Losing the entirety of week three’s classes has done me no favours towards getting the cogs in my brain churning. Assignment 1 felt like a bit of a bust: technical hitches coupled with an adolescent understanding of the concept we were actually investigating meant that project work was a little sloppy, a little rough around its embedded edges.

Assignment 2 (I legitimately have lost control of the concept of time……. we’re already in week 4? I mean damn) started to look brighter. Darcy debriefed me on what I’d missed, and over the previous(?) weekend Hannah gave us the task of investigating an interactive documentary of our choice on MIT’s docubase, which was achieved with varying degrees of success. Our principles have been slightly refined. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty. We’re all about new media now, like, the cool stuff we all know and love with varying degrees of affection.

In the reading for both week 3/4 (full document available online and free however legally here), Lev Manovich details the history of new media and how we got to the point where everything we’ve ever known and loved has been rendered into a mesh of 1s and 0s. It’s a whole bunch about the intersection between a) media, and b) computing, from their initial, extremely physical (legitimately physical) beginnings, through various centuries of technological advancement (punch cards: pop-u-lar). There then exists a convergence, in which the two parallel advancements between media and computing intertwine and become one. German engineer Konrad Zuse builds the world’s first digital computer the same year (1936) the integral computer scientist and noted Benedict Cumberbatch-doppelganger (if the light is shining at the right angle) Alan Turing wrote his seminal paper which later gave life to the Turing machine which, skipping over a few surely important developments, gave life to the device you’re reading this on now. Blogs? New media. With this intersection, media becomes translated into numerical data, able to be processed by computers. It’s all 1s and 0s from here on out. Computing becomes a whole lot more complex — beyond a “calculator, control mechanism, or communication device, the computer becomes a media processor”, a “media synthesizer and manipulator.”

Which is where we find ourselves in the development of assignment 2 — how can we put this synthesizer to good use? What inherent parts can we interrogate, highlight, extrapolate? Vine sucks now, where do we go from here?

Manovich has the key yet.