indexing. 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. And, with the rise of Internet commerce, most large-scale commercial sites have become real databases, or rather front-ends to company databases. (View Highlight)
  • 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. Porno Web sites exposed the logic of the Web to its extreme by constantly re-using the same photographs from other porno Web sites. Only rare sites featured the original content. On any given date, the same few dozen images would appear on thousands of sites. Thus, the same data would give rise to more indexes than the number of data elements themselves. (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
  • Web sites and other new media objects which are organized as databases correspond to the data structure; while narratives, including computer games, correspond to the algorithms. (View Highlight)
  • In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database. (View Highlight)
  • However, in the world of new media, the word “narrative” is often used as all-inclusive term, to cover up the fact that we have not yet developed a language to describe these new strange objects. It is usually paired with another over-used word — interactive. Thus, a number of database records linked together so that more than one trajectory is possible, is assumed to be constitute “interactive narrative.” (View Highlight)
  • However, if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all. Indeed, why should an arbitrary sequence of database records, constructed by the user, result in “a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors”? (View Highlight)
    • Note: id argue that this is inherently a narrative. Simply because of the fact that the user chose them they are not random choices. That’s the beauty of new media objects—that everyone is an artist and creator because they are doing the making through the “interactive” medium
  • (Macromedia Director calls this database “cast,” Adobe Premiere calls it “project”, ProTools calls it a “session,” but the principle is the same.) (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
  • Why does new media insist on this language-like sequencing? My hypothesis is that it follows the dominant semiological order of the twentieth century — that of cinema. Cinema replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots which appear on the screen one at a time. For centuries, a spatialized narrative where all images appear simultaneously dominated European visual culture; then it was delegated to “minor” cultural forms as comics or technical illustrations. “Real” culture of the twentieth century came to speak in linear chains, aligning itself with the assembly line of an industrial society and the Turing machine of a post-industrial era. New media continues this mode, giving the user information one screen at a time. At least, this is the case when it tries to become “real” culture (interactive narratives, games); when it simply functions as an interface to information, it is not ashamed to present much more information on the screen at once, be it in the form of tables, normal or pull-down menus, or lists. In particular, the experience of a user filling in an on-line form can be compared to pre-cinematic spatialised narrative: in both cases, the user is following a sequence of elements which are presented simultaneously. (View Highlight)
  • So, when minimalist artist Sol LeWitt spoke of an artist’s idea as “the machine which makes the work,” it was only logical to substitute the human executing the idea by a computer.22At the same time, since the only way to make pictures with a computer was by writing a computer program, the logic of computer programming itself pushed computer artists in the same directions. Thus, for artist Frieder Nake a computer was a “Universal Picture Generator,” capable of producing every possible picture out of a combination of available picture elements and colors.23 In 1967 he published a portfolio of 12 drawings which were obtained by successfully multiplying a square matrix by itself. Another early computer artist Manfred Mohr produced numerous images which recorded various transformations of a basic cube. (View Highlight)
  • Given the dominance of database in computer software and the key role it plays in the computer-based design process, perhaps we can arrive at new kinds of narrative by focusing our attention on how narrative and database can work together. How can a narrative take into account the fact that its elements are organised in a database? How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it lead to new kinds of narratives? (View Highlight)
  • While Greenaway is right to direct filmmakers to more innovative literary narratives, new media artists working on the database — narrative problem can learn from cinema “as it is.” For cinema already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative. We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database-narrative problem in every film, although only a few have done this self-consciously. (View Highlight)
  • This move can be read as the desire to create a database at its most pure form: the set of elements not ordered in any way. If the elements exist in one dimension (time of a film, list on a page), they will be inevitably ordered. So the only way to create a pure database is to spatialise it, distributing the elements in space. This is exactly the path which Greenaway took. Situated in three-dimensional space which does not have an inherent narrative logic, a 1992 installation “100 Objects to Represent the World” in its very title proposes that the world should be understood through a catalog rather than a narrative. (View Highlight)
  • h a catalog rather than a narrative. At the same time, Greenaway does not abandon narrative; he continues to investigate how database and narrative can work together. H (View Highlight)
  • This process of discovery is film’s main narrative and it is told through a catalog of discoveries being made. Thus, in the hands of Vertov, a database, this normally static and “objective” form, becomes dynamic and subjective. (View Highlight)

title: “Database as a Symbolic Form” author: “Lev Manovich” url: ”http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/022-database-as-a-symbolic-form/19_article_1998.pdf” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

Database as a Symbolic Form

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Highlights

  • Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (View Highlight)
  • Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (View Highlight)
  • Similarly, literary or cinematic narrative, an architectural plan and database each present a different model of what a world is like. It is this sense of database as a cultural form of its own (View Highlight)
  • Multimedia works which have “cultural” content appear to particularly favor the database form. Consider, for instance, the “virtual museums” genre — CD-ROMs which take the user on a “tour” through a museum collection. A museum becomes a database of (View Highlight)
  • The open nature of the Web as medium (Web pages are computer files which can always be edited) means that the Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. The sites always grow. New links are being added to what is already there. It is as easy to add new elements to the end of list as it is to insert them anywhere in it. 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. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing? (View Highlight)
  • Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation which videotaped and then digitized numerous interviews with Holocaust survivors; it would take one person forty years to watch all the recorded material. The editors of Mediamatic journal, who devoted a whole issue to the topic of “the storage mania” (Summer 1994) wrote: “A growing number of organizations are embarking on ambitious projects. Everything is being collected: culture, asteroids, DNA patterns, credit records, telephone conversations; it doesn’t matter.”8 Once it is digitized, the data has to be cleaned up, organized, indexed. The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality-> media->data->database. The rise of the Web, this gigantic and always changing data corpus, gave millions of people a new hobby or profession: data indexing. 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. And, with the rise of Internet commerce, most large-scale commercial sites have become real databases, or rather front-ends to company databases. (View Highlight)
  • 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. Porno Web sites exposed the logic of the Web to its extreme by constantly re-using the same photographs from other porno Web sites. Only rare sites featured the original content. On any given date, the same few dozen images would appear on thousands of sites. Thus, the same data would give rise to more indexes than the number of data elements themselves. (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
  • Web sites and other new media objects which are organized as databases correspond to the data structure; while narratives, including computer games, correspond to the algorithms. (View Highlight)
  • In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database. (View Highlight)
  • However, in the world of new media, the word “narrative” is often used as all-inclusive term, to cover up the fact that we have not yet developed a language to describe these new strange objects. It is usually paired with another over-used word — interactive. Thus, a number of database records linked together so that more than one trajectory is possible, is assumed to be constitute “interactive narrative.” (View Highlight)
  • However, if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all. Indeed, why should an arbitrary sequence of database records, constructed by the user, result in “a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors”? (View Highlight)
    • Note: id argue that this is inherently a narrative. Simply because of the fact that the user chose them they are not random choices. That’s the beauty of new media objects—that everyone is an artist and creator because they are doing the making through the “interactive” medium
  • (Macromedia Director calls this database “cast,” Adobe Premiere calls it “project”, ProTools calls it a “session,” but the principle is the same.) (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
  • Why does new media insist on this language-like sequencing? My hypothesis is that it follows the dominant semiological order of the twentieth century — that of cinema. Cinema replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots which appear on the screen one at a time. For centuries, a spatialized narrative where all images appear simultaneously dominated European visual culture; then it was delegated to “minor” cultural forms as comics or technical illustrations. “Real” culture of the twentieth century came to speak in linear chains, aligning itself with the assembly line of an industrial society and the Turing machine of a post-industrial era. New media continues this mode, giving the user information one screen at a time. At least, this is the case when it tries to become “real” culture (interactive narratives, games); when it simply functions as an interface to information, it is not ashamed to present much more information on the screen at once, be it in the form of tables, normal or pull-down menus, or lists. In particular, the experience of a user filling in an on-line form can be compared to pre-cinematic spatialised narrative: in both cases, the user is following a sequence of elements which are presented simultaneously. (View Highlight)
  • So, when minimalist artist Sol LeWitt spoke of an artist’s idea as “the machine which makes the work,” it was only logical to substitute the human executing the idea by a computer.22At the same time, since the only way to make pictures with a computer was by writing a computer program, the logic of computer programming itself pushed computer artists in the same directions. Thus, for artist Frieder Nake a computer was a “Universal Picture Generator,” capable of producing every possible picture out of a combination of available picture elements and colors.23 In 1967 he published a portfolio of 12 drawings which were obtained by successfully multiplying a square matrix by itself. Another early computer artist Manfred Mohr produced numerous images which recorded various transformations of a basic cube. (View Highlight)
  • Given the dominance of database in computer software and the key role it plays in the computer-based design process, perhaps we can arrive at new kinds of narrative by focusing our attention on how narrative and database can work together. How can a narrative take into account the fact that its elements are organised in a database? How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it lead to new kinds of narratives? (View Highlight)
  • While Greenaway is right to direct filmmakers to more innovative literary narratives, new media artists working on the database — narrative problem can learn from cinema “as it is.” For cinema already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative. We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database-narrative problem in every film, although only a few have done this self-consciously. (View Highlight)
  • This move can be read as the desire to create a database at its most pure form: the set of elements not ordered in any way. If the elements exist in one dimension (time of a film, list on a page), they will be inevitably ordered. So the only way to create a pure database is to spatialise it, distributing the elements in space. This is exactly the path which Greenaway took. Situated in three-dimensional space which does not have an inherent narrative logic, a 1992 installation “100 Objects to Represent the World” in its very title proposes that the world should be understood through a catalog rather than a narrative. (View Highlight)
  • h a catalog rather than a narrative. At the same time, Greenaway does not abandon narrative; he continues to investigate how database and narrative can work together. H (View Highlight)
  • This process of discovery is film’s main narrative and it is told through a catalog of discoveries being made. Thus, in the hands of Vertov, a database, this normally static and “objective” form, becomes dynamic and subjective. (View Highlight)

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