Lev Manovich Review

Let me begin by saying that I took issue with much of this reading. I believe that Manovich took lot of liberties by making deceptively simple arguments without laying the appropriate groundwork for, or adequately explaining his points. I am with him through the first few pages while he is explaining digital film. On page 180, though, he makes an absurd leap from film to cinema without bothering to deal with cinema in its own right. This is a crucial issue, particularly in light of the fact that the essay is entitled 'What is Digital Cinema?'. I do not believe, as Manovitch seems to, that film and cinema are synonymous.

Secondly, as a painter I was of course offended by the light-fingered way Manovich equates painting, to digital photography, to digital film (in the breadth of one sentence!) His only point here is that the 'inherent mutability erases the difference between' the three, and while I agree that there are now more similarities between these three disciplines than ever before, they can hardly be considered one in the same. You could use the exact same argument to equate digital film with cooking, anyway, which is a flaw.

But I digress. I do have a rhetorical question to ask about this reading. I have put aside all my issues and am thinking specifically about the passage, on page 179, dealing with pixels. I am intrigued with the idea of pixels being a sort of universal unit that gives equal weight to (and unifies) 'raw material' from photographic, synthesized, and manipulated digital sources. My question is this: is there anything that can be thought of as a 'pixel' for The Arts (visual, written, music, 2-d, 3-d, performance, etc?)

The easy answer to this question is YES. We often apply words like tone and texture to a number of artistic disciplines, but my question gets at something larger. Could The Arts perhaps all deal with emotion? Or the human condition? Is there a common material that 'can be easily altered, substituted one for another, and so on'- between the traditional artistic disciplines- the way that a pixel can fluidly travel between different digital disciplines?