Digital Constructivism

I. From "New Vision" to New Media
To what extent the computer revolution can be compared to the modernist revolution in the beginning of the twentieth century? During this revolution, all key modern visual communication techniques were developed: photo and film montage, classical film language, surrealism, the use of sex appeal in advertisement, modern graphic design, new typography. No fundamental new approaches emerge after the 1920’s; we are still using the same techniques, and the shift to computer media does not appear to bring with it any new ones. Why? More generally, if historically each cultural period (Renaissance, Baroque, and so on) brought with it a new expressive language why is the computer age satisfied with using the language of the previous period?

II. The Avant-Garde as Software
Part of the answer is that with new media, modernist communication techniques acquire a new status. The techniques developed by the artistic avant-garde of the 1920’s became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from a dream-existence of bourgeois society (constructivist design, New Typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing, photo-montage) now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: the interaction with a computer.  I analyze the transformations of avant-garde techniques into the techniques of human-computer interface: 3D visualization, windows, "cut and paste," and hyperlinking.

III. The New Avant-garde
Does new media, just as post-modern culture in general (such as MTV) simply naturalize the old, modernist avant-garde? No, but it does introduce an equally revolutionary set of communication techniques. The new avant-garde is quite different from the old. The old media avant-garde came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, image processing, search engines, data mining, and simulation. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or super-media, as it uses old media as its primary material. From "New Vision," New Typography, New Architecture of the 1920s we move to New Media of the 1990s; from "A Man with a Movie Camera" to a user with a search engine, compositing program, image analysis program, visualization program; from cinema, the technology of seeing, to a computer, the technology of memory.
 
 
 

Case study: The Avant-Garde as Software: Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov, "A Man with a Movie Camera," 1929.

Lessons from Vertov:

1. Database / Narrative

2. The Langauge of effects

3. Loops / narrative (new temporality)

4. Non-illusionistic compositing

From the Avant-Garde to Software:

5. Pilot's eye -> flight simulators -> virtual camera

6. "I am a mechanical eye" -> subject-less machine vision

7. Montage -> window interface

8. "Visual Esperanto" -> human-computer interface