Lev Manovich — Software Takes Command — software studies

2013

Artists: Lev Manovich · Year: 2013 · Medium: Theoretical book — extending The Language of New Media into software-specific analysis · Substrate: Published book, approximately 350 pages, analyzing software as cultural artifact · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Bloomsbury Academic (publisher) Lev Manovich published Software Takes Command in 2013 with Bloomsbury Academic, a full decade after his earlier The Language of New Media (2001) had established the field's first major theoretical synthesis. Software Takes Command extended the argument in a specific direction: if the first book had treated the emerging digital media as a new language with specific formal properties (the database, the interface, variable-form reassembly), the second book treated software itself as the dominant cultural substrate — not a new medium among other media, but the medium within which all other media were now being produced, reproduced, and circulated. Manovich's specific claim is that by the early 2010s, nearly every cultural artifact the contemporary viewer encountered was mediated by software before it reached them. Photography was edited in Photoshop; video was produced in Final Cut; writing was processed in Word; music was composed in Logic or Pro Tools; architecture was drafted in AutoCAD. The software layer was not incidental to these cultural products; it determined what they looked like, what could and could not be done with them, and what forms the production process took. A theory of contemporary culture, Manovich argued, had therefore to be a theory of software. The book's argument landed well. It has become one of the standard references for post-digital media studies, is widely taught in graduate programs in communications and media studies, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Manovich himself, who directs the Software Studies Initiative at CUNY Graduate Center and runs the Cultural Analytics project (which applies computational-visual-analysis methods to very large image datasets), has continued to extend the software-studies framework through the 2010s and 2020s. What makes Manovich specifically important to this archive is that he is the theorist whose arguments artists in the field have read and responded to most directly. The software-art movement of the 2000s-2010s (Casey Reas, Ben Fry, Golan Levin, and the Processing generation) treated Manovich as a primary critical reference. The cultural-analytics tradition Manovich runs is itself a form of computational artistic research. His presence in this archive is as the field's most consequential theorist. Lore Manovich was born in Moscow in 1960, emigrated to the United States in 1981, and trained in computer science at NYU before shifting to art theory at the University of Rochester. The biographical trajectory is worth noting: he is one of very few contemporary media theorists whose technical training is genuinely deep, and this shows in his writing. Software Takes Command reads specific source code, discusses specific algorithm implementations, and treats the technical substance of software as legitimate critical material — a move that most humanities-trained media theorists of the period were reluctant to make. Manovich's Cultural Analytics lab (based at CUNY and UCSD over the years) has processed datasets of millions of images — Instagram posts, Manga scans, scans of art-historical archives — and used the results to produce specifically visual arguments about cultural production at scale. Sources • Manovich, Lev — Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). • Manovich, Lev — The Language of New Media (MIT, 2001). • Software Studies Initiative — softwarestudies.com.