Databases and Nonlinear Represenations

1
Databases and Non-linear Represenations

• Narratives and Arrays

2

• 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)

3
The database can be understood extension of
earlier forms?

• The encyclopedia
• Scientific collections and archives
• Industrial organization and management of labor
  and production

4
New media objects

• dont tell stories
• dont have beginning or end
• dont 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.

5
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

6

• 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.

7
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.

8

• 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 computers unique
  ontology onto the cultural sphere.

9
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)

10
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)
• Momento, 2000, Christopher Nolan

11
Online Examples

• (involving trans media, and shifts in the valence
  of media components audio, image, text, etc)
• Youtube
• Jumpcut
• Delicious and social bookmarking sites
• Myspace
• John Osh They Rule http//www.theyrule.net/
• Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents (Bust
  down the Doors) http//www.yhchang.com/

12
More Online Examples

• The Sheep Market http//www.thesheepmarket.com/
• The Sonic Memorial Project http//www.sonicmemoria
  l.org/sonic/public/index.html
• Termite TV, Life Stories http//www.termite.org/LS
  /htm/ls_start.html

13

• 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.