Geoffrey Batchen: Lev, your impressive new book, The Language of New Media, is important for the way it goes about trying to trace a coherent history for its subject. This, of course, can't help but raise all sorts of provocative questions (including definitional questions about both "language" and "new media"). The ones that struck me have to do with the archaeology you provide for new media and with your choice of a particular theory and history of cinema as the "key conceptual lens" through which to look at this archaeology. New media, however you define it, incorporates so many different aesthetics and technologies (computing, photography, video, film, animation, graphics, sound, software design, 3D-modelling, to name only a few), that it's hard to see why it's so useful to privilege any one "conceptual lens." Of course this choice does provide you with a strikingly concrete metaphor for your history, the Z1 computing machine built by Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room in 1936, a machine that incorporated punched tape made from discarded 35mm movie film. Given the stress you place on this moment ("the two separate historical trajectories [media and computing] finally meet," "a son murders his father"), I can see why you chose to replicate it on the cover of your book.

But why couldn;t you equally argue that most of the significant conceptual relationships that you identify with new media are already current a century before Zuse cluttered up his parents' house with the Z1? You mention Daguerre and his copper-based photographic plates, for example, but ignore the fact that the inventors of the computer and of paper-based photography, Englishmen Charles Babbage and Henry Talbot, were close friends and collaborators. Babbage even exhibited Talbot's early photographs next to his Difference Engine in 1840, as if to suggest that they were of the same order. Babbage was, of course, famous not only for his mathematics (as was Talbot, incidentally) but also for his software design using punched cards and for his code-breaking skills, a past-time he often shared with Charles Wheatstone. Wheatstone, in turn, invented a stereoscopic system of representation, and made a photographic stereo-portrait of Babbage, the world's first effort at a virtual 3D-modelling of the human form. Meanwhile, another of photography's inventors, the American painter Samuel Morse, came up with a system for an electric telegraph, building his earliest working model in 1837. Contemporary commentators were quick to put all this together, speaking of "a vast sounding gallery,...a vast picture gallery, and...a universal telegraph." Strange that you don;t mention the telegraph in your history, because it could be argued that this technology basically involves the decomposition of images into electrical impulses that are then sent to be recomposed somewhere else, all familiar attributes of new media. As Morse himself claimed in 1837, "if...electricity can be made visible...I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance."

So what's at stake in privileging cinema and 1936 as your two origin points in The Language of New Media? Why, in particular, return us to an "avant-garde masterpiece" of Russian cinema, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera from 1929, as our analytical guide? Television had already been patented by 1924, but it only gets two brief mentions in your book. You argue instead that "cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data." But why go back to an already outmoded technology (cinema) if new media has, as you argue in your last few pages, a "radically new nature" and "new properties." In fact, isn't it striking how many features of computer interfaces borrow, not from cinema, but from the illustrated book? Indeed, isn't this the source of many of cinema's narrative features too? In fact, it could be argued that the implosion of depth and surface, the bodily interaction between image, eye and hand,, and the strange convolusion of temporal coordinates that one experiences sitting in front of a computer are all quite distinctive and different from the cinema experience. I better stop here, but you're getting my drift. I'm interested in histories, and how and why they're written, and your book is an excellent place from which to start any debate on how one might go about composing a history for new media.

Lev Manovich:

Geoff, I am very impressed by the new histories of new media you sketch above and the new connections you have uncovered, but I do disagree with your criticisms. I think that in you are putting too much emphasis on a particular section of my book, “How Media Became New,” at the expense of the other segments. My goal in the book was to provide many different archeologies of new media, foregrounding, at various times, different historical moments and diverse media. For example, my “arheology of the computer screen” looks at Reneissance perspectival machines, early nineteenth-century photographic setups, mid twentieth-century radar, television and late twentieth-century VR; the section on compositing considers eighteenth-century panaromas, optical printing in cinema and video keying; the section “The Langauge of Cultural Interfaces” discusses a history of the book and Reneissance painting; and so on.

Now, if we look closer at the section where Konrad Zuse makes an appearance, I think that I do not actually privilege only cinema or 1936 in this particular archeology. My point is that mass media and modern computing are the complimentary technologies of a modern mass society; they appear together and develop side by side, with new important advances in media and in computing often taking place during the same decade: 1890s, 1940s, etc. As I put it in that section, “Throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, numerous mechanical and electrical tabulators and calculators were developed; they were gradually getting faster and their use was becoming more wide spread. In parallel, we witness the rise of modern media which allows the storage of images, image sequences, sounds and text in different material forms: a photographic plate, film stock, a gramophone record, etc.”

I think I made a mistake in the book’s introduction when I wrote that cinema acts as the main “conceptual lens” through which I look at new media. In fact I use as many concepts from literary theory, art history and art theory. I also situate new media within the history of visual culture of the last few centuries (including vernacular images, painting, graphic design, animation) and not only the history of the moving image.

And yet, why did I put a stylized image of Zuse’s film with punched binary code on the cover of the book, rather than, for instance, Talbot's early photographs, Charles Wheatstone’s stereoscope, or Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph, or Dürer’s perspectival machine, or any other icon in the history of modern visual culture and media? There are many reasons, but given the limited space I have here, I will only mention a few:

1. Cinema has without doubt been the most important popular art-form of the twentieth century, so if new media prepares to realize its ambition to become the successor of cinema for this twenty-first century, it would have to incorporate the cinematic within itself, to reinvent it, to make it anew. 2. New media makes a time-based dynamic multimedia a new communication default – and of course cinema was the original time-based dynamic multimedia (rather than the static illustrated book), so we might as well look at what we can take from its techniques and bring it into new media. 3. As Anne Hollander argued in her Moving Pictures, twentieth-century cinema incorporates and further develops various techniques of painting and graphic arts, so when we talk about cinema, we reference the whole history of modern visual culture. 4. In contrast to art history or literary theory, film theory’s subject is a technology-based cultural form (or a set of forms) – many of its concepts lend themselves well to the study of new media.

I can go on, but I hope these examples are sufficient. All in all, if we look at new media in terms of its new capacities for representation and its use of already existing representational techniques (which is what I am doing in my book), cinema indeed comes out to be more important than other arts and media – and this is why Zuse’s film ended up on the cover. Of course, if we are to focus on the emerging possibilities of new media for telecommunication and telepresence (which is what I plan to discuss in my next book) – cell phones, instant messaging, chat, multi-user games, and so on – Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph, the first television designs from the 1870s, the first fax from the turn of the century, or another image from the history of telecommunication would become more important.