An article featuring the Chancellor's Collaboratory-funded project is available through UCSD News and the Calit2 newsroom.
"UCSD Visual Arts Professor Lev Manovich is leading a team of researchers who will use software-based research methods and cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure to analyze large cultural data sets."
Video recordings from the Software Studies Workshop SoftWhere'08 are now available. Individual presentations are linked to the workshop participants list by name, and are available for online streaming or download in Quicktime MOV format.
The videos have also been uploaded to YouTube. They can be browsed via the Software Studies YouTube Channel and embedded as playable objects:
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The YouTube videos are catagorized, dated, tagged, geocoded, and otherwise metadatively expressive - if you'd like extra data added to them or have video clips of your own to contribute to the channel, let us know!
The FILE Labo is announcing the Opening of the Software Studies Initiative in São Paulo, Brazil.
Round table: Software Studies Initiative in
Software Studies is a new research field for intellectual inquiry that is now just beginning to emerge. The Software Studies Initiative intends to play the key role in establishing this new field. The competed projects will become the models of how to effectively study “software society.” Through workshops, publications, and lectures conducted at UCSD and disseminated via the web and in hard copy publications, we will disseminate the broad vision of software studies. That is, we think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies.
The Software Studies Group in Brazil will develop a deep analysis of the impact of the Open and Free Source softwares in the Brazilian society in the civilian and governmental levels .
I recently received some post-workshop thoughts from Benjamin Bratton, who writes in an email titled "SS: What We May Want (from Each Other)":
Software names less a discrete thing than a indiscrete convergence. It is a convergence between genealogies of language and genealogies of technology (leaving information theory and Kittlerian media studies aside for the moment, though their no-show at SS was amazing).
In the history of languages, software is unique in that it performs machinically and mechanically in ways that other languages cannot. Software executes. I can put software "in a box" and that box will do things in the wild world. If I put Russian or Spanish in the box, it would not do anything mechanically. Software is language becoming machine-technology.
Conversely, in the history of technology, software is unique in that its instrumentality is configured linguistically. Software is written. I can write software to operate a machine to cause it to do things. I could write instructions on the side of a hammer (if I was Jonathan Borofsky) but I cannot write a hammer, nor does what I write on the hammer effect its hammeringness. Software is technology becoming inscription-language.
The vectors of this convergence were on display during our day two planning session. More or less clear positions were outlined by socio-culturalists and technologists. Each saw the concerns of the the latter as enveloped by their own.
BUT --and here's the kicker-- it was the socio-culturalists who were more invested in defining software as a wordly technology (building bridges, governments, identities, etc.) and it was the technologists who were more invested in defining software as autonomous linguistic frame or substance (code rhetorics, assembly politics, generative grammars, etc.)
The surprised me. Should it have? Do you agree with this observation?
Is it that Humanists have technology envy, tired of the virtuality of words, and Technologists have culture envy, tired of being instrumentalized as specialized mechanics? Is Software Studies the place where we trade goods, blend our cultural capitals, and leverage a new, shared bargain?
If so, what does it mean that SS to date involves this transposition and transprogramming of interests, and that the wish of one discipline is to be play as the other? To me, it seems like a very good sign, and good reason to get Latour at the next meeting!
LECTURE @UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE
Lev Manovich (UCSD): How to Study Software Cultures?
After Effects + Motion Graphics + Soft Cinema.
Wednesday, June 4, 3pm - 4:20pm @ HIB 100
Free and open to the public.
We live in a software culture - that is, a culture where the production, distribution, and reception of most content is mediated by software. And yet, most creative professionals do not know much about the intellectual history of software they use daily - be it Microsoft Word, Photoshop, Final Cut, After Effects, Flash, etc. Similarly, theorists and critics so far have not systematically examined the connections between the workings of contemporary media software and the new communication languages in design and media (including graphic design, web design, motion graphics, animation, cinema, product design, space design, interface design, etc.) As an example of how we can study such relationships, I will look at a new area of contemporary culture whose development in the 1990s was closely connected to the use of particular software such as After Effects - motion graphics. I will discuss the aesthetics of contemporary motion graphics and will present some hypothesizes regarding how we can understand it theoretically. To illustrate my arguments I will screen recent music videos, short films, TV graphics, and experts from feature films. I will also show samples from my own project, Soft Cinema, which uses motion graphics in the context of longer narrative films.
About the Speaker Series:
Software Culture brings new media scholars to UC Irvine, supported by Film & Media Studies, Visual Studies, and the UCI Humanities Center, as well as by the "Transliteracies" UC-MRG. - Other speakers this year included Alan Liu, Wendy Chun, Alex Galloway, McKenzie Wark. See http://www.media-theory.com for details.
Software Studies Initiative presented a series of demos at HASTAC II conference (University of California - Irvine, May 23, 2008) using HIperWall.
(Note: the HIperWall consists from fifty 30-inch Apple monitors driven by a number of MACs. Therefore, it is not simply a large visual display - rather, it is a visual supercomputer.)
We have presented the following demos developed at Software Studies Initiative:
Culural Analytics Research Enviroment - interface design:
Concept: Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass. Graphic design: Bob Li and Sergie Magdalin, undergraduate Visual Arts students, UCSD.
Use of HIperWall to visualize patterns in literary texts and computer games:
Concept and production: Jeremy Douglass.
PowerWall Presenter, an application developed by Jeremy Douglass together with Calit2-Irvine HIperWall Group:
All images above by Anne Helmond. More images are available on Flickr.
Video of all these demos will be available here shortly.
