Origin of Digital Species Essay -- Internet History Essays

Origin of Digital Species Lev Manovich1 and Simon Cook2 argue that the internet and digital culture should be understood as a product of late Victorian and Modernist visual forms, but it is the goal of this paper to show that the internet and digital culture, while heavily influenced by these visual forms, is not the sole product of them, and that the time period between 1930 and the present day must also be included when analyzing the history of the internet. The best illustration of this point is the similarity and yet fundamental difference between the cinematographic experiments of the Soviet Constructivist Dziga Vertov and the modern visual jockey artists known as the â€Å"NomIg Collective†. By analyzing the art forms that exist on the internet it is possible to see how they are related to the preceding forms of art that existed in the times from which Manovich and Cook claim the internet to be a product. Before the terms Late Victorian, Modernist and Post-modernist visual forms are used, it is important to define what is meant by each of these terms, and to explain how they are all in essence connected to each other. During the Victorian era the world was transformed. Starting with Darwin’s theory of evolution, the world of science crecendoed into a period of rapid discovery and accelerated advancement that was previously unknown. It was out of this boom in the intellectual world that man’s desire to possess all knowledge began to seem more of an achievable goal and less like medieval lore . It was around the Victorian period that all modern forms of classification are began to expand: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Museums are Libraries -to name a few forms- started to grow into their modern form as common tool... ...tov the need to refer to the cinematographer and the camera as machines that can engineer a product as well as any other piece of machinery. However, NomIg makes no self references, there is no portrayal of the computer or the human as anything specific in their work, and so they leave out a basic tenet of the Modernist manifesto. When the internet and digital culture is analyzed through the types of art it inspires it becomes clear that while the foundations for computers and artistic technique are a inspired by and partly the product of late Victorian and Modernist visual forms, it is not possible to ignore the effect that postmodernism has had on these art forms. To understand digital culture, regard should be given to both the Modernists who created the scientific framework and the Postmodernists who created the subject matter to exist within that framework.