Summary: Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices – Manovich
By: Shiyam Ramachandran
Database as a Symbolic Form
This article is about the rise and domination of a form of cultural expression that affects virtually every aspect of communicative life within modernity: the database. Historically, cinema has privileged “the narrative” as the strategic means to convey meaningful information.
In fact, it has been so privileged that it is difficult to find something meaningful if it is codified otherwise. If in lieu of seeing a film in its final composite of shots, but were thrown into all the non-edited footage in a disorganized file folder (where file names aren’t at all meaningful but are randomly named) could we effectively call it a film? I think most of us would be inclined to think otherwise. But the database “structures” so much of life, that, according to Manovich, we should start thinking about it for what it is (and certainly not take it for granted). Or at least that’s my take from the article.
The framework of the internet is, essentially a database. There is no first or last page to the internet, beginning or end. It has no depth, only different levels of virtuality that are represented by other levels of virtuality (with the word “level” not necessarily implying hierarchy). If someone were to say “oh, I’m going to go and understand everything there is to know about the internet”, they’d be on an absurd quest, on account you can’t really understand the internet, because the internet isn’t a thing. It’s a database. And a database’ ontology is not meant for understanding in its entirety on account that it possesses no entirety and no boundary.
In the land of computers, Manovich future divides new media objects not just in terms of data structures but as well in terms of algorithms. Algorithms are executable, data structures are that from which one executes; indeed, they, as Manovich puts it, “have a symbiotic relationship”. I should add here, that data can exist as it is or as they are (depending on what one thinks of plurality). Algorithms are instructions needing an external instructor (computer or non-computer). Data, doesn’t have an external instructor on account that in most instances it has no externality or internality because it is what it is.
Perhaps the most complex part of the article – something I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around – is the paralleling the database/narrative dichotomy with the semiological dichotomy of the syntagm and the paradigm. If I may interpolate, the syntagm is “the dish” and paradigm is the “freedom of the cook”; in other words, the syntagm is whatever that’s present in communication, the paradigm is all else. So, in terms of the database vs narrative dichotomy, it’s easy to think of the database as being paradigmatic (because, it’s everything), and the narrative as syntagmatic (because it’s the final product). Of course, new media, inverts this “paradigm” in the sense that the paradigm becomes the seen and the syntagm becomes the unseen (or rather unthought). This in essence is what this article is about.
Soft Cinema
Software cinema essentially is the kind of cinema generated and compiled by a computer. It’s composed of two parts, a mechanism to generate imagery, and another to display it. The details I’m not sure really matter, as really, the main point to draw here is to look at a kind of simultaneous art made predominently through computer database processes as opposed narrative human processes.