About Database of Provincial Life

Database of Provincial Life uses digital computers to accomplish a task which was impossible to achieve using any previous representational medium: documenting EVERYTHING which happen to EVERYBODY who lived in the 20th century. By focusing on the typical rather than the exceptional - provincial existence rather than the major cities and major historical figures - Database of Provincial Life is able to achieve unprecedented level of representational compression: reducing the whole of the 20th century just to ten samples. 

This project is a part of the trio of projects Software for the 20th Century. The other two projects are Freud-Lissitzky Navigator and Reality Generator.
 

Database of Provincial Life Team

Narrative and database contents: Lev Manovich 
Designer: Jessica Fleishman