Lev Manovich

I am working on part 3 of my notes on Youngblood, however I wandered upon some exciting news from Lev Manovich which I want to share. Manovich is a contemporary of Youngblood and he is now distributing his new book "Software Takes Command" under a Creative Commons license on his website. I find this exciting because it offers a detailed look into Software Studies which I feel is a very important emerging field.

As noted on Manovich's Software Studies Initiative page the first book to use the term Software Studies was in Software Studies: A Lexicon edited by Matthew Fuller and published by MIT Press.

Software Studies is a new field of research that focuses on the 'underlying engine' that is driving all aspects of the IT revolution. Manovich and his crew argue that:

"...if we continue to limit critical discussions to the notions of 'cyber,' 'digital,' 'new media,' or 'Internet,' we are in danger of always dealing only with effects rather then causes; the output that appears on a computer screen rather than the programs and social cultures that reduces these outputs."
From the description of Software Studies found here.

I can see this in my use of Isadora or even the interface I am using to post to this blog. I often describe Isadora, EyesWeb and programs in general as tools. However the very nature of the tools that I use, in turn define the realization of the concepts I work on with them. The interactive behavior that I desire to bring to the physical space of my performances is mediated through the options provided to me from my tools, and indeed the head of the nails I carefully place derive their form from the hammer made to drive them. Perhaps this hammer/nail metaphor is not the best, but I can directly see that to ignore the tool and focus on the final constructions is to be divorced from the matrix our constructions are filtered through.

So, how does one go about approaching software studies? How can I analize Isadora, or any of the other tools I am using in my art and performance studies in a meaningful way? Well, I guess it is time to start reading Lev's book...

"...'software studies' translates into two complementary research paradigms. On the one hand, we want to study software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social science. On the other had, we want to bring software-based research methods and cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure tools and resources or the study of the new domain where they have not been applied so far - large sets of cultural data."
From the description of Software Studies found here.