5 July 2013 Samuel Pushpak Info Viz II - Reading on Classification Summary of “Database as a Symbolic Form” by Lev Manovich 1. The Database Logic The author specifies database as a cultural form of its own. He positions a database as a new symbolic form of a computer age or a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and the world. He argues that the world today is an unstructured collection of images, tests and data records and emphasizes that we need to organize it with a database. 2. Data and Algorithm Not all new media objects are databases. Computer games have narratives. In a game from the authors point of view all the elements are motivated. Games do not follow database logic all the time but they are ruled by algorithms. The player has to execute the algorithms in order to win. Keeping this as the background the author gives a general principle of new media: the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself. Computer programming encapsulates the world according to its own logic. Then the author points to the symbiotic relationship between algorithms and data structures - the more complex the structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be and vice versa. 3. Database and Narrative In this section the author discusses the opposition between database and narrative. Database as a cultural form represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. Narrative creates a cause and effect trajectory. An interactive narrative is a sum of the of multiple trajectories through a database. So a narrative and a database do not have the same status in computer culture. 4. Semiotics of Database The author uses the theory of syntagm and paradigm to understand the way in which computer culture redistributes weight in between narrative and database.Elements in syntagmatic dimension are related in Preaesentia - REAL. Elements in paradigmatic dimension are related in Absentia - IMAGINED. New Media reverses this relationship: Database the paradigm is given material existence - REAL. Narrative the syntagm is de materialized - VIRTUAL. 5. A Database Complex Here the author argues that CD storage is not a database but a cinema as a database. He then states that; two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world are the database and narrative. Modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative. Photography privileges catalogs, film privileges narrative: almost all fictional films are narratives with few exceptions. At this point the author establishes the central thought of this paper - Database is more popular than ever and is the cultural form most characteristic of a computer. 

6. Database Cinema: Geenaway and Vertov Cinema exists in the intersection between database and narrative. We shoot the movie onto a tape; also we edit the movie (narrative construction) using a database. Then the author gives examples from the movies made by Greenaway and Vertor. “Man with a Movie” Camera by Vertor which traverses its database in a particular order to construct an argument. Man with a Movie Camera never arrives at anything like a well defined language, rather it proposes an untamed, endless unwinding of cinematic techniques, or effects as cinema’s new way of speaking. 7. For Classroom Discussion a) How new media objects are used to promote a movie ? If new media objects lack the narrative capability, how ideal it is to use them to promote “narrative-rich” movies ? Discuss the promotional website of the movie Lie of Pi. b) How new genres of movies can be created using the unique advantages only a new media object can produce ? Discuss about the interactive film “The Wilderness Downtown” especially how different camera angles can be viewed at a time and how inputs from the user defines the narrative of the movie. Here the medium that is not “narrative-rich” becomes platform to render a new experience of viewing a movie. Yet still all this is possible- thanks to the background hero - database. 8. References Database as a symbolic form by Lev Manovich http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/ Database_as_symbolic_form.htm Biography of Lev Manovich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich PI’s epic journey http://journey.lifeofpimovie.com/#!/ The Wilderness Downtown by Chris Milk http://thewildernessdowntown.com/