I just started reading Lev Manovich's new book Software Takes Command. He released a draft comprised of more than 80,000 words online in late November, explaining that, in line with the subject of his book which is always in process, he wanted to think about his text as something that could forever be reshaped. I'm not sure how I feel about reading the entire text onscreen, but we'll see how it goes. For now, though, a few pages in, what I appreciate already is the distinction between software as invisible mechanism and software as catalyst for contemporary culture. Lev, who teaches in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, where he also directs the Software Studies Initiative, promises to trace this history, from the mid-1990s to the present, and I'm curious about his argument, in part because I experienced this history in a very particular way. How so?
I watched the rise of what Lev calls cultural software as the editor of RES Magazine, which began in 1998 as a publication devoted to digital filmmaking and gradually morphed into a media art journal and then - gulp - into a lifestyle magazine. I liked the middle phase, when dozens of differing art practices suddenly converged around the digital, not, as Lev points out, so much as a specific tool, but as a concept or process. In any given issue of RES during this time, you'd find stories about video art, motion graphics, kinetic typography, live cinema, title design, VJ culture, Web-based cinema, mobile storytelling and, of course, digital filmmaking, which for a while seemed reinvigorated by the possibilities of the digital and experimented with graphics, animation and branching storylines and a kind of post-linear aesthetics.
RES readers went from being feature filmmakers (or those who wanted to make feature films) to anybody who wanted to work with images and sound. We moved away from technical articles about professional cameras to tips on how to do just about anything yourself. Our advertisers were confused, as was the industry - the emerging culture was dubbed a "prosumer" market, but unfortunately, that didn't capture the DIY ethos that was to come. RES gradually followed a bunch of other magazines in the direction of curation, helping sift interesting projects from a burgeoning amateur output, and then started to focus on shopping, pointing readers to cool places, clothes, books and movies. Digital media by 2004, then, wasn't just a tool, or even a practice. It was a lifestyle. For me, it seemed like a good time to jump back into academia where the digital could be taught as a component of every student's toolkit, a literacy necessary for interaction as a citizen in the world.
Anyway, Lev's book centers on motion graphics, visual effects in feature films and social software, and promises to be an insightful read. I already like the fact that he's invited readers to design alternate covers, or create an audio file narrating a section of the book. He also offers the world map from Google analytics showing - today, anyway - the 3,746 visits from 947 cities. Check back later for a full review!
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This post invites the question: Whatever happened to RES? I don't mean just the magazine that retired from print after a more-than-respectable ten-year run, nor even the festival that defined a particularly dynamic moment in short-form digital media-making in the late 90s-early 2000s. Although you seem disappointed by the dissolution of RES' focus on digital media into lifestyle, this still represents a more interesting turn to me than the fate of diehard gearhead endeavors like D-Film or even what's left of online film sites like iFilm, that got blown away by YouTube precisely because of their inability to get the DIY thing. I am wondering what happened to RES readers and makers in the post docom era; did they go commercial or start using older versions of AfterEffects for that DIY look? Most importantly, if RES exemplified, at least temporarily, something that could be called a digital avant-garde, where should we look (besides Blur+Sharpen!) for today's most interesting and experimental media culture?
I was a huge fan of RES magazine... still have all the DVDs and also wonder what happened and why the story of its demise is never told. I feel it was the best magazine I've ever encountered, and am so disappointed that the website never explained its disappearance. the website remains today as it appeared two years ago, promising a revival that never came.
there's an enormous wealth of digital beauty out there in the abyss and its difficult to find people who pull the good stuff out to share it the way RES did. If that magazine failed, I wonder if it is possible to succeed?