(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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bodily experience in classical cinema with what computer-driven animation
techniques such as rotoscoping today do to the mediation of corporeality
on and beyond the screen. The point of this series of reflections is
not to make Benjamin’s writing on new media look old but — very much
in line with the operations of what we call new media today — engage
this writing in an ongoing and open-ended process of remediation.
II
Though it has quickly come to displace a previous focus on terms such
as “multimedia” and “cyberspace,” the notion of new media — as it
has occupied artists, entrepreneurs, and academics alike since the mid-
1990s — has clearly raised as many questions as it has been able to answer.
As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues, the term — unlike some of its predecessors
— was not accommodating: “It portrayed other media as old or
dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favor of
a happy, if redundant plurality. The singular plurality of the phrase (‘new
media’ is a plural noun treated as a singular subject) stemmed from its
negative definition: it was not mass media, specifically television.” 2 And
yet, as unhappy as many might be with this term, it looks as if the concept
has come to stay for the time being, and that — rather than lamenting its
lack of clarity — we are called upon to fill it with meaningful content.
Lev Manovich’s 2001 The Language of New Media remains perhaps
the most lucid and useful attempt to define the specificity of new
media, 3 in spite of the fact that many critics have developed sophisticated
arguments to complicate Manovich’s conceptual matrices since
its publication. For Manovich, the emergence of new media cannot be
exclusively explained by the rise of digitality, nor does it simply represent
an intensification of the logic of mechanical reproduction as theorized
by Benjamin. Instead, what makes new media new is the way in which
they hybridize two distinct, albeit interrelated, technological tributaries:
first, the path that led from photography to film and to the emergence
of the graphical human computer interface in the 1980s, which was
dedicated to the development of technology able to process, exchange,
and disseminate information in and across time; and second, the trajectory
that resulted in an ever more comprehensive drive to break down
any information into discrete numerical data, energized by the ability of
computers to encode and store any kind of input according to universal
algorithmic or digital formulas. Whereas neither mechanical time-art
nor digitality per se suffices to describe the media revolutions of the past
two decades, it is the amalgamation of time-based representation and
advanced computing power that in Manovich’s view sufficiently defines
what makes our own mediascapes categorically different from those of
the early to mid-twentieth century.