Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich is an artist and writer working in digital media. He was born in Moscow where he studied fine arts, architecture and computer science. He continued his education in the U.S. receiving an M.A. in Experimental Psychology from NYU (1988) and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester (1993).
In his writings, Manovich places digital media within the larger context
of modern visual culture, relating it to the histories of art, film, and
photography. His writings have been translated into many languages and
have been published in eighteen countries. His essays have appeared in
the catalogs of major international festivals and symposiums on electronic
art, in addition to such journals as Kunstforum International, Convergence,
Afterimage, The Art Bulletin, and Millennium Film Journal. He is also
a regular contributor to the online journals on new media including CTHEORY,
RHIZOME, and NETTIME. Among the recent anthologies which contain his contributions
are Digital Dialetics: New Essays on New Media (The MIT Press),
Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (Aperture),
Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (Bay Press), Perspectives
of Media Art (Cantz Verlag Ostfildern). Manovich also co-edited Tekstura:
Russian Essays on Visual Culture (The University of Chicago Press,
1993).
He has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences,
including "NewMediaLogia," (Moscow, 1994), "Digital Nature"
(Rotterdam, 1994), "Multimediale 4" (Karsruhe, Germany, 1995),
"Digital Dialectics" (Los Angeles, 1995), "Third Reality"
(St. Petersburg, 1995), "WRO 97 Media Art Biennale" (Poland,
1997), "OSTRANENIE '97" (Dessau, 1997), "Imagina '98"
(Monte Carlo, 1998), "Technologies of Moving Images" (Stockholm,
1998), International Symposium on Interactive Art (Japan, 1999) and "Interactive
Frictions" (Los Angeles, 1999).
In 1995 Manovich was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in Art Criticism by the
California Institute of the Arts. He was also a critic in residence at
the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest, 1997) and at the Villa Waldberta
(Munich, 1996).
Manovich exhibited works in traditional media along with computer films,
digital photographs, and computer installations. Hia recent projects focused
on digital cinema and computer games. Little Movies is a series of short
computer films designed for the Internet (http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~manovich/little-movies).
The project was exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in New York City (Spring,
1996) and was included in a number of exhibitions of net.art. Freud-Lissitzky
Navigator is a computer game which takes its players through the cultural
history of the 20th century (http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~manovich/FLN).
Before coming to UCSD in 1996, Manovich had been teaching theory and practice
of digital media at Syracuse University, University of Maryland, California
Institute of the Arts and UCLA. His studio classes have covered digital
painting and digital photography, 2-D and 3-D computer animation, interactivity,
multimedia, digital filmmaking and computer graphics programming. His
current teaching interests focus on theory and criticism of digital media,
multimedia, digital cinema.
Manovich is presently working on two books. The first, entitled The Language
of New Media, will be published by the MIT Press in 2000. This book analyses
the language of new media by placing it within the history of modern visual
culture. The second book traces the origins of new media and relates it
to the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s.
This speaker will participate in the Navigating the Borders - Edges and Interfaces panel.