manovich

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Domus (in English)

"Lev Manovich: the new aesthetics of information" by Stefania Garassini.
June 22, 2005.

Excerpt:

""The discipline of info-aesthetics studies how the contemporary culture responds to the challenge of managing, storing and circulating growing quantities of data – explains the scholar – this leads to new aesthetic sensitivity and communication forms and strategies, from design to architecture, from the cinema to the design of human-computer interfacing”. A cascade of data in cyberspace, the domain of pure information, invades the material world and moulds it into new categories. Every object can now become an interface, have a screen and potentially open a window on a host of data. An example of this is the way media skins – building facades or entire surfaces – show video screenings, in some cases displaying constantly changing information. The Graz Art museum is clad with a methacrylate surface containing 930 small lights, like as many pixels, that are activated to generate continuous animation. “Here, information and form are working together to create interesting hybrid objects”, explains Manovich. This trend is symbolically well represented by Frank Gehry’s constructions, in which the form is like a snapshot of a constantly evolving fluid process."

2005  Interview