Graphic Design Talk by Lev Manovich

Business Building 905, Beirut campus

 The Graphic Design Department is organizing a talk conducted by Lev Manovich (author of The Language of New Media) on how to compare one million images.

Speaker’s Biography

Lev Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), which is described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich is a professor in the {C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}Visual Arts Department (San Diego), and director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He is also visiting professor at the European Graduate School. 

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How to compare one million images?

Visualizing patterns in art, games, comics, cinema, web, print, and user-generated content.

The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media, and the digitization of cultural heritage by museums, libraries, and other agencies opened up fundamentally new possibilities for the studies of both contemporary and historical cultures. But how do we navigate massive visual collections of user-generated content which may contain billions of images? What new theoretical concepts do we need to deal with the new scale of born-digital culture? In 2007, Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) has been established at the University of California (San Diego), to begin working on these questions.

Lev Manovich will show a number of the projects, highlighting how visualization allows us to see patterns in cultural data which were not visible before, and also helps us to question our assumptions. The examples include analysis of art, photography, film, animation, motion graphics, video games, magazines, and other visual media, including 1 million pages of Manga (Japanese comics) pages and 1 million images from DeviantArt (largest social network for non-professional art).

Event organizer: Department of Graphic Design