This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Does new media represent a 'new avant-garde' of information? How can an information society be represented iconically if the activities that define it are all so dynamic? What are the cultural consequences of extending the internet into the physical world?
In proposing software as modernity's new societal force, this book seeks to reclassify software as today's revitalized combustion engine, underpinning the logic of contemporary culture. Manovich investigates the ways in which the shift from an industrial to information society has resulted in new aesthetic sensibilities and representations. He describes software as the internal combustion engine of the information society, arguing that it is in software that the new cultural logic manifests itself most clearly. This is a cutting-edge and systematic examination of contemporary culture by the creator of the field of software studies.
Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory. Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016), which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics). The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google, New York Public Library, and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is the author and editor of 15 books including The Language of New Media that has been translated into fourteen languages. Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.