lev manovich is writing on his new book information aesthetics. he tries to find out what kind of interfaces artist, designers, "can be scientists", are creating to interact with information. just some thoughts to think over out of the talk:

society is still driven by as he calls it "industrial modernism"

there are strategies in terms of how to organise our space, how to make our objects, how to organise text, right? sometimes people use the term modernism for these, but i find it much too broad then it covers everything from 1860 to 1960: everything from say manet to pop art; and i think what people developed - let's say between 1915 and 1929 - is something more specific. therefore i am playing with the term industrial modernism - but i am still not sure if this is a good term.

the bottom line: if you go to any space today, if you just wake up and switch on tv you realise - at least in certain countries, that we have moved into a new type of society: the information society. this is going on since the 50s but still, the kind of aesthetics we use is very much connected what was already solidified by 1929. look at this table, look at the chairs, we are sitting in a room without ornaments. if i look at the typography of this book, it is basically 1920 aesthetics, it is neither the aesthetic from 1980 nor 1988

modernism was very much about the conceptual, a try to deal with the scantiness of resources: bandwidth was limited ... you had to build a mathematical theory of communication so you can measure how much stuff you can send through a channel. the same idea occured in modernist design, in the design of the 1890s. the idea by then was: what is the minimum amount of ink we can put on a page to have the maximum impact on the viewer.

you can see that the whole culture of modernism was very much influenced by the idea of efficiency, but today we are no longer limited by scantiness of resources. you can put everything on a hard disc, etc, etc. that means new cultural strategies will emerge ... the definition of information from 1945 is still important, but just for engineers who have to put optical cable somewhere. culturally it is not as important anymore. what we need are in fact some other ways of thinking about information.

... of course it is not just about capitalism. we live in a so called democratic society, driven by the question: how can i separate myself from you? i can separate myself from you by my style. we create symbolic and social separations; there are always symbolic, social, psychological reasons why we can define chances.

i keep saying that for me industrial modernism was about efficiency, but it is also a part of capitalism. and what is interesting on capitalism is that capitalism needs inefficiency. if you want to buy new headphones i give you a map, saying go here! but i also want you to get lost and to buy 500 other things ... it is not just capitalism, think about the failure of the communist countries in 20th century. what those countries did was basically to try to take modernism and to apply it to a social order. the idea was to have something like a master plan: everything totally efficient. well, it didn't work. of course, from the point of information theory you can say: we didn't have feedback, but it also means that for some reasons human beings and human minds like inefficiency, we like a certain kind of mess, we like multiple channels ...

it is part of a larger phenomena which means that if i am designing a website in 2003 i am driven by two very contradictory logic's. one logic is i want to you to find what you are looking for as fast as possible. on the other hand i want traps on my website, i want you to get lost so that you end up with something new. i think this is not a new phenomena, but i think this phenomena is much more obvious in 2003 than in 1920 ...

a lot of ideas can be found in his phd from 1993 the engineering of vision from constructivism to computer. nice text and nice chapter: "the enginering of vision from inkhuk to mir" which includes a lot historical facts on information theory.

info-aesthetic (¡12mb!) with lev manovich, paul pangaro and special guest heinz von foerster. (and if someone wonders, i couldn't find a correct "a" to correct the mis-pronounced word in this spoken version. didn't want to cut it either.)

A very interesting interview.

I've been thinking awhile about the term "industrial modernism", and I think that people may misunderstand it:

- It is too related to the Modern/Postmodern debate. The "posmo people" will interpret it as criticism of rationality of modernism defending the "posmodern condition". But, if I get Lev's idea's right, postmodern art or design is also within the industrial modernism paradigm.

Then industrial, as opposed to informational may be also disorientating.

When you think about it, I'd say that a great deal of the design and aesthetics of this industrial modernism is based on mathematical information processing. So how about "informational modernism"? I've been thinking about that while watching several pieces or software are that are very close to the experimental works of visual representation of data in the 60s and 70s when computer scientits start to make digital works of art mostly based in mathematical algorithms.

Isn't it something wrong when the most "avantgarde" tendencies in digital art mimick the pioneer's work in the sixties?

> resources: bandwidth was >limited ... you had to build >a mathematical theory of >communication so you can >measure how much stuff you >can send through a channel.
I would say that this will never change. The more you can send, the more people will like to get. Resources will always be scarce. In the ol' days we were happy to wait even minutes to watch a picture. Now people want video on demand. Next will be 3D operas, or whatever.

But I really enjoyed the idea of efficiency as one of the main criteria behind this industrial modernism. It is one of this general principles that you didn't think about it and if you keep it in mind, lots of things start to make sense.

Think of usability. Is a way to put the industrial efficiency in the world of bytes. If you follow Nielsen dictums too closely you end up with very boring sites, but extremely efficient.
And as time goes by, more and more people are obssesed with usability.

Damm! Hope Lev finishes the book soon. I'd love to read it