Hubbry Logo
Lev ManovichLev ManovichMain
Open search
Lev Manovich
Community hub
Lev Manovich
logo
8 pages, 0 posts
0 subscribers
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich
View on Wikipedia
from Wikipedia

Lev Manovich (/ˈmænəvɪtʃ/ MAN-ə-vitch[2]) is an artist, author and theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.[3]

Key Information

Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016),[4] which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and videos (cultural analytics).[5] The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google,[6] New York Public Library,[7] and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[8]

He is the author and editor of 15 books, including The Language of New Media, which has been translated into fourteen languages.[9] Manovich's latest academic book, Cultural Analytics, was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.[10]

Biography

[edit]

Manovich was born in Moscow, USSR, where he studied painting, architecture, computer science, and semiotics.[11] After spending several years practicing fine arts, he moved to New York in 1981. His interests shifted from still image and physical 3D space to virtual space, moving images, and the use of computers in media. While in New York, he received a M.A. in Experimental Psychology (NYU, 1988) and additionally worked professionally in 3D computer animation from 1984 to 1992. He then went on to receive a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in 1993 under the supervision of Mieke Bal. His Ph.D. dissertation, The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers, traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s.[12]

Manovich has worked with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include Little Movies,[13] the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994-1997), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator,[14] a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history (1999), and Anna and Andy,[15] a streaming novel (2000). He is also well known for his insightful articles, including "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001)[16] and "Database as Symbolic Form" (1998).[17] In the latter article, he explains why databases have become so popular, while juxtaposing them to concepts such as algorithms and narrative. His works have been included in many key international exhibitions of new media art. In 2002, Manovich presented his mini-retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London under the title Lev Manovich: Adventures of Digital Cinema.

Manovich has taught new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design Helsinki.[18] In 1993, students of his digital movie making classes at the UCLA Lab for New Media founded the Post-Cinematic Society which organized some of the first digital movie festivals based on his ideas about new media such as database cinema.[19] Since 1999, he has given more than 180 lectures on new media in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

In 2007 Manovich founded the research lab Software Studies Initiative, which was subsequently renamed as the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2016.[20]

On November 8, 2012, it was announced that Manovich would be joining the faculty of the City University of New York's Graduate Center in January 2013, with the goal of enhancing the graduate school's digital initiatives.[21]

Selected books and projects

[edit]

The Language of New Media

[edit]

The book, The Language of New Media (2001), covers many aspects of cultural software: for example, he identifies a number of key tools or processes (he calls them 'operations') that underpin commercial software from word processing to video editing programs. These include the conventions of 'cut and paste' copy, find, delete, transform, etc. The extracts we have chosen highlight significant 'new' aspects of the new media Manovich is concerned with. He is often concerned with visual culture and especially with moving image, so the first sections, 'The Database' and 'Database and Algorithm', explore something of the distinct ways in which computers store and manipulate information (here, for example, moving image footage). He compares this with traditional techniques of manipulating and editing film stock. The 'Navigable Space' extract is also concerned with the moving image, but this is the moving image as a mapping or modeling of virtual space. From architectural 'fly-throughs' to the visceral and violent pleasures of exploring the corridors of the videogame Doom, virtual space is discussed as a significant new cultural form that draws on pre-digital visual and cinematic culture.[9]

In "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001), Manovich describes the eight definitions of "new media":[16]

  1. New Media versus Cyberculture
  2. New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
  3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software
  4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
  5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology
  6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies
  7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
  8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

Soft Cinema

[edit]

His digital art project Soft Cinema[22] was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002–03); traveling to Helsinki, Finland, and Tokyo, Japan, in April 2003. "Although the films resemble the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts, or narratives. Each Soft Cinema run offers a unique viewing experience for the audience; the software works with a set of parameters that allow for almost every part of a film to change."[23]

Soft Cinema projects mine the creative possibilities that exist at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualization, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs.[24]

Software Takes Command

[edit]

Software Takes Command was published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic.[25] The book analyses in detail software applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, and how their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design. This analysis is framed by a history of media's "softwarization" in the 1960s and 1970s (‘the transfer of techniques and interfaces of all previously existing media technologies to software’[25]: 180 ). The book includes a theoretical discussion of whether we can still speak about media as ‘a relatively small number of distinct mediums’,[26] given software’s propensity to hybridize previously separate media and multiply.

Manovich develops the concept of metamedia that was originally proposed by Alan Kay. Metamedia refers to our use of digital computers to both simulate most previous artistic media and define endless new media. Manovich explains the differences between metamedia, multimedia, and remediation.[27] The book uses a number of classical new media artworks as examples to illustrate how artists and designers create new metamedia.

The title is a reference to Mechanization Takes Command (1948) written by Sigfried Giedion. It is part of the series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics,[28] founded by series editor Francisco J. Ricardo. An earlier draft version of the book was released under a Creative Commons license.[29]

Instagram and Contemporary Image

[edit]

Manovich's Instagram and Contemporary Image was released under a Creative Commons license in 2017.[30] The book's four parts were written during 2016. Each part was posted online after it was finished. The parts were then later edited and combined into a single PDF.

The first half of the book develops a typology of images shared on Instagram, dividing them into ‘casual’,[31] ‘professional’, and ‘designed’.[32] In the latter half of the book, Manovich focuses on how Instagram allows its users to establish and develop their identities through their photos’ subjects, compositions, palettes, contrast levels, edits, filters, and presets.[33] He identifies Instagram as an example of the ‘aesthetic society’, in which various tribes emerge and sustain themselves through their aesthetic choices.[34]

This work was both the first academic book about Instagram, and the first book in the then emerging field of digital art history. It is based on research carried out by the author, his lab and collaborators in 2012-2015. During this period, the lab created a number of projects that used 17 million geo-located Instagram images from 18 cities. These projects included Phototrails,[35] Selfiecity,[36] The Exceptional and The Everyday,[37] and On Broadway.[38] Each project used computer vision, machine learning and data visualization to analyze different patterns in content and visual aesthetics across large numbers of publicly shared Instagram images.

In 2018, the book was translated into Japanese and published in a special edition with contributions from nine Japanese authors.[39]

Cultural Analytics

[edit]

Manovich's most recent book Cultural Analytics was published by The MIT Press in October 2020.[10] Situated at the intersection of data science, cultural studies and media theory, the book introduces key concepts for the analysis of culture using computational and data visualization methods. In contrast to many works in digital humanities that focus on analysis of text, the book pays particular attention to visual media.

The book argues for the necessity of using computational methods to be able to “see” contemporary culture given its immense scale. If traditional methods of analysis such as ‘close readings of small samples’[40] were adequate to study smaller communities of creators in previous centuries, they evidently do not allow for representative studies of digital culture, where millions of cultural artifacts are created and shared daily. Manovich develops the concept of ‘exploratory media analysis’ - the use of special visualization techniques to explore large visual collections without formulating a particular hypothesis beforehand.[10]: 207  While exploratory data analysis is a standard practice in data science, similar methods did not exist until recently in media studies, art history and other fields dealing with visual culture.

The book’s conclusion discusses the advantages and limitations of cultural analytics, beyond its ability to analyze cultural artifacts on a large scale. Cultural analytics resembles the humanities of the 20th century in that it looks for patterns. However, it does not start with already accepted cultural categories.[10]: 249  Instead, it analyzes ‘raw’ cultural data to find new patterns. However, Manovich also points out that ‘any cultural pattern…captures similarities among a number of artifacts on only some dimensions, ignoring their other differences’.[10]: 250  This is an important limitation of a research paradigm that measures various characteristics in large collections of artifacts, and then looks for patterns in these characteristics. However, despite this limitation, Manovich remains optimistic about both the theoretical and practical potential of computational paradigms. In contrast to 20th century structuralism and related programs that aimed to reduce diversity of culture to a small number of patterns, cultural analytics in Manovich’s view should aim to fully describe contemporary culture’s global diversity without reduction: ‘that is, to focus on what is different among numerous artifacts and not only on what they share’.[10]: 251 

Books

[edit]
  • Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture, editor, together with Alla Efimova (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).[41]
  • Info Aesthetics, a semi-open source book/Web site in progress. Project started August 2000, last update October 2001.[42]
  • Metamediji (in Serbian) (Belgrade: Center for Contemporary Arts: 2001).[43]
  • Soft Cinema, with contributions by Andreas Angelidakis, Jason Danziger, Andreas Kratky, and Ruth M. Lorenz (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2002).
  • The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).[9]
  • Black Box - White Cube (in German) (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2005).[44]
  • Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, together with Andreas Kratky (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005).[23]
  • Software Culture (in Italian) (Milano: Edizioni Olivares, 2010).[45]
  • Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).[25]
  • The Illusions (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014).[46]
  • Data Drift: Archiving Media and Data Art in the 21st Century, editor, together with Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits (Riga: RIXC, LiepU MPLab, 2015).[47]
  • Instagram and Contemporary Image (New York, 2017).[30]
  • Theories of Software Cultures (in Russian) (Nizhny Novgorod: Krasnaya Lastochka, 2017).[48]
  • Instagram and Contemporary Image (in Japanese), with contributions by Kiritorimederu, Akihiro Kubota, Yoshiaki Kai, Kouichiro Shibao, Junya Tsutsui, Kosuke Nagata, Barbora, Osamu Maekawa, Nobuhiro Masuda (Tokyo: BNN, 2018).[39]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Lev Manovich

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Lev Manovich (born 1960) is a Russian-American professor, author, digital artist, and theorist whose work has profoundly shaped the fields of studies, digital culture, and cultural analytics. Born in , he immigrated to in 1981 and became a U.S. citizen. Manovich studied fine arts, , and in before earning a B.A. in liberal arts and an M.A. in from in 1985 and 1988, respectively, followed by a Ph.D. in visual and from the in 1993. Since 1984, Manovich has created digital art using computers, and he began teaching in 1992, serving as a professor at the from 1996 to 2012. Currently, he holds the position of Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center of the (CUNY), where he founded and directs the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2007, focusing on computational analysis of massive cultural datasets. His academic output includes 17 books and over 200 articles, with his work cited more than 46,975 times and an h-index of 63 as of recent metrics. Manovich's most influential publication is The Language of New Media (2001), which has garnered over 23,450 citations and established foundational principles for understanding as an extension of cinematic language and database logic. Other key books include Software Takes Command (2013, 3,341 citations), exploring software's role in culture; Cultural Analytics (2020), detailing methods for analyzing big cultural data; and Artificial Aesthetics (2024), examining AI's impact on . He pioneered several subfields, including studies starting in 1991, software studies in 2001, cultural analytics in 2007, and AI aesthetics in 2017, emphasizing the analysis of digital through computational tools.

Biography

Early Life and Education

Lev Manovich was born in 1960 in , in the , to a Jewish family.[web:30] His father was a and his mother a poet, providing him with early exposure to both the arts and sciences during a period marked by cultural restrictions and limited access to Western influences.[web:30] Growing up in the Brezhnev era, Manovich's childhood was shaped by the ideological constraints of the time, where intellectual pursuits in the and often intersected with state-controlled narratives.[web:91] From an early age, Manovich developed interests in fine arts, , and , studying these fields in during the 1970s.[web:2] He pursued formal in civil architecture at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, graduating in 1979.[web:54] His exposure to during this period, amid the scarcity of advanced technology in the , laid the groundwork for his later interdisciplinary work at the intersection of , and digital tools.[web:2] In 1981, Manovich emigrated from the to the , a move influenced by the political and social pressures faced by Jewish families under the regime, and became a U.S. citizen.[web:30] He continued his studies at , earning a B.A. in Liberal Arts in 1985 and an M.A. in in 1988, with a focus on and human-computer interaction.[web:101] Manovich then completed a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the in 1993, where his dissertation, titled "The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to ," explored the historical and theoretical foundations of computer interfaces in relation to modernist visual traditions.[web:81][web:101]

Academic and Professional Career

Manovich began his academic career in the early as an instructor and visiting faculty member at the , where he taught courses in from 1992 to 1995. In 1996, he joined the (UCSD) as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts Department, advancing to associate professor in 2001 and full professor in 2003. During his tenure at UCSD, which lasted until , Manovich focused on and theory, contributing to the development of interdisciplinary programs in and . In 2007, Manovich founded and directed the Software Studies Initiative at UCSD, an early effort to formalize the study of software's cultural and social impacts, which later evolved into the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2016 after his move to New York. He held visiting positions at several institutions, including the (2009–2017) as a professor of cultural analytics and as a LeBoff Visiting Scholar in 2016, where he led seminars on and media visualization. In 2012, Manovich was appointed Presidential Professor of Art, Culture, and Technology at The Graduate Center, (CUNY), a position he continues to hold. At CUNY, he has taught graduate seminars in the Ph.D. programs in and and Visualization, playing a key role in establishing curricula that integrate computational methods with . His professional achievements include authoring over 195 scholarly articles, which have been reprinted more than 850 times and translated into 37 languages, underscoring his global influence in digital culture scholarship.

Key Theoretical Contributions

New Media Theory

Lev Manovich defines as a hybrid form that converges elements of cinema, , , and , fundamentally altering cultural production through digital technologies. In his seminal 2001 work, he outlines five key principles that characterize this new paradigm: numerical representation, where media objects are composed of discrete data samples subject to algorithmic manipulation; , enabling independent elements to be combined and recombined; , allowing computers to perform tasks like and media generation; variability, permitting dynamic customization of media without altering underlying data; and , the mutual reshaping of cultural and computational layers. These principles, introduced in The Language of New Media, establish new media not merely as digitized old media but as a distinct aesthetic and logical system rooted in computer operations. Historically, Manovich traces the evolution of from the experimental of the 1960s, which explored algorithmic generation and , through the expansions of the 1980s, to the hyperlinked web environments of the that democratized access and distribution. He critiques the application of to digital contexts, arguing that its emphasis on fragmentation and inadequately captures the structured and inherent in computational media, which impose new forms of logic over cultural chaos. This shift marks a departure from analog media's fixed narratives toward database-driven structures, where content is organized as searchable collections rather than linear sequences. At the core of Manovich's framework is the principle of , which posits that all objects exist as dual layers: the computer layer of formal data structures and the cultural layer of human meanings, with each continually recoding the other to enable bidirectional influence. For instance, cultural narratives are translated into database queries and interfaces, while computational logics reshape artistic expression, fostering emergent forms like interactive simulations. Manovich's has profoundly impacted and communication by facilitating a transition from analog to digital logics, where media become programmable and remixable. This is evident in hypermedia systems, such as early web applications that link elements non-linearly, and database , which prioritize collection and over authoritative storytelling, influencing fields from digital to interactive installations.

Software Studies

Lev Manovich coined the term "software studies" in 2001 as an interdisciplinary approach to examining the epistemological and aesthetic impacts of software on culture and media production. This initiative built on his earlier work in theory, positioning software not merely as a tool but as a fundamental cultural force that structures human perception and creative practices. In conjunction with this, Manovich founded the Software Studies Initiative in 2007 at the , which hosted the first Software Studies Workshop in 2008 to foster research on software's role in shaping media and . The field emphasizes reverse-engineering software interfaces and workflows to uncover how they embed cultural logics, drawing from media theory, , and . A central thesis in Manovich's software studies is encapsulated in the idea that "software takes command," meaning it has supplanted earlier media technologies to become the dominant engine of cultural production in the digital age. This command manifests through software's ability to standardize cultural forms, imposing uniform paradigms on global design and aesthetics—for instance, the (GUI) paradigms pioneered in the 1980s Macintosh system, which popularized metaphors like desktops and windows, influencing everything from to mobile apps worldwide. Manovich argues that such does not merely facilitate creation but actively shapes what can be imagined and produced, embedding ideological assumptions into the very tools of expression. In analyzing creative software, Manovich treats applications from companies like and as key artifacts for understanding modern creativity, viewing their tutorials and documentation as contemporary equivalents of historical "how-to" manuals that codify aesthetic norms. For example, Photoshop's layered editing interface and 's Maya modeling tools are dissected to reveal how they simulate traditional media processes while introducing parametric logics that automate and constrain artistic decisions. This leads to his concept of metamedia, where software transcends individual media types by simulating and remediating multiple forms within a single environment, effectively making the software itself the new "medium" under study. Manovich traces the historical evolution of software from the 1960s era of , where computations ran in non-interactive sequences on mainframes, to the interactive GUIs of the and , and onward to the cloud-based tools of the that enable collaborative, platform-mediated production. This timeline highlights software's shift from specialized, command-line systems to user-friendly, metaphorical interfaces that democratized media creation but also entrenched corporate control. In critiquing , Manovich examines how services like exemplify this dynamic, where platforms extract value from while dictating the terms of cultural exchange and data flows.

Cultural Analytics and AI Aesthetics

Cultural analytics represents a computational approach pioneered by Lev Manovich to examine vast cultural datasets, enabling researchers to "zoom" into millions or billions of images and other visual media to identify and quantify evolving trends in digital culture. Developed as a method in , it leverages to process and visualize massive scales of that exceed perceptual limits, shifting focus from individual artifacts to aggregate patterns in , , and design. This framework emerged from the explosion of , allowing for empirical analysis of cultural phenomena that were previously inaccessible through traditional qualitative methods. Central techniques in cultural analytics include image plotting, which arranges visual data into grid-based visualizations to reveal compositional similarities; clustering, which groups images by visual or semantic features to uncover stylistic clusters; and montage, which composites large image sets to highlight temporal or thematic evolutions. These methods have been applied to platforms, such as analyzing the evolution of self-portraits on using datasets from the , where patterns in posing, lighting, and demographics emerged across global cities. By transforming cultural flows into computable forms, these techniques provide a data-driven lens on visual trends, such as the homogenization or diversification of aesthetic norms in . Following the rise of generative AI after 2018, Manovich extended cultural into AI aesthetics, examining how algorithms generate novel visual styles that surpass direct human imitation. In this paradigm, AI systems trained on enormous cultural corpora produce outputs—such as hybrid artistic forms or —that blend historical influences in unprecedented ways, challenging conventional notions of authorship and originality in . This shift emphasizes AI's role in automating aesthetic decision-making, from design prototypes to artistic experimentation, while drawing on software studies' emphasis on computational tools for cultural inquiry. In the 2020s, Manovich's work integrated more deeply into for , using AI to detect stylistic evolutions across centuries of visual archives and to model cultural dynamics at scale. This includes critiques of inherent biases in AI systems, which often perpetuate skewed representations in due to imbalanced training data, such as underrepresentation of non-Western or marginalized perspectives. These developments underscore the need for ethical frameworks in AI-driven analysis, ensuring that computational methods amplify rather than distort .

Major Publications

Foundational Books

Lev Manovich's foundational books established key frameworks for understanding in the early 2000s, published by and drawing on his interdisciplinary expertise in , , and . These works shifted scholarly attention toward the structural and aesthetic logics of , emphasizing how computational principles reshape representation and narrative. The Language of New Media, published in 2001 by , is widely regarded as a seminal text that provides the first systematic theory of , positioning it within the histories of visual and media cultures to outline core principles such as numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. The book was selected as the book of the month in August 2001 by the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies and has been translated into 14 languages, serving as a in hundreds of academic programs worldwide. It has garnered over 23,000 citations on , reflecting its profound influence on fields like and . Reception has praised the work for its rigorous synthesis of theory and practice, hailing it as a "major event" for and art analysis, though some critiques note its focus on cinema's legacy may underemphasize non-Western or pre-digital media traditions. In 2005, Manovich co-authored Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database with Andreas Kratky, also published by as a companion to the Soft Cinema artistic project, which experiments with database-driven cinema to explore dynamic, algorithmically generated narratives that challenge linear . The delves into how enable variable media forms, allowing content to be remixed in real-time based on software logic, thereby bridging theoretical inquiry with practical production. While less cited than his earlier (approximately 180 citations on as of 2025), it has been commended for innovating at the intersection of cinema and computation, though reviewers have pointed out its emphasis on Western experimental forms as potentially limiting broader cultural applicability.

Recent Books and Analyses

In the years following 2010, Lev Manovich's publications increasingly incorporated empirical methods and to examine the evolution of , software, and in cultural production. His 2013 book Software Takes Command, published by Bloomsbury Academic, provides the first comprehensive theoretical and historical analysis of creative software such as Photoshop, , and , tracing their development from the and to their influence on modern media . The work was released in an edition, making it freely available to scholars and practitioners exploring how software shapes cultural forms. Manovich's 2017 publication Instagram and Contemporary Image, released initially on his website under a , conducts a large-scale data study of 16 million Instagram images collected from 17 global cities between 2012 and 2015. This analysis, carried out at the Cultural Analytics Lab, reveals significant stylistic shifts in social photography, from spontaneous aesthetics in Instagram's early years to more curated, professional-like compositions by 2015, influenced by platform features like filters and the rise of advertisers. The book integrates , , and computational methods to contextualize these changes within broader trends in , including and music videos. Building on these data-driven approaches, Manovich's 2018 book AI Aesthetics, published by Strelka Press, investigates the integration of into artistic practices and cultural production. Similarly, his 2020 volume Cultural Analytics, issued by , outlines methods for computationally analyzing vast cultural datasets, with a focus on visual media, drawing from over a decade of research at his lab. While primarily authored by Manovich, these works incorporate contributions from Cultural Analytics Lab collaborators, emphasizing collaborative empirical explorations of AI's aesthetic implications. Manovich's most recent book, Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media (2025), co-authored with Emanuele Arielli, examines the transformative role of generative AI in visual creation, media , and . Released as a complete PDF in January 2025 after chapter-by-chapter online publication from 2021 to 2024, it critiques anthropocentric notions of while analyzing AI's augmentation of human aesthetic processes. By 2025, Manovich had authored or co-authored 17 books, reflecting a marked shift toward empirical, data-backed arguments that blend theoretical insight with computational evidence to address contemporary digital phenomena.

Artistic and Research Projects

Soft Cinema

Soft Cinema is an experimental media project developed by Lev Manovich in collaboration with Andreas Kratky between 2002 and 2005 for the ZKM Center for Art and Media in , . It premiered at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in , , on November 16, 2002, as part of the "Future Cinema" exhibition, marking an early exploration of algorithmic approaches to cinema. The project embodies Manovich's principle of variability in , where content is not fixed but dynamically assembled from modular elements. At its core, Soft Cinema employs to generate films in real time from extensive databases comprising approximately four hours of video and clips, three hours of , and five hours of music. The system remixes these elements according to predefined parameters set by the authors, such as mood, sequence, or placement, resulting in an infinite variety of narrative sequences presented across multiple screens in non-linear layouts. This database-driven approach allows for emergent storytelling, where the software acts as an editor, selecting and arranging clips to form cohesive yet unpredictable films. The project manifested in several interactive installations, including , which explores themes of mobility and space through variable urban narratives; , featuring looping sequences that simulate a narrative cycle; and Mission to Earth, a piece addressing and cultural adaptation via multi-frame compositions. These works were exhibited internationally, notably at the ZKM in from November 16, 2002, to March 30, 2003. Soft Cinema innovates by fundamentally challenging the conventions of linear storytelling in traditional cinema, instead proposing a fluid, software-mediated form that prefigures the personalization algorithms used in modern streaming platforms.

Cultural Analytics Lab

The Cultural Analytics Lab was established in 2007 by Lev Manovich at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the (UCSD), initially as the Software Studies Initiative, which was renamed the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2016. In 2013, the lab expanded its operations to include The Graduate Center, (CUNY), while maintaining ties to Calit2. It functions as an interdisciplinary hub with a team of over 20 researchers and collaborators from fields including , data visualization, media design, , , , and . Building on Manovich's concept of cultural analytics, the lab applies computational methods to examine massive visual and cultural datasets, emphasizing patterns in media evolution and social imagery. A prominent tool developed by the lab is ImagePlot, introduced in 2011, which facilitates the visualization and statistical analysis of large image and video collections through techniques like scatter plots, histograms, and networks. This has supported diverse applications, such as tracing stylistic changes in film history and mapping aesthetic trends in uploads. Key outputs include a of more than 15 million Instagram photos posted in 16 global cities from 2012 to 2015, which illuminated shifts toward stylized, high-contrast imagery in . In 2014, the lab partnered with the (MoMA) to computationally explore 21,000 photographs from its photography collection, generating interactive visualizations that highlighted temporal and thematic evolutions in photographic practice. As of 2025, the lab has advanced its methodologies by incorporating and —initiated as early as 2008—for sophisticated cultural and forecasting. It has also made public datasets available under open licenses, including the Phototrails collection of 2.3 million Instagram images from 13 cities (2013–2014), enabling broader scholarly access to cultural data for replication and extension of analyses.

Other Digital Art Initiatives

In addition to his foundational works in algorithmic and cultural visualization, Lev Manovich has pursued a series of individual initiatives since the early that emphasize generative processes, AI-driven synthesis, and the reconfiguration of visual and . These projects often blend computational methods with artistic inquiry, probing how algorithms transform personal, historical, and urban imagery into novel forms that challenge traditional notions of authorship and representation. By 2025, Manovich's art has been featured in over 125 group exhibitions and 14 solo shows worldwide, spanning institutions such as the in and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in . One early example is Phototrails (2013), an interactive visualization project that algorithmically processes and remixes millions of user-generated photographs from to create high-resolution "trails" mapping visual patterns across 13 global cities. Co-developed with Nadav Hochman and Jay Chow using custom software, the work aggregates 2.3 million geotagged images to reveal emergent in everyday , evoking dream-like flows of urban memory and collective . It was exhibited in solo format as The Aggregate Eye: 13 cities/312,694 people/2,353,017 photos at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY , highlighting Manovich's interest in as a medium for artistic exploration. Drawing Rooms (2023) extends this computational approach into AI-mediated fragmentation of architectural and cultural history. The series consists of digital images generated with tools like and edited in Lightroom, depicting rooms filled with floating, shattered fragments of historical drawings and artifacts—symbolizing the "packetization" of knowledge in processes. Drawing on early concepts like Paul Baran's (1960s) and the first deep neural networks by and Valentin Lapa (1960s), the work critiques how AI diffuses and reassembles visual heritage, creating synthetic spaces that blur physical and digital materiality. It was included in the group exhibition Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI at The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, New York, from January 23 to March 29, 2025. The Ideal City series (2022–2025) represents Manovich's ongoing experimentation with generative AI to simulate utopian and reconstructed urban landscapes. Using Midjourney to produce digital images, the project reimagines cityscapes—often drawing from the artist's personal memories of Soviet-era environments—into idealized, algorithmically evolved forms that explore themes of memory, history, and speculative design. These works highlight the limitations and affordances of AI as a "memory machine," generating infinite variations that mimic historical styles while introducing novel compositions. Installations from the series have appeared in group exhibitions such as Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes at the Los Angeles Center of Photography (2024) and the Bandung Photography Triennale in Indonesia (2025). Library of Unwritten Manuscripts (2022) further critiques digital archiving through AI-generated visualizations of imagined, unfinished literary works. Created with generative AI and post-processed in Lightroom, the images depict torn pages, half-erased drafts, and simulated book covers derived from patterns in cultural data, inspired by censored or unrealized texts from 20th-century Soviet . The project underscores how computation can "write" what never existed, questioning the completeness of and the ephemerality of creative ideas. It critiques broader archiving practices by simulating a repository of cultural "ghosts," and was featured in the group exhibition Careful Details at Museo Guttuso, (October 4 to December 4, 2024). Across these initiatives, Manovich integrates AI aesthetics—influenced by his theoretical work on generative media—to merge with visual , fostering interactive and immersive experiences that reflect on technology's role in reshaping art.

References

  1. https://manovich.net/index.php/about
  2. https://gc-cuny.academia.edu/LevManovich/CurriculumVitae
  3. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/lev-manovich-named-presidential-professor
  4. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QP5JHg_7o_cC&hl=en
  5. https://manovich.net/index.php/teaching
  6. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2012/11/17/ucsd-loses-digital-guru-lev-manovich/
  7. https://pact.egs.edu/biography/lev-manovich/
  8. https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/degree/phd-media-culture-and-communication/leboff-visiting-scholars-program
  9. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/renowned-digital-humanities-expert-lev-manovich-joining-graduate-center-faculty
  10. https://manovich.net/content/04-projects/165-language-of-new-media/language.pdf
  11. https://opencuny.org/pnmarchive/files/2019/06/Manovich-NewMedia.pdf
  12. https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/manovich-2001.pdf
  13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357152493_Principles_of_new_media_according_to_Lev_Manovich
  14. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/the-algorithms-of-our-lives
  15. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/software-takes-command
  16. https://www.newswise.com/articles/softwhere-2008-researchers-pioneer-emerging-field-of-software-studies
  17. https://monoskop.org/Software_studies
  18. https://www.academia.edu/5605487/Lev_Manovich_Software_Takes_Command
  19. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/2987/1180
  20. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/download/14459/5301?inline=1
  21. https://lab.culturalanalytics.info/p/about.html
  22. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262037105/cultural-analytics/
  23. https://manovich.net/content/04-projects/075-museum-without-walls-art-history-without-names-visualization-methods-for-humanities-and-media-studies/71-article-2012.pdf
  24. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analytics-of-large-datasets-from-flickr
  25. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/selfiecity-exploring
  26. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/ai-aesthetics
  27. https://monoskop.org/images/6/66/Manovich_Lev_AI_Aesthetics_2018.pdf
  28. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/artificial-aesthetics
  29. https://manovich.net/content/04-projects/179-artificial-aesthetics/manovich_and_arielli.artificial_aesthetics.all_chapters_final.pdf
  30. https://manovich.net/content/04-projects/179-artificial-aesthetics/arielli-artificial-aesthetics.chapter_9.pdf
  31. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/software-takes-command-9781623567453/
  32. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image
  33. https://manovich.net/content/04-projects/172-instagram-and-contemporary-image/instagram_book_manovich_2017.pdf
  34. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analytics
  35. https://www.streamingmuseum.org/post/manovich-artificial-aesthetics
  36. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/soft-cinema-zkm
  37. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/lev-manovich
  38. https://lab.culturalanalytics.info/p/projects.html
  39. https://manovich.art/
  40. https://manovich.net/index.php/art/phototrails
  41. https://drive.google.com/file/d/13qWQUxWq3DYNepo361QBUQ5owD8ff1W8/view?usp=sharing
  42. https://manovich.art/drawing_rooms
  43. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/lectures-exhibitions-2015
  44. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDqdrC_x2Og
  45. https://lacphoto.org/ai-as-a-memory-machine/
  46. https://manovich.art/library_of_unwritten_manuscripts
Add your contribution
Related Hubs
User Avatar
No comments yet.