Ruger E Malizar serties editor
Ruger E Malizar 系列编辑

Designing Information Technology, Ridband Coyne, 1995
信息技术设计，Ridband Coyne，1995
Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Richatd Coymes 1999
技术浪漫主义：数字叙事、整体观与真实的浪漫，理查德·科伊梅斯 1999
The Vistal Mind, editad by Mischele Emater, 1994
《维斯塔尔心智》，由米歇尔·埃马特编辑，1994 年
The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, edited by Ken Goldberg, 2000
《花园中的机器人：互联网时代的远程机器人技术与远程知识论》，编辑：肯·戈德堡，2000 年
Leonardo Almanc, edited by Craig Hamis, 1994
莱昂纳多·阿尔曼克著，克雷格·哈米斯编辑，1994 年
In Search of Inowation: The Xerox PARC PAIR Project, edited by Craig Hamis, 1999 The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, edited by Peter Lumenfeld, 1999
寻找创新：施乐 PARC PAIR 项目，克雷格·哈米斯编辑，1999 年；数字辩证法：新媒体的论文集，彼得·卢门费尔德编辑，1999 年
The Language of New Media, Lev Manowith, 2001
《新媒体的语言》，列夫·马诺维奇著，2001 年
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Eniwinonments, edited by Mary Awne Phoser with Douglass Machead, 1996
沉浸于技术：艺术与虚拟环境，编辑：玛丽·奥恩·福瑟与道格拉斯·马基德，1996 年

The Language of New Media
新媒体的语言艺术

Lev Manovich 列夫·曼诺维奇

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
保留所有权利。本书的任何部分不得以任何电子或机械方式（包括复印、录音或信息存储与检索）在未获得出版商书面许可的情况下复制。

This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc.
这本书是由 Graphic Composition, Inc.使用 Bell Gothic 和 Garamond 3 字体排版的。

Printed and bound in the United States of America.
在美国进行印刷和装订。

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
国会图书馆编目出版数据
Manowich, Lew. 刘·曼诺维奇
The language of new media/Lev Manovich.
新媒体的语言/列夫·曼诺维奇著。
p. cm. - (Leonardo)
页厘米 - (莱昂纳多)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
包含参考文献和索引。
ISBN 0-262-13374-1 (he : alk. paper), 0-262-63255-1 (pb)
ISBN 0-262-13374-1（精装本），0-262-63255-1（平装本）

Mass media-Technological innovations. I. Title. II. Leonarda
大众媒体与技术创新。我。标题。II。莱昂纳达
(Series) Camibridge, Mass.)
（系列）美国马萨诸塞州剑桥市

Р96.Т42M35 2000 R96.T42M35 2000

302.2 - dc 21

Foneword by Mark Tribe …

x

马克·特里布的《Foneword》 …

x

ROLOGUE: YERTOV’S DATASET … xiv
ROLOGUE: YERTOV 的数据集 … 第十四页
CKNOWLEDGMENTS … xxyi 感谢 … xxyi
Introduction … 2 介绍内容 … 2
A PERSONAL Chronology 个人时间线
THEORY OF THE PRESENT … 6
现在的理论 … 第 6 章
MAPPING NEW MEDLA: METHOD … 8
新媒体映射：方法 … 8
MAPPING NEW MEDIA ORGANIZATION … 1
新媒体组织映射 … 1
THE TERMS: LMNGUAGE, OBjECT, REPRESENTATION … 12
条款：语言、对象、表现……12
1 What Is New Media?
1 新媒体是什么？
how media became new … 21
媒体是如何变得新颖的 … 21
principles of new media
新媒体的基本原则

Numerical Representation
数字化表示
Modularity … 30 模块化 … 30
Automation … 32 自动化 … 32
Variability … 36 变异性 … 36
Transcoding … 45 转换中 … 45
WHAT NEW MEDIA IS NOT … 49
新媒体并不是……49
Cinema as New Media … 50
电影作为一种新媒体 … 50
The Myth of the Digital … 55
数字时代的神话 … 55
The Myth of Interactivity … 0
互动的神话 … 0
2 The Interface … 62
2 接口 … 第 62 页
the language of clitural interfaces … 69
文化界面的语言 … 69
Cultural Interfaces … 69
文化界面 … 69
Printed Whond … 73
打印的 Whond … 第 73 页
HCI: Representation wersus Control … 84
HCI：表现与控制……84
HE SCREEN AND THE USER … 94
屏幕与用户 … 94
A Screen’s Genealogy … 95
一块屏幕的家族谱系 … 95
The Sicreem and the Body … 103
西克里姆与身体 … 103
Representation versus Simulation … 111
表现与模拟的对比 … 111
3 The Operations … 116
第 3 章操作 … 116
MENUS, FILTERS, PLUG-INS … 123
菜单、筛选器、插件 … 123
The Logic of Selection … 123
选择的逻辑 … 123
“Postmodernism” and Pliotoshop … 129
“后现代主义”与 Pliotoshop … 129
From Object to Signal … 132
从对象到信号 … 132
COMPOSETING … 136 复合材料 … 136
Frona Image Streams to Modular Media … 136
Frona 图像流转向模块化媒体 … 136
The Resistance to Montage … 141
对蒙太奇的反抗 … 141
Ancherlogy of Compositing: Cinema … 145
组合学的基础：电影 … 145
Archeology of Compositing: Video … 149
合成考古学：视频 … 149
Digital Compositing … 152
数字合成技术 … 152
Compositing and New Types of Montage … 155
合成与新型剪辑 … 155
TELEACTION … 161 电动行动 … 161
Representation versus Communication … 161
表达与交流 … 161
Telepresence: Illusion wersus Action … 164
远程存在：幻觉与行动的区别 … 164
Image-Instruments … 167 图像仪器 … 167
Telecommunication … 168 电信行业 … 168
Distance and Aura … 170
距离与气场 … 170
4 The Illusions … 176
四个幻觉 … 176
SyNTHETIC REAlism and ITS DisCONTENTS … 184
合成现实及其相关内容……184
Technology and Scyle in Cinema … 185
电影中的科技与风格 … 185
Technology and Style in ComputerAnimation … 188
计算机动画中的技术与风格 … 188
the Icons of Mimesis … 195
模仿的象征 … 195
THE SNTHETHC MAGE AND ITS SEBJECT … 199
这位神秘的法师及其对象 … 199
Georges Mélies, the Father of Computer Graphics … 200
乔治·梅里爱，计算机图形学的奠基人……200
Jurassic Parki and Socialist Realism … 201
《侏罗纪公园》与社会主义现实主义 … 201
205
illusion, NARrative, and interhettwtity
幻觉、叙事与互文性
212
5 The Forms 五种形式
218
the database 数据库系统
218
The Database Logic 数据库的逻辑
221
Data and Algorithm 数据与算法
Database and Nartativ … 225
数据库与叙述 … 225
Paradigm and Syntagm … 229
范式与句法 … 229
A Database Complex … 233
一个复杂的数据库……233
Dacabase Cinema: Greenaway and Wertow … 237
达卡巴斯电影：格林纳威与维尔托 … 237
Nayigable space … 244
可通航的空间 … 244
Dooms and Myst … 244
末日与神秘 … 244
Computer Space … 253
计算机空间 … 253
The Poetics of Nawigation … 259
导航的诗学 … 259
The Navigator and the Explorer … 268
导航者与探险家 … 268
Kino-Eye and Simulators. … 281
电影之眼与模拟器。… 281
EVE and Place EVE 与地点
286
6 What Is Cinema?
6 电影是什么？
293
digital Cinema Mnd the histori OF a MOVing image … 293
数字电影与动态影像的历史……293
Cinema, the Art of the Index
电影，作为索引的艺术
296
From Animation to Cinema … 298
从动画到电影 … 298
Cinema Redefined … 300
影院的重新定义 … 300
307
THE NEW LANGUAGE OF CINEMA … 309
电影的新语言 … 309
Gimemaric and Graphic: Cinegratography … 309
吉美马里克与图像：电影摄影 … 309
The New Temporality: The Loop ws a Nartative Engine … 314
新的时间观：循环是一个叙事引擎……314
Spatial Montage and Macrocinema … 322
空间蒙太奇与宏观电影艺术 … 322
Cinema as an Information Space … 326
电影作为信息领域 … 326
Cinema as a Code … 330
电影作为一种符号 … 330
INDEX … 335 索引…第 335 页

I first encountered Lev Manovich three years ago, when he posted a message to the Rhizome e-mail list. The subject line was “On Totalitarian Interactivicy”. One passage in particular caught my attention: “A Western artist sees the Internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring art to the people. In contrast, as a post-communist subject, I cannor but see the Intermet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always, present are lines for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen.” Manowich’s image of the Intemet as a Russian apartment was made more vivid by the fact that I had recently spent a month living with an artist in Moscow. I had also just moved to New York from Berlin, where I had worked as a web designer. While in a material sense, the Internet is a globally homogeneous network with common tools and protocols, and while it is contributing, perhaps more than any other technology, to the globalization of economies and cultures, my experience in Berlin taught me that it nonetheless means very different things in different parts of the world. The perspective Manovich brought to the subject was a bracing reminder that the zeal with which most Americans (myself included) embraced computers and networks in the mid-1990s wais nor a global condition.
三年前，我第一次接触列夫·曼诺维奇，当时他在 Rhizome 邮件列表上发了一条消息，主题是“关于极权互动性”。其中一段话特别引起了我的注意：“西方艺术家将互联网视为打破所有等级制度、将艺术带给人民的完美工具。相反，作为一个后共产主义的个体，我只能将互联网视为斯大林时代的公寓：没有隐私，人人都在监视他人，总是要排队使用公共区域，比如厕所或厨房。”曼诺维奇将互联网比作俄罗斯公寓的形象让我更加深刻，因为我最近在莫斯科与一位艺术家同住了一个月，而我刚从柏林搬到纽约，之前在那儿做网页设计师。尽管从物质上看，互联网是一个全球统一的网络，拥有共同的工具和协议，并且它可能比其他任何技术更促进了经济和文化的全球化，但我在柏林的经历让我意识到，它在世界不同地区的意义却大相径庭。Manovich 对这一主题的观点提醒我们，大多数美国人（包括我自己）在 1990 年代中期对计算机和网络的热情并不是一种全球性的现象。

When Manovich wrote “On Tatalitarian Interactivity”, a debate was raging on the Rhizome e-mail list. The Europeans-who may have lagged technologicallly but had an edge when it came to cheory-were on the attack, criticizing Americans for our “California ideology” (a deadly cocktail of naive oprimism, techno-utopianism, and new-libertariani politics popularized by Wired magazine). In the midst of this highly polarized debtate,
当马诺维奇撰写《论极权互动》时，Rhizome 电子邮件列表上正展开激烈的辩论。尽管欧洲人在技术上可能落后，但在理论上却占据优势，他们对美国的“加州意识形态”进行了猛烈抨击（这是一种由《连线》杂志推广的天真乐观、技术乌托邦主义和新自由主义政治的致命混合）。在这场高度两极化的辩论中，
Mancwich’s displaced voice, the waice of someone who had “lived experience” of booch ideological excremes, was refreshing indeed. His trajectory had taken him from the surreal worlld of Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia to the hyperreal warld of Walt Disney’s California. Having grown up in Russia, compleced his thigher education in the United States, and lived and worked here ever since, he sees the world through the eyes of what he calls a “postcommunist subject,” but one might say with equal accuracy that he wears a set of newworld glasses as well.
曼克维奇被驱逐的声音，来自一个有“生活经验”的人，他对意识形态的反思确实令人耳目一新。他的经历将他从列昂尼德·布雷日涅夫时代的超现实俄罗斯带到了沃尔特·迪士尼的加利福尼亚的超现实世界。由于在俄罗斯长大，并在美国完成了高等教育，之后一直在这里生活和工作，他以“后共产主义主体”的视角看待世界，但同样可以说，他也戴着一副新世界的眼镜。

Having studied film theory, art history, and literary theory, and having worked in new media himself as airtist, commercial designer, animator, and programmer, Manovich approaches new media in a way that is boch theoretical and practical. This mulailevel hybridity-simultaneously postcommunist and late-capitalist, at once academic and applied-lends his ideas a richness and complexity that is more than a little unusual in a field dominated on the one hand by techno-utopians and on the other by ivory-tower theory wonks. My own interest in mew media has been focused on the Internet and its potential as a tool and a space for art making. Art has always been bound up with technology, and artists have always been among the first to adopt new technologies as they emerge. We monkey around with new tecthnologies in an effort to see what they can do, to make them do things the engineers never intended, to understand what they might mean, to reflect on their effects, to push chem beyond their limits to break them. But some technologies seem to hold considerably more promise for artists than orhers. The Internet is particularly ripe with the potential to enable new kinds of collaboratiwe production, democratic distribution, and participatory experience.
研究电影理论、艺术史和文学理论，并且作为艺术家、商业设计师、动画师和程序员亲自从事新媒体工作，马诺维奇以一种既理论又实践的方式接触新媒体。这种多层次的混合性——同时具有后共产主义和晚期资本主义的特征，既是学术的又是应用的——赋予了他的思想一种丰富性和复杂性，这在一个一方面被技术乌托邦主义者主导，另一方面被象牙塔理论狂热者占据的领域中是相当不寻常的。我自己对新媒体的兴趣主要集中在互联网及其作为艺术创作工具和空间的潜力上。艺术一直与技术密切相关，艺术家们总是最早采用新技术的人。我们探索新技术，试图了解它们的功能，促使它们做出工程师未曾设想的事情，思考它们的意义，反思它们的影响，推动它们超越极限。但有些技术对艺术家而言似乎更具潜力。互联网尤其充满了实现新型协作生产、民主分发和参与体验的可能性。

It is precisely this newness that makes new media an interesting place for cultural producers to work. New media represents a constantly shifting frontier for experimentation and exploration. Whille new media are understood in terms of the older media that precede them, they are nonetheless freed, at least to some extent, from traditional constraints. Having to figure out how new tools work necessitates innovation and encourages a kind of beginner’s mind. New media attract innovators, iconoclasts, and risk-takers. As a result, some of the hottest creative minds spend their time hacking around with new technologies that we barely understand. In this sense the new media artists of today have much in common with the wideo artists of the early 1970s. Manovich has made significant contributions to new media art as well, with his net-based projects “Little Movies” and “Freud-Lissitzky Nawigator.” Because of their very newness, new media are slightly beyond the effective reach of established institutions and cheir bureaucracies. Net art is a case in point. While museums started to catch on to che net as an art medium in the last years of the 1990 s and began to collect, commission, and exhibir net-based work, most of the artists who interest them made their mames outside the gallery-museum matrix. The net art community of the late 1990s possessed an anarchic quality of entrepreneurial meritocracy strikingly different from the rest of the art world, where gallery schmoozing and the abiliry to produce marketable objects hawe remained primary determinants of success.
正是这种新颖性使新媒体成为文化创作者的一个有趣领域。新媒体代表了一个不断变化的实验和探索的前沿。尽管新媒体是通过其前身的旧媒体来理解的，但它们在某种程度上仍然摆脱了传统的束缚。了解新工具的工作方式需要创新，并鼓励一种初学者的心态。新媒体吸引了创新者、破坏者和冒险者。因此，一些最具创意的头脑花时间在我们几乎无法理解的新技术上进行探索。从这个角度来看，今天的新媒体艺术家与 1970 年代早期的视频艺术家有很多相似之处。马诺维奇在新媒体艺术领域也做出了重要贡献，他的网络项目“微电影”和“弗洛伊德-利西茨基导航器”便是例证。由于新媒体的全新性，它们在一定程度上超出了传统机构及其官僚体系的有效触及范围。网络艺术就是一个典型例子。尽管博物馆在 1990 年代末开始意识到网络作为艺术媒介，并开始收集、委托和展出基于网络的作品，但大多数令他们感兴趣的艺术家是在画廊-博物馆体系之外崭露头角的。 1990 年代末的网络艺术社区展现出一种无政府主义的企业家精神，这与艺术界的其他部分截然不同。在艺术界，画廊的社交能力和生产可销售作品的能力仍然是成功的主要决定因素。

But this freedom comes at a cost. Sluggish as they may seem, galleries and musewms serve an important interpretive function. They focus the attention of critics and audiences, situate work in historical context, and allocate time and space for us to experience and reflect on the work itself. On the technological frontiers of art making, where museums fear to tread, critical dialogue becomes all the more important. But the newness of new media makes it particularly difficult to write about, or at least to say anything useful. Most writers lapse into futurology, or remain mired in ungrounded theary. That makes this book. by Lev Manovich all the mone unusual and important. The first detailed and encompassing analysis of the wisual aesthetics of mew media, the book locates new media within the history of visual culture, articulacing connections and differences among new media and older forms. Finding the origins of new media aestherics in painting, photography, cinema, and television, Manovich looks at digital imaging, human-computer interface, hypermedia, computer games, compositing, animarion, telepres- ence, and wirtual worlds. In doing so, he eclectically and imaginatively draws on film theory, literary ctheory, and social theory. Just as important, he draws on his own working experience with new media technologies and computer science to lay out the fundamental principles chat distinguish new media from old. In his analysis, he offers detailed readings of particular objects in art and popular culture. Unique in their depth and scope, the chapters that follow will be of interest not only to academics, but also to artists and designers who seek

a

berter understanding of the history and theory of their practice.
但这种自由是有代价的。尽管画廊和博物馆看起来行动缓慢，它们却在解释功能上发挥着重要作用。它们集中批评家和观众的注意力，将作品置于历史背景中，并为我们体验和反思作品本身提供了时间和空间。在艺术创作的技术前沿，博物馆不敢涉足的领域，批判性对话显得尤为重要。然而，新媒体的创新性使得写作变得特别困难，或者至少很难表达出有用的观点。大多数作家陷入了未来学，或者停留在没有依据的理论中。这使得 Lev Manovich 的这本书显得格外独特和重要。这本书首次对新媒体的视觉美学进行了详细而全面的分析，将新媒体置于视觉文化的历史背景中，阐明了新媒体与传统形式之间的联系与差异。曼诺维奇追溯新媒体美学的起源，涉及绘画、摄影、电影和电视，探讨数字成像、人机交互、超媒体、计算机游戏、合成、动画、远程呈现和虚拟世界。在这个过程中，他广泛而富有创意地借鉴了电影理论、文学理论和社会理论。同时，他还结合自己在新媒体技术和计算机科学方面的工作经验，阐述了区分新媒体与旧媒体的基本原则。在他的分析中，他对艺术和流行文化中的特定对象进行了详细解读。接下来的章节在深度和广度上独具特色，不仅对学术界有吸引力，也对那些希望更好理解自己实践历史和理论的艺术家和设计师同样重要。

At a recent conference on the theory and culture of computer games, a panelist asked this provocative question: “If in the early years of cinema we already had seminal works that defined the language of the medium, why haven’t we seen the computer-game equivalent of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation?” The answer, of course, is that we have. The question is how to recognize it. To do so, we need to build a history and theory of the language of new media. In this groundbreaking work, Lev Manovich has done a great deal of the fundamental conceptual work toward that end.
在最近的一次关于计算机游戏理论与文化的会议上，一位小组成员提出了一个发人深省的问题：“如果在电影的早期就已经有了定义这一媒介语言的开创性作品，为什么我们还没有看到计算机游戏中相当于 D.W.格里菲斯的《民族的诞生》的作品？”答案显然是，我们已经看到了这样的作品。关键在于如何识别它。为此，我们需要建立新媒体语言的历史和理论。在这部开创性的著作中，列夫·曼诺维奇为此做了大量的基础性概念工作。

Mark Tribe 马克·特里布
Founder, Rhizome.org Rhizome.org 的创始人
New York City 纽约市

Prologue: Vertov's Dataset
序言：维尔托夫的资料集

The awant-garde masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, completed by Russian director Dziga Vertow in 1929 , will serve as our guide to the language of new media. This prologue consists of a number of stills from the film. Each still is accompanied by a guote from the text summarizing a particular principle of new media. The number in brackets indicates the page from which the quote is taken. The prologue thus acts as a wistal index to some of the book’s major ideas.
前卫杰作《带电影摄影机的人》，由俄罗斯导演齐佳·维尔托夫于 1929 年完成，将引导我们探索新媒体的语言。序言中包含了一些电影的静态画面，每个画面都附有一段文字引用，概括了新媒体的某个特定原则。括号中的数字表示引用的页码。因此，序言实际上充当了本书主要思想的索引。

[78-79] A hundred years after cinema’s birth, chematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. In this respect, the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visulul Esperanto-a goal chat preoccupied many film arrists and critics in the 1920s, from Griffith to Vertow. Indeed, today millions of computer users communicate with each other through the same computer interface. And in contrast to cinema, where mose “users” are able to " “understand” cinematic language but not “speak” it (i.e., make films), all computer users can “speak” the language of the interface. They are active users of the interface, employing it to perform many tasks: send e-mail, organize files, run various applications, and so on.
在电影诞生一百年后，观察世界、结构时间、叙述故事以及将一个体验与下一个体验联系起来的方式，已成为计算机用户访问和互动所有文化数据的基本手段。在这方面，计算机实现了电影作为一种视觉世界语的承诺——这是许多电影艺术家和评论家在 1920 年代所关注的目标，从格里菲斯到维尔托。事实上，今天数百万计算机用户通过相同的计算机界面相互交流。与电影不同的是，电影的“大多数用户”能够“理解”电影语言，但不能“说”它（即制作电影），而所有计算机用户都可以“说”界面的语言。他们是界面的活跃用户，使用它来完成许多任务，比如发送电子邮件、整理文件、运行各种应用程序等。

[84-85] The incorporation of virtual camera controls into the very hardware of game consoles is truly a historic event. Directing the virtual camera becomes as important as controlling the hero’s actions. . . In computer games], cinematic perception functions as the subject in its own right, suggesting the return of “New Vision” movement of the 1920 s (Moholy-Nagy Rodchenko, Vertov, and others), which foregrounded the new mobility of the photo and film camera, and made unconwentional points of wiew a key part of its poetics.
将虚拟摄像机控制整合到游戏机硬件中，确实是一个历史性的事件。操控虚拟摄像机与控制英雄的动作同样重要。在电脑游戏中，电影感知作为一个独立的主题，暗示着 1920 年代“新视觉”运动的回归（如莫霍伊-纳吉、罗德琴科、维尔托夫等），突显了照片和电影摄像机的新机动性，并使非常规视角成为其诗学的关键部分。
[148] Editing, or montage, is the key twentieth-century technology forcreating fake realities. Theoreticians of cinema have distinguished berween many kinds of montage, but for the purpase of skerching an archeology of the technologies of simulation that led to digital compositing, I will distinguish berween two basic techniques. The first technique is temporal montage: Separate realities form consecutive moments in time. The second technique is montage within a shot. It is the opposite of the first: separate realities form contingent parts of a single image. . . . Examples include the . . . superimposition of images and multiple screens by avant-garde filmmakers in the 1920s (for instance, the sulperimposed images in Vertov"s Man with a Mowie Cawerwa and the three-pare screen in Abel Gance’s 1927 Natpoleon).
编辑或剪辑是二十世纪创造虚假现实的关键技术。电影理论家区分了多种剪辑方式，但为了探讨导致数字合成的模拟技术的演变，我将区分两种基本技术。第一种是时间剪辑：不同的现实在时间上连续出现。第二种是在一个镜头内的剪辑，正好与第一种相反：不同的现实构成了单一图像的相互部分……例如…… 1920 年代先锋电影制片人通过图像叠加和多屏幕展示的手法（例如，维尔托夫的《带小麦的男人》和阿贝尔·甘斯 1927 年的《拿破仑》中的三屏幕）。

[149] As theorized by Vertov, film can overcome its indexical nature thirough montage; by presenting a viewer writh objects that never existed in reality.
[149] 正如维尔托夫所理论的，电影可以通过蒙太奇克服其指示性特征；通过向观众展示那些在现实中从未存在的物体。
51

[158] Although digital compositing is usually used to create a seamless virtual space, this does not have to be its only goal. Borders between different worlds do not have to be erased; different spaces do not have to be ratatched in perspective, scale, and lighting; individual layers can retain their separate idencities rather than being merged into a single space; different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe.
尽管数字合成通常用于创建无缝的虚拟空间，但这并不是它的唯一目的。不同世界之间的边界不必被抹去；不同的空间不必在透视、比例和光照上保持一致；各个层次可以保留各自的特性，而不是合并成一个单一的空间；不同的世界可以在语义上发生冲突，而不是形成一个统一的宇宙。

When photographs are brought together within a single magazine or newreel, both che scale and unique locations of the objects are discarded thus answering the demand of mass society for a “universal equality of things.”
当照片被汇集在一本杂志或新闻片中时，物体的规模和独特位置被忽略，从而满足了大众社会对“事物普遍平等”的需求。
[172] The camueraman, whom Benjamin compares to a surgeon, “penetrates deeply into its [reality’s] web”; his camera zooms in order to “pry an object from its shell.” Due to its new mobility, glorified in such films as Man with a Mowie Canuera, the camera can be anywhere, and with its superhuman vision it can obtain a close-up of any abject. . . .
摄影师，班雅明将其比作外科医生，“深入到[现实的]网络中”；他的相机放大以“撬出一个物体。”由于在《带着割草机的男人》等电影中所展现的新机动性，相机可以出现在任何地方，凭借其超凡的视力，它能够捕捉到任何卑微事物的特写镜头。 . . .
71

[173 - 174]

Modernization is accompanied by a disruption of physical space and matter, a process that privileges interchangeable and mobile signs over original objects and relations. . . . The concept of modernization fits equally well with Benjamin’s account of film and Virilio’s account of telecommunication, the latter but a more advanced stage in the continual process of turning objects into mobile signs. Before, different physical locations met within a single magazine spread or film newsreel; now they meet within a single electronic screen.
现代化伴随着物理空间和物质的变革，这一过程使得可互换和移动的符号优于原始的对象和关系……现代化的概念与本雅明对电影的论述以及维里里奥对电信的分析同样契合，后者只是将物体转变为移动符号的持续过程中的一个更高级阶段。过去，不同的物理位置可以在同一杂志版面或电影新闻片段中相遇；而现在，它们则在同一电子屏幕上相遇。

[202] Whose wision is it? It is the wiston of a cömputer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the furure, when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic reptesentation of a diffenent reality.
这是谁的视野？这是计算机、半机械人和自动导弹的视野。这是对未来人类视野的真实展现，届时它将通过计算机图形技术得到增强，并去除噪音。这是数字网络的视野。合成计算机生成的图像并不是我们现实的低劣表现，而是另一种现实的真实反映。

[239] Along with Greenaway, Dziga Vertov can be thought of as a major “database filmmaker” of the twentieth century. Man with a Mowie Camera is perhaps the most important example of a database imagination in modern media art.
与格林纳威一起，德齐加·维尔托夫被认为是二十世纪重要的“数据库电影制作人”。《带着莫维相机的人》可能是现代媒体艺术中数据库想象的最重要例子。

[241] Just as new media objects contain a hierarchy of lewels linterfacecontent; operating system-application; Web page-HTML code; highlevel programming language-assembly language-machine language), Vertov’s film contains at least chtee lewels. One level is the story of a cameraman shooting material for the film. The second level consists of shots of che audience watching the finished film in a movie theater: The thind level is the film itself, which consists of footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev, and Riga, arranged according to the progression of a single day: waking up-workleisure acriwities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of as its. metarexts.
就像新媒体对象包含一个层次结构（界面内容；操作系统-应用程序；网页-HTML 代码；高级编程语言-汇编语言-机器语言），维尔托夫的电影至少有三个层次。第一个层次是摄影师拍摄电影素材的故事。第二个层次是观众在电影院观看完成的电影的镜头；第三个层次是电影本身，由在莫斯科、基辅和里加录制的镜头组成，按照一天的进程排列：醒来-工作-休闲活动。如果这个第三个层次是一个文本，其他两个层次可以被视为它的元文本。

[242] If a “normal” awant-garde film still proposes at colherent language different from the language of mainstream cinema, that is, a small set of techniques that are repeated, Man with a Mowie Canera never arriwes at anything like a well-defined language.
[242] 如果一部“正常”的先锋电影仍然能够提出与主流电影语言不同的连贯表达，也就是说，使用一小套重复的技巧，那么《带着莫维相机的男人》从未达到过任何明确的语言。

Rather, it proposes an untamed, and apparently endless, unwwinding of techniques, or, to use contemporary language, “effects,” as cinema’s new way of speaking.
相反，它提出了一种不受拘束、似乎无尽的技术展开，或者用现代语言来说，就是电影的新表达方式，“效果”。

[243] "And this is why Vertow’s film has particular relevance to new media. Ir prowes that it is possible to turn “effects” into a meaningful artistic language. Why is it that in Witmey’s compurer films and music videos effects are just effects, whereas in the hands of Vertov they acquire meaning? Because in Vertov’s film they are motivated by a particular argument, which is that the new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them, summed up by Vertow in his term “kino-eye,” can be used to decode the world. Ats the film progresses, straight footage gives way to manipulated footage; newer techniques appear one after another, reaching a roller-coaster intensity by the film’s end-a true orgy of cinematography. It is as though Vertov restages his discovery of the kino-eye for us, and along with him, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov’s goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitement, as he discovers a new language for film. This gradual process of discovery is film’s main narrative, and it is told through a catallog of discoveries. Thus, in the hands of Vertov, the database, this normally static and “objective” form, becomes dynamic and subjective. More important, Vertow is able to achieve something that new media designers and artists still have to learn - how to merge database and narrative into a new form.
这就是维尔托夫的电影与新媒体特别相关的原因。它证明了将“效果”转化为有意义的艺术语言是可能的。为什么在维特梅的计算机电影和音乐视频中，效果仅仅是效果，而在维尔托夫的作品中却赋予了意义？因为在维尔托夫的电影中，这些效果是由一个特定的论点驱动的：获取和操纵图像的新技术，可以用维尔托夫的“电影之眼”来概括，这些技术能够解读世界。随着电影的推进，原始镜头逐渐被处理过的镜头所取代；新的技术一个接一个地出现，直到电影结束时达到一种过山车般的强度——一场真正的电影摄影盛宴。就像维尔托夫为我们重新演绎了他对电影之眼的发现，随着他的引导，我们逐渐意识到相机所能提供的各种可能性。维尔托夫的目标是让我们沉浸在他的视角和思维中，分享他的兴奋，因为他为电影发现了一种新的语言。这一逐步的发现过程构成了电影的主要叙事，通过一系列发现来展现。因此，在维尔托夫的手中，数据库这种通常静态和“客观”的形式变得动态而主观。更重要的是，维尔托夫能够实现一些新媒体设计师和艺术家仍需学习的东西——如何将数据库与叙事融合成一种新形式。

[262] If modern wisual culture exemplified by MTV can be thought of as a Mannerist stage of cinema, its perfected techniques of cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing self-consciously displayed and paraded for its own sake, Whaliczky’s film presents an alternative response to cinema’s classical age, which is now behind us. In this metafilm, the camera, part of cinema’s apparatus, becomes the main character (and in this respect, we can connect The Fortest co another metafilm, Mas with a Mawie Camerat).
[262] 如果将现代视觉文化视为以 MTV 为代表的 mannerist 电影阶段，那么其精湛的摄影、布景和剪辑技巧自觉地展示并为自身而炫耀。而 Whaliczky 的电影则对已经过去的电影古典时代提出了另一种回应。在这部元电影中，摄影机作为电影设备的一部分，成为了主要角色（在这方面，我们可以将《森林》与另一部元电影《与玛丽·卡梅拉》联系起来）。

day’s computer user: no longer just a pedestrian walking down a street, but not yet Gibson’s data cowboy who zoorns through pure data armed with data-minting algorithms. In his research on what can be called “kino-eye interface,” Vertov systematically tried different ways to overcome what he thought were the limits of human wision. He mounced cameras on the roof of a building and a moving automobile; he slowed and sped up filun speed; he superimposed a number of images together in time and space (temporal montage and montage within a shor). Man with a Mowie Camera is not only a database of city life in the 1920s, a database of film techniques, and a database of new operations of visual epistemology, but also id database of new intefface operations that together aim to go beyond simple human nawigation thirough physical space.
当今的计算机用户：不再只是街上走路的行人，但还不是吉布森所描述的“数据牛仔”，他用数据挖掘算法在纯数据中穿梭。在他对“电影眼界面”的研究中，维尔托夫系统地尝试了多种方法来克服他认为的人类视觉的局限。他将摄像机安装在建筑物的屋顶和一辆移动的汽车上；他调整胶卷的播放速度；他在时间和空间中将多个图像叠加在一起（时间蒙太奇和短片中的蒙太奇）。拥有 Mowie 相机的人不仅是 1920 年代城市生活的数据库，还是电影技巧和视觉认知新操作的数据库，同时也是新的界面操作的数据库，这些操作共同旨在超越人类在物理空间中的简单导航。

[306-307] One general effect of the digital
数字技术的一个普遍影响

metaphors of computer to be embedded in the commands and incerface ized in a computer. Digital ware. In short, the avant-garde became racerialgarde strategy of collage reenema technology is a case in point. The avantmost basic operation one can corendenand, the on film became embedded in pain funt digital data. The idea of painting vant-garde move to combine animations of film-editing software. The footage is repeated in the convergence of, printed texts, and live-action compositing, and editing systems into all-in-tion, title generation, paint,
计算机中的隐喻被嵌入到命令和界面中。数字产品。简而言之，先锋派成为了拼贴重塑技术的先锋策略，这是一个典型的例子。最基本的操作可以理解为，电影被嵌入到数字数据的痛苦中。先锋派的想法是结合动画和电影编辑软件。镜头在印刷文本、实景合成和编辑系统的融合中不断重复，生成标题和绘画。

16

[3171 Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age? It is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to computer programming. Programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as “iffthen” and “repeat/while”; the loop is the most elementary of these control structures., . . As the practice of compurer programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be considered mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to end by execucing a series of loops.
循环能否成为适合计算机时代的新叙事形式？值得注意的是，循环不仅催生了电影，也催生了计算机编程。编程涉及通过控制结构（如“如果...那么”和“重复/当”）来改变数据的线性流动；而循环是这些控制结构中最基本的。正如计算机编程的实践所示，循环与顺序进展并不一定是相互排斥的。计算机程序通过执行一系列循环，从开始到结束。
[316] Cinema’s birth from a loop from was reenacted at least once during its history. In one of the sequences of Mawu wisth a Mowie Camera, Vertov shows us a cameraman standing in the back of a moving automobile. As he is being carried forward by the automobile, he cranks the handle of his camera. A loop, a repetition, created by the circular movement of the handle, gives birth to a progression of events-a very basic nartative that is also quintes sentially modern-a camera moving through space recording whatever is i its wray.

⟶

电影的诞生在历史上至少重演过一次。在《马乌与莫维相机》的一个片段中，维尔托夫展示了一位摄影师站在一辆行驶中的汽车后面。当汽车向前行驶时，他转动着相机的手柄。手柄的圆周运动形成了一个循环和重复，诞生了一系列事件——这是一个非常基本的叙事，同时也是本质上现代的——一台相机在空间中移动，记录着它所经过的一切。

[322] Sparia! montage represents an alternative to traditional cinematic temporall montage, replacing its traditional sequential mode with a spatial one. Ford’s assembly line rellied on the separation of the production process into sets of simple, reperitive, and sequential activities. The same principle made computer programming possible: A computer program breaks a task into a series of elemental operations to be executed one at a time. Cinema followed this logic of industrial production as well. It replaced all orther modes of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots that appear on the screen one at a time. This rype of narrative turned our to be particiularly incompatible with the spatial narrative that had played a prominent role in European wisual culture for centuries.
[322] Sparia！蒙太奇提供了一种替代传统电影时间蒙太奇的方式，通过空间模式取代了传统的顺序模式。福特的流水线依赖于将生产过程分解为一系列简单、重复和顺序的活动。相同的原则使计算机编程成为可能：计算机程序将任务分解为一系列基本操作，逐一执行。电影同样遵循了这种工业生产的逻辑，采用顺序叙事取代了其他叙事模式，形成了一条一个接一个出现在屏幕上的镜头流水线。这种叙述方式与在欧洲视觉文化中长期占据重要地位的空间叙述格格不入。

[324] Since the development of the Xerox PAB the Xerox PARC Alto workstation, the alice Interface (GUI) has used multiple windows. It would be logical to expect that cultural forms based on moving images will eventually adopt similar conventions. . . . We may expect that computer-based cinema will eventually go in the same direction-especially once the limitations of communication bandwidth disappear while the resolution of displays significaintly increases, from the typical

1 - 2 K

in 2000 to

4 K, 8 K

, or beyond. I believe that the next generation of cinema-broadland or macrocinemia-will add multiple windows to its language.
自从施乐 PAB 和施乐 PARC Alto 工作站的开发以来，爱丽丝界面（GUI）就开始使用多个窗口。我们可以合理地预期，基于动态图像的文化形式最终会采用类似的惯例……我们可以预见，基于计算机的电影也会朝着同样的方向发展——尤其是在通信带宽的限制消失、显示器的分辨率显著提高，从 2000 年的典型

1 - 2 K

到

4 K, 8 K

或更高的情况下。我相信下一代电影——宽带电影或宏观电影——将会在其语言中引入多个窗口。

326-3271 If the Human Computer Interface ( HCD ) is an interface to computer data, and a book is an interface to text, cinema can be thought of as an interface to events taking place in 3-D space. Just as painting before it, cinema presents us with familiar images of visible reality-interiors, landscapes, human characters-arranged within a rectangular frame. The aeschetics of these arrangements ranges from extreme scarcity to extreme density… It would take only a sratll leap to relate this density of “pictocial displays” to the density of contemporary information displays such as Web portals, which may contain a few dozen hyperlinked elements, or the interfaces of popular software packages, which similarly present the user with dozens of commands at once.
如果人机界面（HCD）是计算机数据的接口，而书籍是文本的接口，那么电影可以被视为在三维空间中发生事件的接口。就像绘画一样，电影向我们展示了可见现实中熟悉的图像——室内、风景和人物——这些图像被安排在一个矩形框架内。这些安排的美学从极度稀缺到极度密集不等……我们只需简单地将这种“图像展示”的密度与当代信息展示的密度相联系，例如网络门户，可能包含几十个超链接元素，或者流行软件包的界面，这些界面同样一次性向用户展示数十个命令。

Acknowledgments 致谢

Special thanks: Doug Sery, my editor at MIT Press, whose support and continuous encouragement made this book possible; everybody else at MIT Press who brought their expertise and passion to this project; Mark Tribe, who read the manuscript in its entirety and offered numerous suggestions; Tarleton Gillespie, who offered invaluable help with editing at the last moment; Alila Efimova, for everything; Rochelle Feinstein, who served as my muse.
特别感谢：道格·塞里，我在麻省理工学院出版社的编辑，他的支持和不断鼓励使这本书得以成形；麻省理工学院出版社的其他同事们，他们为这个项目贡献了专业知识和热情；马克·特里布，他通读了手稿并提出了许多宝贵的建议；塔尔顿·吉莱斯皮，他在最后时刻提供了重要的编辑帮助；阿丽拉·埃菲莫娃，感谢她的所有付出；罗谢尔·费因斯坦，她是我的灵感来源。

This book would not exist withloonar all the friends, colleagues, and instirucions committed to oew media arr and theory. I am grateful to all of them for ongoing exchange and intellectual and emocional support.
这本书的存在离不开所有朋友、同事以及致力于新媒体艺术与理论的机构。我对他们在持续交流和智力、情感支持方面的帮助深表感激。

For providing inspiring places to work: Mondrian Hotel (West Hollywood, Los Angeles), The Standard (West Hollywood, Los Angeles), Fred Segal (West Hollywood, Los Angeles), Del Mar Plaza (Del Mar, CA), Gitano (NoLita, NYC), Space Untitled (Solo, New York), The Royall Library (Stockholm), De Jaren (Arnsterdam).
提供灵感的工作场所：蒙德里安酒店（西好莱坞，洛杉矶），标准酒店（西好莱坞，洛杉矶），弗雷德·塞戈尔（西好莱坞，洛杉矶），德尔玛广场（德尔玛，加州），吉塔诺（诺利塔，纽约），无题空间（索洛，纽约），罗亚尔图书馆（斯德哥尔摩），德雅伦（阿姆斯特丹）。

Administrative support: Department of Visual Arts, Uniwersity of California, San Diego; Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University; Center for User-Centered Interface Design, Royal Institute of Technology, Stackholm.
行政支持：加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校视觉艺术系、斯德哥尔摩大学电影研究系以及瑞典皇家理工学院用户中心界面设计中心。

Word processor: Microsoft Word.
文档处理软件：微软 Word。
Web browser: Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer.
网络浏览器：Netscape Navigator 和 Internet Explorer。
Favorite search engine: wwww.hotbor.com.
我最喜欢的搜索引擎是：wwww.hotbor.com。
Favorite moving image format: QuickTime.
我最喜欢的动态视频格式是 QuickTime。
HTML editor: Netscape Communicator, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
HTML 编辑器：Netscape Communicator 和 Macromedia Dreamweaver。
OS: Windows 98 .
操作系统：Windows 98。

Hardware: SONY PCGSO5EX laptop.
硬件：SONY PCGSO5EX 笔记本。

Mobile phone: Nokia. 手机品牌：诺基亚。

The principal editing of this book was done between July 1998 and November 1999 in La Jolla and Del Mar, California; Los Angeles; New York; Stockholm; Helsinki; and Amsterdam.
这本书的主要编辑工作是在 1998 年 7 月至 1999 年 11 月期间，在加利福尼亚州的拉荷亚和德尔玛、洛杉矶、纽约、斯德哥尔摩、赫尔辛基以及阿姆斯特丹完成的。

Although significant parts of this book have been written anew, I have drawn on material from a number of previously published articles. Sometimes anly part of an article made it into the final manuscript; in other cases, parts ended up in different chapters of the book; in yet other cases, a whole article became the basis for one of the sections. In the following list, I cite the articles that were used as material for the book. Many of them were reprinted and translated into orher languages; here I list the first instance of publication in English. Also, it has been my practice for a number of years to post any new writing I do to Nettime

^{1}

and Rhizome,

^{2}

two important Internet e-mail lists devoted to discussions of new media art, criticism, and pollitics. This practice enabled me to receive immediate feedback on my work and also provided me with a community interested in my work. Most articles, accordingly, appeared on these two e-mail lists before being published in more traditional print venues such as journals and anthologies or in Internet journals.
尽管本书的许多重要部分是重新撰写的，但我参考了一些之前发表的文章。有时，文章的某些部分被纳入了最终手稿；在其他情况下，部分内容出现在书的不同章节中；还有一些情况下，整篇文章成为某一部分的基础。在以下列表中，我列出了作为书籍材料的文章。许多文章被重新印刷并翻译成其他语言；在这里，我列出了它们首次以英语出版的实例。此外，多年来，我一直在 Nettime

^{1}

和 Rhizome

^{2}

上发布我所写的新作品，这两个重要的互联网邮件列表专注于新媒体艺术、批评和政治的讨论。这个实践让我能够及时获得对我工作的反馈，并为我提供了一个对我的工作感兴趣的社区。因此，大多数文章在被发表在传统的印刷媒体，如期刊和选集，或互联网期刊之前，通常会先出现在这两个电子邮件列表上。
“Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics.” In Afterimage 20, no. 2 (September 1992): 12-14.
“组装现实：计算机图形学的神话。” 发表在《后影》20 卷第 2 期（1992 年 9 月），第 12-14 页。
“Paradoxes of Digital Photography”. In Photograpby affer Phodugryaplyy, edited by Hubertus v. Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, Florian Rötzer, 58-66 (Munich: Verlig der Kunst, 1995).
“数字摄影的悖论”。收录于《摄影之后的摄影》，由胡贝尔图斯·阿梅伦克森、斯特凡·伊格尔豪特和弗洛里安·罗特泽尔编辑，58-66 页（慕尼黑：艺术出版社，1995 年）。
“To Lie and to Act: Potemkin’s Villages, Cinema, and Telepresence.” In Mythos Information-Weiluame to the Wired World. Ars Electromica 95, edited by Karl Gebel and Peter WWeibel, 343-353 (Vienna and New York: Springler-Verlag, 1995).
“撒谎与行动：波将金的村庄、电影与远程呈现。”收录于《神话信息：通往网络世界的韦鲁阿梅》。阿尔斯·电子媒体 95，编辑：卡尔·盖贝尔和彼得·韦伊贝尔，343-353（维也纳和纽约：施普林格出版社，1995 年）。
“Reading Media Art.” (In German translation) in Mediagramm 20 (ZKM/ Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsrruhe, 1995): 4-5.
“阅读媒体艺术。”（德语翻译）见《媒体图谱 20》（卡尔斯鲁厄艺术与媒体技术中心，1995 年）：第 4-5 页。

1. htrtps//www.netcime.org.

hectp:I/wwsws.rhizomene.otg.
“Archeology of a Compurer Screen.” In New MediaLagia (Moscow: Soros Cen-" ter for Contemporary Art, 1996).
“计算机屏幕的考古学。” 收录于《新媒体拉吉亚》（莫斯科：索罗斯当代艺术中心，1996 年）。
“Distance and Aura.” In_SPEED_: Technology, Media, Sociecy 1.4 (http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/ speed $/ 1.4 / 1$ ), 1996.
“距离与气场。” 载于《速度：技术、媒体与社会》1.4 (http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/speed $/ 1.4 / 1$ )，1996 年。
“Cinema and Digital Media.” In Perspektivan der Medienkanst / Perspectives of Media Art, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag Ostiilderin, 1996).
“电影与数字媒体。”收录于杰弗里·肖和汉斯·彼得·施瓦茨编辑的《媒体艺术的视角》（斯图加特：Cantz Verlag Ostiilderin，1996 年）。
“What Is Digital Cinema?” In Telepolis (www.ix.de/tp) (Munich: Verlag Heinz Heise, 1996).
“数字电影是什么？”发表于 Telepolis（www.ix.de/tp）（慕尼黑：海因茨·海泽出版社，1996 年）。
“The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: Report from Los Angeles.” In Telepolis (www.ix.de/tp) (Munich: Verlag Heinz Heise, 1996).
“虚拟世界的美学：洛杉矶报告。” 见于《电波城》（www.ix.de/tp）（慕尼黑：海因茨·海泽出版社，1996 年）。
“On Totalitarian Interactivity.” In RHIZOME (hrtp://www.rhizome.com), 1996.
“关于极权主义的互动。”发表于 RHIZOME（http://www.rhizome.com），1996 年。
“Behind the Screen / Russion New Media.” In art/text 58 (August-October 1997): $40 - 43$ .
“屏幕背后 / 俄罗斯新媒体。” 发表在《艺术与文本》第 58 期（1997 年 8 月至 10 月）： $40 - 43$ 。
“Cinema as a Cultural Interface.” In W3LAB (http://gsan.rutgers.edu/ maldoror/techne/w3lab-entry.html), 1998.
“电影作为文化接口。”发表于 W3LAB（http://gsan.rutgers.edu/maldoror/techne/w3lab-entry.html），1998 年。
“Database as a Symbolic Form.” In RHIZOME (www.thizome.com), 1998.
“数据库作为一种象征形式。”发表于 RHIZOME（www.thizome.com），1998 年。
“Nawigable Space.” (In German translation) in ONSCREEN/OFFSCREENGrenzen, Übergänge und Wandel desf flunischen Raumes, edited by Hans Beller, Martin Emele and Michael Schuster (Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1999).
“可导航空间。”（德语翻译）收录于《ONSCREEN/OFFSCREEN：流动空间的边界、过渡与变革》，由汉斯·贝勒、马丁·埃梅尔和迈克尔·舒斯特编辑（斯图加特：Cantz Verlag，1999 年）。
“'Cinema by Numbers: ASCII Films by Vuk Cosic.” In Vuk Casic: Contentorary ASCII(Ljubljana, Slowenia: Galerija Š.O.U. Kapelica, 2000). (huttp:///www. vuk.orglascii/)
“'数字电影：Vuk Cosic 的 ASCII 电影。” 见 Vuk Casic: 当代 ASCII（斯洛文尼亚卢布尔雅那：Galerija Š.O.U. Kapelica, 2000）。 (huttp:///www. vuk.orglascii/)
“New Media: A User’s Guide.” In NETCONDITHON (ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe and The MIT Press, forthcoming).
“新媒体：用户指南。” 收录于 NETCONDITHON（卡尔斯鲁厄艺术与媒体技术中心与麻省理工学院出版社，即将出版）。

The Language of New Media
新媒体的语言艺术

A Personal Chronology 个人时间线

Marcoul 1975. Although my ambition is to become a painter, I enroll in the marhematical (“matematicheskaya”) high school, which in adidition toa regulat curriculum has courses in calculus and computer programming. The
马尔库尔 1975。尽管我希望成为一名画家，但我还是选择了数学（“matematicheskaya”）高中。该校除了常规课程外，还提供微积分和计算机编程课程。

Introduction 引言

programming course lasts two years, during which we never see acompiter. Our teacher uses a blackboard to explain the concepts of computer programming. First we learn a computer language invented in the Sowiet Union in the late 1950 s. The language has a wonderful Cold War name: “Peace-1” (“MiR-1”). Later we learn a more standard high-level language: ALGOL-60. For two years, we write computer programs in our notebooks. Our teacher grades them and returns them with corrections: missed end of the loop statement, undeclared variable, forgotten semicolon. At the end of the twoyear course, we are taken-just once-to a data-processing center, which normally requires clearance to enter. I enter my program into a computer, but it does not run: Because I had never seen a computer keyboard before, I used the letter

O

whenever I need to input zero.
编程课程持续两年，在这段时间里我们从未接触过计算机。老师使用黑板来讲解计算机编程的概念。首先，我们学习了一种在 20 世纪 50 年代末期苏联发明的计算机语言，这种语言有一个很有意思的冷战名字：“和平-1”（“MiR-1”）。随后，我们学习了一种更为标准的高级语言：ALGOL-60。在这两年里，我们在笔记本上编写计算机程序，老师会对这些程序进行评分，并带着修改意见归还给我们，比如漏掉了循环语句的结束、未声明的变量和忘记的分号。在课程结束时，我们仅有一次机会参观一个数据处理中心，而这个中心通常需要特别的进入许可。我把程序输入到电脑里，但它没有运行：因为我之前从未见过电脑键盘，所以每次需要输入零时，我就用字母

O

。

Also in 1975, I start taking private lessons in classical drawing, lessons that also last two years. The Moscow Architectural Institute entrance exams include a test in which the applicants have to complete a drawing of an anxique bust in eight hours. To get the top grade, one has to produce a drawing that not only looks like the cast and has perfect perspective, but also has perfect shading. This means chat all shadows and surtfaces are defined completely through stading, so allil the lines originally used to define them disappear. Hundreds of hours spent in front of a drawing boand pay off: I get an A on the exam, even though out of eight possible casts I am assigned the most difficult one: the head of Venera. It is more difficult because, in contrast to casts of male heads such as Socrates’, it does not have well-defined facets; the surfaces join smoothly together as though constructed with a spline modeling program. Later I learn that, during the 1970s, computer scientists were working on the same problem, that is, how to produce smoothly shaded images of 3 -D objects on a computer. The standard rendering algorithm still used today was invented at the University of Utah in 1975 - the same year I started my drawing lessons.

^{1}

1975 年，我开始上私人古典绘画课程，这些课程持续了两年。莫斯科建筑学院的入学考试包括一项测试，考生需要在八小时内完成一幅古代半身像的素描。要获得最高分，必须画出不仅与模型相似，而且透视和阴影都完美的素描。这意味着所有的阴影和表面都必须通过阴影来完全定义，因此最初用来描绘它们的所有线条都会消失。经过数百小时在绘画板前的努力，我在考试中获得了 A，尽管在八个可能的模型中，我被分配到了最困难的一个：维纳的头部。这更具挑战性，因为与苏格拉底等男性头部的铸件相比，它没有明显的面；表面平滑地连接在一起，仿佛是用样条建模程序构建的。后来我了解到，在 1970 年代，计算机科学家们也在研究同样的问题，即如何在计算机上生成平滑阴影的三维物体图像。至今仍在使用的标准渲染算法是在 1975 年由犹他大学发明的——那一年我开始上绘画课。

^{1}

Netw Youk, 1985. It is early morning, and I ams sitting in front of a Tetronics terminal in midtown Manhattan. I hawe just finished my night shift at Digital Effects, one of the first companies in the world devoted to producing 3-D computer animation for film and television. (The company worked on Trom and produced computer animation for all of the major television networks.) My job is to opetate the Harris- 500 mainframe, used to compute animations, and also the PDP-11, which controls the Dicomed film recorder, used to oucput animation on 35 mm film. After a few months I am able to figure out the company’s proprietary computer-graphics soltware writtren in APL (a high level programming language), and begin work on my first images. I would like to produce a synthetic image of an antique bust, bur the task turns out to be impossible. The software is able to creare 3-D objects only out of primitive geometric forms such as cubes, cylinders, and spheres-so I am forced to settle for a composition made out of these primitive forms. Tetronics is a vector rather than raster terminal, which means that it does not updare its screen in real time. Each time I make a change in my program or simply change a point of view, I hit the enter key and wait while the computer redraws the lines, one by one. I wonder why I had to spend years learning to draw images in perspective when a computer could do it in seconds. A few of the images I create are exhibited in shows of computer art in New York. But this is the heyday of postmodernism: The art market is hot, paintings by young New York artists are selling for tens of thousands of dollars, and the art world has little interest in computer art.
纽约，1985 年。清晨，我坐在曼哈顿中城的一个 Tetronics 终端前，刚刚结束在 Digital Effects 的夜班。Digital Effects 是全球首批专注于为电影和电视制作 3D 计算机动画的公司之一。（该公司参与了《特罗姆》的制作，并为所有主要电视网络提供计算机动画服务。）我的工作是操作 Harris-500 主机，用于计算动画，同时还要使用 PDP-11 控制 Dicomed 电影录制机，将动画输出到 35 毫米胶卷上。几个月后，我掌握了公司专有的计算机图形软件，这款软件是用 APL（一种高级编程语言）编写的，并开始制作我的第一幅图像。我想制作一幅古董半身像的合成图像，但这个任务似乎是不可能的。软件只能从立方体、圆柱体和球体等基本几何形状中创建三维物体，因此我不得不满足于用这些基本形状组成的构图。Tetronics 是一个矢量终端，而不是光栅终端，这意味着它不会实时更新屏幕。每次我在程序中进行更改或简单地改变视角时，我都要按下回车键，等待计算机逐一重绘线条。我不禁想，为什么我花了多年时间学习透视绘图，而计算机却能在几秒钟内完成。我创作的一些图像在纽约的计算机艺术展览中展出。但这是后现代主义的黄金时代：艺术市场非常火热，年轻纽约艺术家的画作售价高达数万美元，而艺术界对电脑艺术几乎没有兴趣。

Linz, Austria, 1995. I am at Ars Electronica, the world’s most prestigious annual computer-art festival. This year it drops the “computer graphics”’ category, replacing it with the new “net art” category, signaling a new stage in the evolution of modern culture and media. The computer, which since the early 1960 s has been used as a production tool, has now become a universal media machine-a tool used not only for production, but also for storage and distribution. The World Wide Web crystallizes this new condition; on the level of language, this fact is recognized around 1990 when the term “digital media” comes to be used along with “computer graphics.” At the same time, along with existir; cultcural forms, computers begin to host an array of new forms: Web sites and computer games, hypermedia CD-ROMs and interactive installations-in short, “new media.” And if in 1985 I had to write a long computer program in a specialized computer language just to put a picture of a shaded cube on a computer screen, ten years later I can choose from a number of inexpensive, menu-based 3-D software tools that run on ordinary PCs and come with numerous ready-made 3-D models, including detailed human figures and heads.
林茨，奥地利，1995 年。我在阿斯电子艺术节，这是世界上最负盛名的年度计算机艺术节。今年，它取消了“计算机图形”类别，取而代之的是新的“网络艺术”类别，标志着现代文化和媒体演变的新阶段。自 20 世纪 60 年代初以来，计算机一直被视为生产工具，如今已成为一种通用的媒体机器——不仅用于生产，还用于存储和分发。万维网体现了这种新状态；在语言层面，这一事实在 1990 年左右被认可，当时“数字媒体”一词开始与“计算机图形”一同使用。“与此同时，随着文化形式的存在，计算机开始承载一系列新的形式：网站、计算机游戏、超媒体 CD-ROM 和互动装置——简而言之，就是‘新媒体’。如果在 1985 年我需要用一种专业的计算机语言编写一个长程序，仅仅是为了在计算机屏幕上显示一个阴影立方体的图片，那么十年后我可以选择许多便宜的、基于菜单的 3D 软件工具，这些工具可以在普通 PC 上运行，并且配有许多现成的 3D 模型，包括详细的人物和头部模型。”

What else can be said about 1995? The Sowiet Union, where I was born, no longer exists. With its demise, the tensions that for decades animated creative imaginations both in the East and the West-between freedom and confinement, interactivity and predetermination, consumerism in the West and “spirituality” in the East-disappear. What takes their place? A triumph of consumerism, commercial culture (based on stereotypes and limited clichés), megacorporations that lay claim to such basic caregories as space, time, and the future (“Where Do You Want to Go Today?” ads by Micrasoft; “Internet Time” by Swatch, which breaks twenty-frur hours into 1,000 Swatch “beats”; “You will” adss by AT&T), anhd “globalization” (a term at least as ellusive as “spirituality”).
1995 年还有什么可以说的呢？我出生的苏联已经不复存在。随着它的消亡，几十年来在东西方之间激发创造想象的紧张关系——自由与束缚、互动与预定、西方的消费主义与东方的“精神性”——也随之消失。那么，取而代之的是什么呢？消费主义的胜利，基于刻板印象和有限陈词的商业文化，跨国公司声称拥有空间、时间和未来等基本范畴（例如微软的“你今天想去哪里？”广告；Swatch 的“互联网时间”，将二十四小时划分为 1000 个 Swatch“节拍”；AT&T 的“你将会”广告），以及“全球化”（这个词至少和“精神性”一样难以捉摸）。

When I visit St. Petersburg in 1995 to participate in a small computer art festival called “In Search of a Third Reality,” I see a curious performance, which may be a good parable of globalization. Like the rest of the festival, the performance takes place in the planerarium. Its Director, forced like everyone else to make his own living in che new Russian economic order (or lack thereof), had rented the planetarium to conference organizers. Under the black hemispherical ceiling with mandatory models of planets and stars, a young artist methodically paints an abstract painting. Probably trained in the same classical style as I had been, he is no Pollock; cauriously and systematically, he makes careful brushstrokes on the canvas in front of him. On his hand he wears a Nintendo Dataglove, which in 1995 is a common media object in the West but a rare sight in St. Perersburg. The Dataglove transmits the movements of his hand to a small electronic synuthesizer, assembled in the laboratory of some Moscow institute. The music from the synthesizer serves as an accompaniment to two dancers, a male and a female. Dressed in Isadora Duncan-like clothing, they imptovise a “modern dance” in front of an older and, apparently, completely puzzled audience. Classical art, abstraction, and a Nintendo Dataglowe; electronic music and early twentieth-century modernism; discussions of virtual reality (VR) in the planetarium of a classical city that, like Venice, is obsessed with its past-what for me, coming from the West, are incompatible historical and conceptual layers are composited together, with the Nintendo Dataglowe being just one layer in the mix.
1995 年，我在圣彼得堡参加一个名为“寻找第三现实”的小型计算机艺术节时，看到了一场奇特的表演，这或许是全球化的一个很好的寓言。和节日的其他活动一样，这场表演在天文馆进行。导演和其他人一样，被迫在新的俄罗斯经济秩序（或缺乏秩序）中谋生，他将天文馆租给了会议组织者。在黑色半球形的天花板下，悬挂着强制性的行星和星星模型，一位年轻的艺术家有条不紊地在创作一幅抽象画。或许他接受过与我相同的古典风格训练，但他并不是波洛克；他好奇而有条理地在面前的画布上小心翼翼地挥动画笔。他手上戴着一只任天堂数据手套，这在 1995 年在西方是常见的媒体物品，但在圣彼得堡却很少见。数据手套将他的手部动作传输到一个小型电子合成器，该合成器是在某个莫斯科研究所的实验室组装的。合成器发出的音乐为两位舞者提供伴奏，一男一女。他们穿着类似伊莎多拉·邓肯的服装，在一群年长且显得完全困惑的观众面前即兴表演“现代舞”。古典艺术、抽象艺术与任天堂 Dataglowe；电子音乐与二十世纪初的现代主义；在一个像威尼斯一样沉迷于过去的古典城市的天文馆中讨论虚拟现实（VR）——对我这个来自西方的人来说，这些不兼容的历史和概念层次交织在一起，而任天堂 Dataglowe 只是其中的一部分。

What also arrives by 1995 is the Internet-the most material and visible sign of globalization. And by the end of the decade it will also become clear that the gradual computerization of culture will eventually transform all of it. So, invoking the old Marxist model of base and superstructure, we can say that if the economic base of modern society from the 1950s onward stants to shift toward a service and information economy, becoming by the 1970 a a so-called post-industrial saciety (Daniel Bell), and them later a “network society” (Mamual Castells), by the 1990 s the superstructure starts to feel the full impact of this change.

^{2}

If the postmodernism of the 1980 s is the first sign of this shift still to come-still weak, still possible to ignore-the 1990 s’

^{'}

rapid transformation of culture into e-culture, of computers into universal culture carriers, of media into new media, demands that we rethink our categories and models.
到 1995 年，互联网的到来成为全球化最显著的标志。到十年末，文化的逐步计算化将彻底改变这一切。因此，借用马克思主义的基础与上层建筑理论，我们可以说，现代社会的经济基础自 1950 年代起逐渐向服务和信息经济转型，到 1970 年代成为所谓的后工业社会（丹尼尔·贝尔），随后又演变为“网络社会”（曼纽尔·卡斯特尔斯），而到了 1990 年代，上层建筑开始深刻感受到这一变化的影响。如果说 1980 年代的后现代主义是即将到来的转变的第一个迹象——虽然仍然微弱，仍然可以忽视——那么 1990 年代文化向电子文化的快速转变、计算机成为普遍文化载体、媒体转变为新媒体，迫使我们重新思考我们的分类和模型。

The year is 2005 …
这一年是 2005 年…

Theory of the Present
现今理论

I wish that someone in 1895,1897 , or at least 1903 , had realized the fundamental significance of the emergence of the new medium of cineme and produced a comprehensive record: interviews with audiences; a systematic account of narrative strategies, scenography, and camera positions as they developed year by year, an analysis of the connections berween the emerging language of cinema and different forms of popular entertainment that coexisted with it. Unfortunately, such records do not exist. Instead we are left with newspaper reports, diaries of cinema’s inventors, programs of film showings, and other bits and pieces-a a set of random and unevenlly distributed historical samples.
我希望在 1895 年、1897 年，或者至少在 1903 年，有人能够意识到电影这一新媒介出现的根本意义，并制作一份全面的记录：包括与观众的访谈；对叙事策略、场景设计和摄影机位置逐年发展的系统性描述；以及对新兴电影语言与同时期不同形式流行娱乐之间联系的分析。不幸的是，这样的记录并不存在。我们只能依赖报纸报道、电影发明者的日记、电影放映的节目单以及其他零散资料——这些都是随机且分布不均的历史样本。
Today we are witnessing the emergence of a new medium-the metamedium of the digital computer. In contrast to a hundred years ago, when cinema was coming into being, we are fully aware of the significance of this new media mevolution. Yet I am afraid that furure theorists and historians of computer media will be left with nor much more than the equivalents of the newspaper reports and film programs from cinema’s first decades. They will find that analytical texts from our era recognize the significance of the com-
今天，我们见证了一个新媒介的诞生——数字计算机的元媒介。与一百年前电影刚刚兴起时相比，我们完全意识到这种新媒体演变的重要性。然而，我担心未来的计算机媒体理论家和历史学家可能只会得到与电影早期几十年的报纸报道和电影节目相当的资料。他们会发现，我们这个时代的分析文本承认计算机媒体的重要性。
2. Daniel Bell, The Cossing of Post-inductriat Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Manuel Castells, The Risu of the Network Soriety (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). puter’s takeover of culture yet, by and large, contain speculations about the future rather than a necord and theory of the present. Future researchers will wonder why the theoreticians, who lead plenty of experience analyzing older cultural forms, did nor try to describe computer media’s semiotic codes, modes of address, and audience receprion patterns. Hawirg painstakingly reconstructed how cimema emerged out of preceding cultural forms (panorama, optical toys, peep shows), one might ask why they didn’t attempt to construct a simillar genelogy for the language of computer media at che moment when it was just coming into being, that is, when the elements of previous cultural forms shaping it were still clearly wisible and recognizable, before melting into a coherent language? Where were the theoreticians at the moment when the icons and burtons of multimedia interfaces were like wet paint on a just-completed painting, before they became universal conventions and thus slipped into invisibility? Where were they at the moment when the designers of Myst were debugging their code, converting. graphics to 8-bit, and massaging QuickTime clips? Or at the historical moment when a twenty-something programmer at Netscape took the chewing gum out of his mouth, sipped warm Coke out of the can - he had been at a computer for sixteen hours straight, trying to meet a matketing deadline-and, fonally satisfied with its small fle size, saved a shott animation of stars moving across the night sky? This animation would appear in the upper cight corner of Netscape Navigator, and become the most widely seen mowing image sequence ever-until the next release of the software.
2. 丹尼尔·贝尔，《后工业社会的到来》（纽约：基础书籍，1973 年），曼努埃尔·卡斯特尔斯，《网络社会的崛起》（剑桥，马萨诸塞州：布莱克威尔出版社，1996 年）。计算机对文化的接管总体上更多是对未来的推测，而不是对当下的记录和理论。未来的研究者会好奇，为什么那些在分析旧文化形式方面经验丰富的理论家，没有尝试去描述计算机媒体的符号代码、表达方式和观众接受模式。霍维尔费力地重建了电影是如何从先前的文化形式（如全景、光学玩具和窥视秀）中诞生的。人们可能会问，为什么在计算机媒体语言刚刚形成的那一刻，他们没有尝试构建一个类似的谱系？那时，塑造这一语言的先前文化形式的元素仍然清晰可见和可识别，为什么没有在它们融入一个连贯的语言之前进行探讨？当多媒体界面的图标和按钮像刚完成的画作上的湿漆一样时，他们又在哪里？在这些元素成为普遍约定并因此消失之前？当《神秘岛》的设计师们在调试代码、将图形转换为 8 位并处理 QuickTime 剪辑时，他们又在哪里？或者在一个历史时刻，当一位二十多岁的程序员在网景公司把口香糖吐出，喝了一口温热的可乐——他已经连续在电脑前工作了十六个小时，试图赶上一个市场营销的截止日期——最终对这个小文件的大小感到满意，保存了一段短动画，展示星星在夜空中移动？这个动画将出现在网景导航器的右上角，并成为有史以来观看次数最多的动态图像序列——直到下一个软件版本发布。

What follows is an actempt at both a recond and a theory of the present. Just as film historians craced the development of film language during cinema’s first decades, I aim to describe and understand the logic driving the development of the language of new media. (I am not claiming that there is a single language of new media. I use “language” as an umbrella term to refer to a number of vanious connentions used by designers of new media objects to organize data and structure the user’s experience) It is tempting to extend this parallel a litcle further and specalate whether this new language is already drawing closer to acquiring its final and stable form, just as fim language acquired its “classical” form during the 1910 s. Or it may be that the 1990 s are more like the 1890 s , in the sense that the computer-media language of the furure will be entirely different from the one used today.
接下来是对当下进行记录和理论探讨的尝试。正如电影历史学家在电影的早期几十年中追踪电影语言的发展，我的目标是描述和理解推动新媒体语言发展的逻辑。（我并不是说新媒体只有一种语言。我使用“语言”这个总括性术语，指代新媒体设计者用来组织数据和构建用户体验的多种连接方式。）将这个类比进一步延伸，推测这种新语言是否已经越来越接近于获得其最终和稳定的形式，就像电影语言在 1910 年代获得了“经典”形式一样，这确实令人感到兴奋。或者说，1990 年代可能更像 1890 年代，因为未来的计算机媒体语言将与我们今天使用的完全不同。

Does it make sense to theorize the present when it seems to be changing so fast? It is a hedged bet. If subseguent developments prowe my theorecical projections correct, II win. But even if the language of computer media
当下变化如此迅速，理论化现在是否有意义？这是一种谨慎的赌注。如果后续的发展证明我的理论预测是正确的，我就赢了。但即使计算机媒体的语言也在变化。
develops in a different direction than the one suggested by the present analysis, this book will become a record of possibilities heretofore unrealized, of a horizon visible to us today but later unimaginable.
如果这本书的发展方向与当前分析所建议的不同，它将成为一个以前未实现的可能性的记录，展现一个今天对我们可见但未来难以想象的地平线。
We no longer think of the history of cinema as a linear march toward a single possible language, or as a progression toward perfect verisimilitude. On the contrary, we have come to see its history as a succession of distinct and equally expressive languages, each with its own aestheric variables, and each clasing off some of the possibilities of its predecessor (a cultural logic not dissimilar to 'Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific paradigms.) Similarly, every stage in the history of computer media offers its own aestheric opportunities, as well as its own wision of the future: in short, its own “research paradigm.” In this book I want to record the “research paradigm” of new media during its first decade, before it slips into invisibility.
我们不再将电影史视为朝着单一语言的线性进程或完美逼真度的逐步发展。相反，我们开始将其视为一系列独特且同样富有表现力的语言，每种语言都有其独特的美学变量，并且每种语言都排除了前一种语言的一些可能性（这种文化逻辑与托马斯·库恩对科学范式的分析有相似之处）。同样，计算机媒体历史的每个阶段都提供了独特的美学机会，以及对未来的独特视角：简而言之，它的“研究范式”。在这本书中，我想记录新媒体在其第一个十年中的“研究范式”，以免它消失在无形之中。

Mapping New Media: The Method
新媒体的映射：方法论

I analyze the language of new media by placing it within the history of modern visual and media cultures. What are the ways in which new media relies on older cultural forms and languages, and what are the ways in which it breaks with them? What is unique about how new media objects create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space and time? How do conventions and techriques of old media-such as the rectangular frame, mobile wiewpoint, and montage-operate in new media? If we construct an archeology connecting new computer-based techniques of media creation with previous techniques of representation and simulation, where should we locate the essentiall historical breaks?
我通过将新媒体的语言放置在现代视觉和媒体文化的历史背景中进行分析。新媒体在多大程度上依赖于旧的文化形式和语言？又在什么方面与之相悖？新媒体对象在创造现实的幻觉、与观众互动以及表现空间和时间方面有什么独特之处？旧媒体的惯例和技术，比如矩形框架、移动视点和蒙太奇，在新媒体中是如何运作的？如果我们构建一条将新计算机技术的媒体创作与以往的表现和模拟技术相连接的考古学，我们应该在哪里找到那些重要的历史断裂点？

To answer these questions, I lookat all areas of new media: Web sites, virtual worlds,

^{4}

wirtual reality (VR), mulcimedia, computer games, interactive instal-
为了回答这些问题，我会关注新媒体的各个领域：网站、虚拟世界、

^{4}

虚拟现实（VR）、多媒体、电脑游戏和互动装置
3. Thomas S. Kuliu, The Structure of Scientific Revalutions; 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
3. 托马斯·S·库利乌，《科学革命的结构》（第二版）。芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，1970 年。
4. By viraual worlds I mean 3-D computer-generated interartiwe ensiranments. This definition firs a whole eange of 3-D compuner environments alseady in existrence-high-end VR works that feature head-mounred displays and photo realiastic graphics, wircade, CD-ROM and on-line multi-player computer games

_{n}

QuickTime VR movies. WRML CVirtual Reality Modeliag Language) scenes, and graphical chat envitonments such as The Palace and Active Worids…
通过虚拟世界，我指的是 3D 计算机生成的互动环境。这个定义涵盖了一系列已经存在的 3D 计算机环境——高端虚拟现实作品，配备头戴显示器和逼真的图形效果，包括街机游戏、CD-ROM 和在线多人游戏

_{n}

QuickTime VR 电影，WRML（虚拟现实建模语言）场景，以及图形聊天环境，如 The Palace 和 Active Worlds……

Vitutal worlds repmesent an important trend actoss computer culture, consistently promising to beoome a new standard in human-compurer interfaces and computer networks. (For :i lations, computer animation, digital wideo, cinema, and human-computer interfaces. Although the book’s main emphasis is on theoretical and historical arguments, I allso analyze many key new-media objects, from American commercial classics such as Myst and Doon, Jwassic Pays and Titanic, to the wrork of international new media artists and collectiwes such as

ART + {COM}_{,}

antirom, jodi.org, George Legrady, Olga Lialina, Jeffrey Shaw, and Tamas Waliczky.
虚拟世界代表了计算机文化中的一个重要趋势，始终承诺成为人机界面和计算机网络的新标准。虽然这本书主要侧重于理论和历史论证，但我也分析了许多关键的新媒体作品，从美国商业经典如《神秘岛》和《沙丘》，《侏罗纪公园》和《泰坦尼克号》，到国际新媒体艺术家和团体的作品，如

ART + {COM}_{,}

antirom、jodi.org、George Legrady、Olga Lialina、Jeffrey Shaw 和 Tamas Waliczky。

The computerization of culture not only leads to the emergence of new cultural forms such as computer games and virtual worlds; it redefines existing ones such as photography and cinema. I therefore also investigate the effects of the computer revalution on visual culture at large. How does the shift to computer-based media redefine the nature of static and moving images? What is the effect of computerization on the visual languages used by our culture? What new aesthetic possibilities become awailable to us?
文化的计算机化不仅催生了新的文化形式，如电脑游戏和虚拟世界；它还重新定义了现有的形式，如摄影和电影。因此，我也研究计算机革命对视觉文化的整体影响。转向计算机媒体如何重新定义静态和动态图像的本质？计算机化对我们文化中使用的视觉语言有什么影响？我们又能获得哪些新的美学可能性？

In answering these questions, Idraw upon the histories of arr, photography, video, telecommunication, design, and, last but not least, the key cultural form of the twentieth century-cinema. The theory and history of cinema serve as the key conceptuallens though which I look at new media. The book explores the following topics:
在回答这些问题时，我参考了艺术、摄影、视频、通信和设计的历史，以及二十世纪最重要的文化形式——电影。电影的理论和历史是我观察新媒体的关键视角。本书将探讨以下主题：

the parallels between cinema history and the history of new media;
电影历史与新媒体历史之间的相似之处；
the identity of digital cinema;
数字电影的本质;

the relations between the language of multimedia and nineteenth century pro-cinematic cultural forms;
多媒体语言与十九世纪亲电影文化形式之间的关系
the functions of screen, mobile camera, and montage in new media as compared to cinema;
新媒体中屏幕、手机摄像头和剪辑的功能与电影的比较；
the historical ties between new media and avant-garde fillm.
新媒体与先锋电影之间的历史渊源。
discumsion of why this promise may mewer be fulfilled, see the “Navigable Space” section.) For example, Syllicon Graphics developed a 3-D file system that was showcased in the movie Jerassii Parts Sony used a picrune of a room as an ingeffece in its MagicLink personal communicator. Apple’s short-lived E-Wonld greened its users with a drawing of a ciry. Web designers offer use pictures of buildings, acrial wiews of cities, and maps as interface metaphors. In che words of the scientists from Sony’s The Wirtual Sociery Project (wwwricsl.sony.co.jp/project/VS), “It is our belief that fucure online systems will be characterized by a luigh degree of interaction, support for multi-media and most importantly the ability to support shared 3-D spaces. In our vision, wers. will not simply access textual based chat forums, bur will enter into 3-D worlds where they will be able to jnteract with the world and with other users in that world.”
讨论为什么这个承诺可能永远无法实现，请参见“可导航空间”部分。例如，Silicon Graphics 开发了一个 3D 文件系统，该系统在电影《侏罗纪公园》中展示。索尼在其 MagicLink 个人通讯器中使用了一个房间的图片作为界面。苹果短暂存在的 E-Wonld 用一幅城市的画作来吸引用户。网页设计师使用建筑物的图片、城市的鸟瞰图和地图作为界面隐喻。索尼的《虚拟社会项目》（wwwricsl.sony.co.jp/project/VS）中的科学家们表示：“我们相信，未来的在线系统将具有高度的互动性，支持多媒体，最重要的是能够支持共享的 3D 空间。在我们的愿景中，用户将会...” 不仅会访问基于文本的聊天论坛，还会进入 3D 世界，在那里他们可以与环境和其他用户进行互动。”

Along with film theory, this book draws theoretical coolls from borth the humanities (art history, literary theory, media studies, social theory) and computer science. Its overall merhod could be called “digital materialism.” Rather than imposing some a priori theory from abowe, I build a cheory of new media from the ground up. I scrutinize the principles of computer hardware and soft ware and the coperations involved in creating cultural objects on a computer to uncover a new cultural logic at work.
除了电影理论，这本书还从人文学科（如艺术史、文学理论、媒体研究和社会理论）以及计算机科学中汲取理论资源。其整体方法可以称为“数字唯物主义”。我并不是从上面强加某种先验理论，而是从基础开始构建新媒体的理论。我仔细审视计算机硬件和软件的原理，以及在计算机上创建文化对象所涉及的合作，以揭示一种新的文化逻辑正在发挥作用。

Most writings on new media are full of speculation about the furure. This book, in contrast, analyses new media as it thas actually developed until the present moment, while pointing to directions for new media artists and designers that have yer to be explored. It is my hope that the theory of new media developed here can act not only as an aid to understanding the present, but also as a grid for practical experimencarion. For example, the “Theory of Cultural Interfaces” section analyzes how the interfaces of new media objects are being shaped by three cultural traditions: print, cinema, and humancomputer interface. By describing elements in these traditions that are already being used in new media, I poinc toward other elements and their combinationss still awaiting experimentation. The “Compositing” section prowides anorther set of directions for experiments by outlining a number of new types of montage. Yer another direction is discussed in “Database,” where I suggest that new media nartatives can explore the new composirianial amd aesthetic possibilities offered by a computer database.
关于新媒体的大多数著作充满了对未来的猜测。相比之下，这本书分析了新媒体如何实际发展到现在，并指出了尚待探索的新媒体艺术家和设计师的方向。我希望这里提出的新媒体理论不仅能帮助我们理解当下，还能作为实践实验的框架。例如，“文化接口理论”部分分析了新媒体对象的接口是如何受到三种文化传统的影响：印刷、电影和人机接口。通过描述这些传统中已经在新媒体中使用的元素，我指向其他仍在等待实验的元素及其组合。 “合成”部分提供了一系列实验方向，概述了多种新的蒙太奇类型。另一个方向在“数据库”中讨论，我建议新的媒体叙事可以探索计算机数据库所带来的新组合和美学可能性。

Alrthough this book does not specullare about the future, it does contain an implicit theory of how new media will dewelop. The advantage of placing new media within a larger historical perspective is chat we begin to see the long trajectories that lead to new mediat in irs present state, and we can extrapolate these trajectories into the future. The section “Principles of New Media” describes four key trends that, in my wiew, are shaping the development of new media over cime: modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.
尽管这本书并没有对未来进行推测，但它确实蕴含了一种关于新媒体发展方式的隐含理论。将新媒体放在更广阔的历史视角中，我们能够看到通向新媒体当前状态的长远轨迹，并可以将这些轨迹推测到未来。“新媒体原则”一节描述了四个关键趋势，我认为这些趋势正在塑造新媒体的发展：模块化、自动化、可变性和转码。

Of course we don’t have to accept these trends blindly. Understanding the logic that is shaping che evolution of new media language alliows us to dewelop different alternatives. Just as avant-garde filmmakers have offered alternatives to cinema’s particular narrative audio-visual regime throughour the medium’s history, the task of avant-garde new media artists today is to offer alternarives to the existing language of computer media. This can be better accomplished if we have a theory of how “mainstrearn” language is now scructured and how it might evolve over rime.
当然，我们不必盲目接受这些趋势。理解塑造新媒体语言演变的逻辑，可以帮助我们发展出不同的替代方案。就像先锋电影制片人在电影历史上为特定的叙事视听体制提供了替代方案一样，今天先锋新媒体艺术家的任务是为现有的计算机媒体语言提供替代方案。如果我们能够理解“主流”语言的结构以及它可能如何随时间演变，那么这一目标将更容易实现。

Mapping New Media: Organization
新媒体的映射与组织

This book aims to contribute to the emerging field of new media studies (sometimes called “digital studies”) by providing one potential map of what the field can be. Just as a literary theory textbook might fearure chaprers on narrative and woice, and a textbook of film studies might discuss cinematography and editing, this book calls for the definition and refinement of the new categories specific to new media theory.
这本书旨在为新媒体研究（有时称为“数字研究”）这一新兴领域做出贡献，提供一个可能的领域框架。就像一本文学理论教科书可能会包含关于叙事和声音的章节，而一本电影研究教科书可能会讨论摄影和剪辑，这本书呼吁对新媒体理论中特有的新类别进行定义和细化。
I have divided the book into a number of chapters, each of which covers one key concept or problem. Concepts developed in earlier chapters become building blocks for analyses in later chapters. In determining the sequence of the chapters, I considered textbooks on various established fields relevant to new media, such as film studies, literary theory, and art history; much as a textbook on film may begin with film technology abd end up with film genres, this book progresses from the material foundations of new media to its forms.
我将这本书分为若干章节，每个章节都探讨一个关键概念或问题。早期章节中提出的概念为后续章节的分析奠定了基础。在确定章节顺序时，我参考了与新媒体相关的多个成熟领域的教科书，如电影研究、文学理论和艺术史；就像一本关于电影的教科书可能从电影技术开始，最终讨论电影类型一样，这本书从新媒体的物质基础出发，逐步深入其形式。
One could also draw an analogy berween the “bottom-up” approach I use here and the organization of computer software. A computer program written by a programmer undergoes a series of translations: high-level computer language is compiled into executable code, which is then converted by an assembler into binary code. Ifollow this order in reverse, advancing from the level of binary code to the level of a computer program, and then move on to consider the logic of new media objects diriven by these programs:
我们可以将我在这里使用的“自下而上”方法与计算机软件的组织进行类比。程序员编写的计算机程序经历了一系列翻译：高级计算机语言被编译成可执行代码，然后由汇编器转换为二进制代码。我按照相反的顺序进行，从二进制代码的层次推进到计算机程序的层次，然后再考虑这些程序驱动的新媒体对象的逻辑。

“What Is New Media?”-the digital medium itself, its material and logical organization.
“什么是新媒体？”-数字媒介及其材料和逻辑结构。
“The Interface”-the human-computer interface; the operating system (OS).
“接口”-人机交互界面；操作系统（OS）。
“The Operations”-software applications that ruin on top of the OS, their interfaces, and typical operations.
“操作” - 在操作系统上运行的软件应用程序，包括它们的界面和常见操作。
“The Illusions”-appearance, and the new logic of digital images created using software applications.
“幻觉”-外观，以及通过软件应用程序生成的数字图像的新逻辑。
“The Forms”-commonly used conventions for organizing a new media object as a whole.
“形式” - 常用的组织新媒体对象整体的方式。

The last chapter “What Is Cinema?” mirrors the book’s beginning. Chapter 1 points out that many of the allegedly unique principles of new media can already be found in cinema. Subsequent chapters continue to employ film history and theory as means of analyzing new media. Having discussed
最后一章“什么是电影？”与书的开头相呼应。第一章指出，许多所谓的新媒体独特原则实际上早已存在于电影中。后续章节继续利用电影历史和理论来分析新媒体。
different levels of new media-interface, operations, illusion, and forms-I then reverse my conceptual lens to look at how computerization changes cinema. Ianalyze the identity of digital cinema by placing it within the history of the mowing image and discuss howy computerization offers new opportunities for deweloping the language of film.
不同层次的新媒体界面、操作、幻觉和形式——接着我反思我的概念视角，探讨计算机化如何改变电影。我通过将数字电影置于运动影像的历史中来分析其身份，并讨论计算机化如何为电影语言的发展提供新的机遇。

At the same time, the last chapter continues the “bottom-up”’ trajectory of the book as a whole. If chapter 5 looks at the organization of new cultcural objects, such as Web sites, hypermedia CD-ROMs, and virtual worlds, all “children” of the computer, chapter 6 considers the effects of computerization on an older cultural form that exists, so to speak, “ourside” computer culture proper-cinema.
与此同时，最后一章延续了整本书的“自下而上”的发展轨迹。如果第五章关注新文化对象的组织，例如网站、超媒体 CD-ROM 和虚拟世界，这些都是计算机的“后代”，那么第六章则探讨计算机化对一种较老的文化形式的影响，可以说，这种文化形式存在于“计算机文化”之外——电影。

Each chapter begins with a short introduction that discusses a concept and summarizes the arguments developed in individual sections. For example, chapter 2, “The Interface,” begins with a general discussion of the importance of the concept of the interface in new media. The two sections of chapter 2 then look at different aspects of new media interfaces: their reliance on the conventions of other media and the relationship between the body of the user and the interface.
每一章都以简短的介绍开始，讨论一个概念并总结各部分提出的论点。例如，第二章“界面”首先讨论了界面在新媒体中的重要性。接下来的两个部分则探讨了新媒体界面的不同方面：它们对其他媒体惯例的依赖，以及用户身体与界面之间的关系。

The Terms: Language, Object, Representation
条款：语言、对象与表现形式

In putting the word language into the title of the book, I do not want to suggest that we need to return to the structuralist plase of semiotics in understanding new media. However, given that most studies of new media and cyberculture focus on their sociological, economic, and political dimemsions, it was impartant for me to use the word language to signal the different focus of this work: the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns, and key forms of new medlia. I considered using the words aesthetics and poetics instead of lawguage, eventually deciding against them. Aertheticy implies a set of oppositions that I would like to avoid-between art and mass culture, the beautiful and the ugly, the waluable and the unimportant. Poetics also bears undesirable connotations. Continuing the project of the Russian formalists of the 1910s, theoreticians in the 1960 s defined poetic as the study of the specific properties of particular arts, such as narrative literature. In his Intraduction to Poetics (1968), literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, writes:
在书名中使用“语言”这个词，我并不想暗示我们需要回到结构主义的符号学来理解新媒体。然而，考虑到大多数关于新媒体和网络文化的研究主要集中在其社会、经济和政治维度上，我认为使用“语言”这个词是重要的，以表明这项工作的不同重点：新媒体中出现的惯例、反复出现的设计模式和关键形式。我曾考虑用“美学”和“诗学”来替代“语言”，但最终决定不这样做。“美学”暗示了一组我想要避免的对立——艺术与大众文化、美与丑、重要与不重要，而“诗学”也带有一些不良的含义。继承 1910 年代俄罗斯形式主义者的研究，1960 年代的理论家将诗学定义为对特定艺术形式（如叙事文学）独特特性的研究。在他的《诗学导论》（1968）中，文学学者茨维坦·托多罗夫写道：

In concradiscinction to the interpretation of partsicular works, it [poetics] does seek co name meaning, but aims at a knowsledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such sciences as psychology, saciol ogy, etc., it seeks these laws within literature itself. Poekics is therefore an approach to literature at once “abstract’ and 'incernal.”
与对特定作品的解读不同，诗学确实试图命名意义，但其目标是了解主导每个作品诞生的一般规律。与心理学、社会学等科学相比，它在文学内部寻找这些规律。因此，诗学是一种既“抽象”又“内在”的文学研究方法。

In contrast to such an “internal” approach, I neither claim that the conventions, elements, and forms of new media are unique, nor do I consider it useful to look at them in isolation. On the contrary, this book aims to situate new media in relation to a number of ocher areas of culcure, both past and present:
与这种“内部”方法相反，我既不认为新媒体的惯例、元素和形式是独特的，也不觉得将它们孤立地看待有任何意义。相反，这本书旨在将新媒体与许多其他文化领域（无论是过去还是现在）相联系：

other ants and media traditions: their visual languages and their strategies for organizing information and structuring the viewer’s experience;
其他蚂蚁及媒体传统：它们的视觉语言以及组织信息和构建观众体验的策略
computer technology: the material properties of the computer, the ways in which it is used in modern society; the structure of its interface, and key software applications;
计算机技术：计算机的物理特性及其在现代社会中的应用方式；界面的结构和主要软件应用；
contemporary visual culturee the internal organization, iconography, iconology, and viewer experience of various visual sites in our culture-fashion and advertising, supermarkets and fine art objects, television programs and publicity banners, offices and techno-chubs;
当代视觉文化的内部组织、图标学、图像学，以及我们文化中各种视觉场所的观众体验——包括时尚与广告、超市与艺术品、电视节目与宣传横幅、办公室与科技中心；
contemporary information cultures
现代信息文化

The concept “information culture,” which is my term, can be thoughe of as a parallel to another, already familiar concept-visual culture. It includes the ways in which information is presented in different cultural sites and objects-road signs; displays in airports and train stations; television on-screen menus; graphic layouts of television news; the layouts of books, newspapers, and magazines; the interior desigas of banks, hotels, and other commercial and leisure spaces; the interfaces of planes and cars; and, last but not least, the interfaces of computer operating syscems (Wrindows, Mac OS, UNIX) and software applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Eudora, Navigator, Real Player, Filemaker, Photoshop, etc.). Extending the parallels with visual culture, information culture also includes historical merhods for
“信息文化”是我提出的一个概念，可以看作是与“视觉文化”这一熟悉概念的平行。它涵盖了信息在不同文化场所和物体中的呈现方式，包括路标、机场和火车站的展示、电视屏幕菜单、电视新闻的图形布局、书籍、报纸和杂志的排版、银行、酒店及其他商业和休闲空间的室内设计、飞机和汽车的界面，以及计算机操作系统（如 Windows、Mac OS、UNIX）和软件应用程序（如 Word、Excel、PowerPoint、Eudora、Navigator、Real Player、Filemaker、Photoshop 等）的界面。在扩展与视觉文化的相似性时，信息文化同样包含历史方法
5. Tzevan Todorov, Introdurtion to Poetics, crans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1981), 6.
5. Tzevan Todorov，《诗学导论》，翻译：理查德·霍华德（明尼阿波利斯：明尼苏达大学出版社，1981 年），第 6 页。
organizing and retrieving information (anialogs of iconography) as well as patcerns of user interaction with information objects and displays.
组织和检索信息（图标学的类比）以及用户与信息对象和展示之间的交互模式。
Another word deserving comment is object. Throughout the book, I use the term mew weedta object, racher than product, artuork, iutervactive wnedla or other possible terms. A new media object may be a digital still, digically composited film, virtual 3-D environment, compurer game, self-contrained hypermedia DVD, hypermedia Web site, or the Web as a whole. The term thus firs with my aim of describing the general principles of new media that hold true across all media types, all forms of organization, and alll scales. I also use object to emphasize that my concern is with the culture at large rather than with new media art alone. Moreover, object is a standard term in the computer scienice and computer industry, where it is used to emphasize the modular nature of object-oriented programming languages such as

C_{+} +

and Java, object-oriented databases, and the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology used in Microsoft Office products. Thus it also serves my purpose to adopt the terms and paradigms of computer science for a theory of cont puterized culture.
另一个值得讨论的词是“对象”。在整本书中，我使用“新媒体对象”这个术语，而不是“产品”、“艺术作品”、“互动媒体”或其他可能的术语。新媒体对象可以是数字静态图像、数字合成电影、虚拟 3D 环境、电脑游戏、自包含的超媒体 DVD、超媒体网站或整个互联网。因此，这个术语与我描述新媒体普遍原则的目标相符，这些原则在所有媒体类型、所有组织形式和所有规模中都适用。我还使用“对象”这个词来强调我关注的是整个文化，而不仅仅是新媒体艺术。此外，“对象”是计算机科学和行业中的一个标准术语，用于强调面向对象编程语言（如

C_{+} +

和 Java）、面向对象数据库，以及在 Microsoft Office 产品中使用的对象链接与嵌入（OLE）技术的模块化特性。因此，我采用计算机科学的术语和范式来构建计算机化文化理论也正是我的目的。

In addition, I hope to activate connotations that accompanied the use of the word abject by the Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s. Russian Constructivists and Productivists commonly referred to cheir creations as objects (vesh, construtetsia, predwet) rather than works of art. Like cheir Bauhaus counterparts, they wanted to take on the roles of industrial designers, graphic designers, architects, and clothing designers, rarher than remain fine arrists producing oneof-a-kind works for museums or private collections. Object pointed toward the faccory and industrial mass production wather than the traditiomal arcistr’s strtdio, and it implied the ideals of rational organization of labor and engineering efficiency that artists wanted to bring into their own work.
此外，我希望激活 1920 年代俄罗斯先锋艺术家使用“卑贱”一词时所伴随的内涵。俄罗斯构成主义者和生产主义者通常将他们的创作称为“物体”（vesh，construtetsia，predwet），而非艺术作品。与他们的包豪斯同行一样，他们希望担任工业设计师、平面设计师、建筑师和服装设计师，而不是作为为博物馆或私人收藏创作独一无二作品的美术家。物体指向工厂和工业大规模生产，而非传统艺术家的工作室，这暗示了艺术家希望在自己作品中融入的劳动合理组织和工程效率的理想。

In the case of new media objects, all these connocations are worth invoking. In the world of new media, che boundary berween art and design is fuzzy ar best. On the one hand, many artists make a living as commercial designers; on the other hand, professional designers are cypically the ones who really push forward the language of new media by being engaged in systematic experimentation and also by creating new standards and conwentions. The second connotation, that of industrial production, also holds true for new media. Many new media projects are put togecher by large teams (although, in contrast to the studio syscem of the classical Hollywood era, single producers or small reams are also common). Many new media objects, such as popular games or software applications, sell millions of copies. Yet anocher fearure of the new media field that unites it with big industry is the strict adherence to various hardware and software scandards.

^{6}

在新媒体对象的情况下，所有这些联想都值得提及。在新媒体的世界中，艺术与设计之间的界限模糊不清。一方面，许多艺术家以商业设计师的身份谋生；另一方面，专业设计师通常是那些通过参与系统实验和创造新标准与惯例，真正推动新媒体语言发展的人员。第二个联想，即工业生产的概念，对新媒体同样适用。许多新媒体项目是由大型团队共同完成的（尽管与经典好莱坞时代的工作室系统相比，单个制作人或小团队也很常见）。许多新媒体产品，如热门游戏或软件应用，销量达到数百万。然而，新媒体领域的另一个特点是与大型工业的紧密联系，即严格遵循各种硬件和软件标准。

^{6}

Finally, and most important, I use the word object to reactivate the concept of laboratory experimentation practiced by the avant-garde of the 1920s. Today, as more artists are turning to new media, few are willing to undertake systernatic, laboratory-like -esearch into its elements and basic compositional, expressive, and generative strategies. Yet this is exactly the kind of research undertaken by Russian and German avani-garde artists of the 1920 s in places like Vkhutemas

^{7}

and Bauhaus, as they explored the new media of their time: photography, film, new print rechnologies, telephony. Today, those few who are able to resist the immediare temptation to create an “interactive CD-ROM,” or make a feature-length “digital film,” and instead focus on determining the new-media equivalent of a shot, sentence, word, or even letrer, are rewarded with amazing findings.
最后，也是最重要的，我使用“对象”这个词来重新激活 20 世纪 20 年代先锋派所实践的实验室实验概念。如今，虽然越来越多的艺术家开始关注新媒体，但愿意对其元素及基本的构成、表现和生成策略进行系统性、实验室式研究的艺术家却非常少。然而，这正是 20 世纪 20 年代俄罗斯和德国先锋派艺术家在 Vkhutemas 和包豪斯等地所进行的研究，他们探索了当时的新媒体：摄影、电影、新印刷技术和电话。今天，那些能够抵制立即制作“互动 CD-ROM”或“数字电影”诱惑的人，转而专注于寻找新媒体中相当于镜头、句子、单词甚至字母的元素，最终获得了惊人的发现。

A third term that is used throughout the book and needs comment is representation. In using this term, I want to invoke the complex and nuanced understanding of the functioning of cultural objects as developed in the humanities over the last decades. New media objects are culrural objects; thus, any new media object-whecher a Web site, compurer game, or digital image-can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: a physically existing object, historical information presented in orther documents, a system of categories currently employed by culture as a whole or by particular social groups. As is the case with all cultural representations, new media representations are also inevitably biased. They represent/construct some fearures of physical reality at the expense of others,
本书中提到的另一个需要讨论的术语是“表现”。在使用这个术语时，我想引入人文学科在过去几十年中对文化对象功能的复杂而细致的理解。新媒体对象属于文化对象；因此，任何新媒体对象——无论是网站、电脑游戏还是数字图像——都可以被视为代表并帮助构建某种外部参照：一个物理存在的对象、在其他文献中呈现的历史信息，或当前文化整体或特定社会群体所使用的分类系统。与所有文化表现一样，新媒体表现也不可避免地带有偏见。它们在展现物理现实的某些特征时，牺牲了其他特征
6. Examples of soffrate standards include operating sysnems such as UNDX, Windows, and MAC OS; file formats (JPEG, MPEG, DV, QuickTime, RTF, WAV); scripting languages (HTML, javascripr); programming languages (

C_{+} +

. Jawio); communication protocols (TCP

{IP}^{2}

); the conventions of HCl (e.g., dialog boxes, copy and paste commands, the help pointer); and also unwritten conventions, such as the 640 -by 480 pixel image size that was used for mare than a decade. Hardware standands inchude starage media formats (ZIP, JAZ, CD-ROM, DVD), port types (serial, USB, Firewire), bus acchatectures (PCI), and RAM tryes.
6. 标准的例子包括操作系统，如 UNDX、Windows 和 MAC OS；文件格式（JPEG、MPEG、DV、QuickTime、RTF、WAV）；脚本语言（HTML、JavaScript）；编程语言（

C_{+} +

. Jawio）；通信协议（TCP

{IP}^{2}

）；HCl 的约定（例如对话框、复制和粘贴命令、帮助指针）；以及一些不成文的约定，例如使用超过十年的 640 x 480 像素图像大小。硬件标准包括存储介质格式（ZIP、JAZ、CD-ROM、DVD）、端口类型（串行、USB、Firewire）、总线架构（PCI）和 RAM 类型。
7… Whutemas was a Moscow art and designa school in the 1920 s that united most leftist avantgande artiscs; it functioned as a counnerpart of the Baubaws in Germany.
7… Whutemas 是 1920 年代莫斯科的一所艺术与设计学校，聚集了许多左翼先锋艺术家；它作为德国包豪斯的对应机构运作。
one worldview among many, one possible system of categories among numerous others. In this book I will talke this argument one step further by suggesting that software interfaces-both those of operating systems and of software applications-also act ass representations. That is, by organizing data in particular ways, they privilege particular models of the world and the human subject. For instance, the two key ways to organize compurer data commonly used today-a hierarchical file system (Graphical User Interface from the 1984 Macintosh onward) and a “flat,” nonhierarchical network of hyperlinks ( 1990 s World Wide Web)-represent the world in two fundamentally different and in fact opposing ways. A hierarchical file system assumes that the world can be reduced to a logical and hierarchical order, where every object has a distinct and well-defined place. The World Wide Web model assumes that every object has the same importance as any orher, and that everything is, or can be, connected to everything else. Interfaces also privilege particular modes of data access traditionally associated with particular arts and media technologies. For instance, the World Wide Web of the 1990 s foregrounded the page as a basic unit of data organization (regardless of which media types it contained), while Acrobat software applied the metaphor of “video playback” to text-based documents. Thus interfaces act as “representations” of older cultural forms and media, privileging some at the expense of others.
在众多世界观中，一种世界观和一种可能的分类系统。在这本书中，我将进一步探讨这个论点，提出软件接口——无论是操作系统的接口还是软件应用的接口——也充当一种代表。也就是说，通过特定方式组织数据，它们优先考虑特定的世界模型和人类主体。例如，今天常用的两种计算机数据组织方式——层次文件系统（自 1984 年 Macintosh 以来的图形用户界面）和“扁平”的非层次超链接网络（1990 年代的万维网）——以两种根本不同甚至对立的方式呈现世界。层次化文件系统认为，世界可以被简化为一个逻辑和层次的秩序，每个对象都有其独特且明确的位置。万维网模型则认为，每个对象与其他对象同样重要，并且一切都可以相互连接。接口也优先考虑与特定艺术和媒体技术相关的特定数据访问方式。例如，1990 年代的万维网将页面视为数据组织的基本单位（无论其包含何种媒体类型），而 Acrobat 软件则将“视频播放”的比喻应用于文本文件。因此，界面作为旧文化形式和媒体的“表现”，在某些方面优先考虑了一些内容，而牺牲了其他内容。
In describing the language of new media, I have found it usefful to use the term representation in opposition to other terms. Depending on which term it is opposed to, the meaning of representation changes. Since these oppositions are introduced in different sections of the book, I will summarize them here:
在描述新媒体语言时，我发现将“表现”这个术语与其他术语对立使用非常有帮助。根据对立的术语不同，“表现”的含义也会有所变化。由于这些对立关系在书的不同章节中被提及，我将在这里对它们进行总结：

Reppresentation-simulation (“Screen” section). Here, representation refers to warious screen technologies such as post-Renaissance painting, film, radar, and television. I define screen as a rectangular surface that frames a wirtual world and that exists within the physical world of a viewer without completely blocking her visual feld. Sinnulation refers to technologies that aim to immerse the viewer completely within a virtual universe-Baroque Jesuit churches, nineteenth-century panorama, twentieth-century mowie theaters. 2. Representation-control (“Cultural Interfaces” section). Here I oppose the image as a representation of an illusionary fictional universe and the image as a simulation of a control panel (for instance, GUI with its different icons and menus) that alllows the user to controll a computer. This new type of im- age can be called inarge-interfatale. The opposition representation-control corresponds to an opposition berween depth and surface: a computer screen as windorw into illusionistic space versus computer screen as flat control panel, 3. Refiresentation-action (“Telearction” section). This is the opposition between technologies used to create illlusions (fashion, realist paintings, dioramas, military decoys, film montage, digital compositing) and representational technologies used to enable action, that is, to allow the wiewer to manipulate reality through representations (maps, architectural drawings, x -tays, telepresence). I refer to images produced by later technologies as image-instruments.
表现与模拟（“屏幕”部分）。在这里，表现指的是各种屏幕技术，如后文艺复兴时期的绘画、电影、雷达和电视。我将屏幕定义为一个矩形表面，它框定了一个虚拟世界，并且存在于观众的物理世界中，而不会完全遮挡她的视野。模拟指的是旨在让观众完全沉浸在虚拟宇宙中的技术——巴洛克耶稣会教堂、十九世纪全景画和二十世纪的电影剧院。2. 表现与控制（“文化接口”部分）。在这里，我将图像视为一种虚幻的虚构宇宙的表现，同时也将其视为控制面板的模拟（例如，具有不同图标和菜单的图形用户界面），允许用户控制计算机。这种新类型的图像可以称为图像-接口。表现与控制的对立反映了深度与表面之间的对立：计算机屏幕作为通往幻觉空间的窗口，与计算机屏幕作为平面控制面板之间的对比，3. 表现与行动（“远程行动”部分）。这是创造幻觉的技术（如时尚、现实主义绘画、立体模型、军事诱饵、电影剪辑、数字合成）与用于实现行动的表现技术之间的对立，后者使观众能够通过表现（如地图、建筑图纸、X 光、远程呈现）操控现实。我将后期技术产生的图像称为图像工具。
Refresentation-communication (“Teleaction” section). This is the opposition between representational technologies (film, audio, and video magneric tape, digital storage formats) and real-ime communication technologies, that is, everything that begins with tele-(telegraph, telephone, tellex, television, telepresence). Representational technologies allow for the creation of traditional aesthetic objects, that is, objects that are fixed in space or time and refer to some referent(s) outside themselwes. By foregrounding the importance of person-to-person telecommunication, and teleculutural forms in general that do not produce any objects, new media force us to reconsides the traditional equation berween culture and objects.
表现-沟通（“远程行动”部分）探讨了表现技术（如电影、音频、视频磁带和数字存储格式）与实时通信技术（如电报、电话、远程传真、电视和远程存在）之间的对立。表现技术使我们能够创造传统的美学对象，这些对象在空间或时间上是固定的，并指向某些外部参照物。通过强调人与人之间远程通信的重要性，以及那些不产生任何对象的远程文化形式，新媒体促使我们重新思考文化与对象之间的传统关系。
Visual illusionisn-siamalation (incroduction to “Illusions” chapter). Illusionism here refers boch to representation and simulation as these terms are used in the “Screen” section. Thus illusionism combines traditional techniques and technologies that aim to create a visual resemblance of reality-perspectival painting, cinema, panorama, etc. Simnlation refers to warious computer methods for modeling other aspects of reality beyond visual appearance-movement of physical objects, shape changes occurring over time in natural phenomena (water surface, smoke), motivations, behawior, speech and language comprehension in human beings.
视觉幻觉主义-模拟（“幻觉”章节的介绍）。在这里，幻觉主义既指表现也指模拟，这两个术语在“屏幕”部分中使用。因此，幻觉主义结合了旨在创造现实视觉相似性的传统技术和方法——如透视画、电影、全景等。模拟则指各种计算机方法，用于建模现实中视觉外观以外的其他方面——例如物体的运动、自然现象中随时间变化的形状（如水面、烟雾）、动机、行为以及人类的语言理解等。
Reprerentation-information (introduction to “Forms” chapter). This opposition refers to two opposing goals of new media design: immersing users in an imaginary fictional universe similar to traditional fiction and giving users efficient access to a body of information (for instance, a search engine, Web site, or on-line encyclopedia).
表现信息（“表单”章节的介绍）。这种对立指的是新媒体设计的两个相反目标：一方面让用户沉浸在类似于传统小说的虚构世界中，另一方面则是为用户提供高效的信息访问方式（例如，搜索引擎、网站或在线百科全书）。

What is new media? We may begin answering this question by listing the caregories commonly discussed under this topic in the popular press: the Inrerner, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer garnes, CD-ROMs and
什么是新媒体？我们可以通过列出在大众媒体中常常讨论的相关类别来开始回答这个问题：互联网、网站、计算机多媒体、计算机游戏、CD-ROM 等

What Is New Media?
新媒体是什么？

DVD, vircual reality. Is this all there is to new media? What about television programs shor on digital video and edited an compurer workstarions? Or feature films that use 3-D animation and digital compositing? Shall we also count these as new media? What about images and text-image compositions-photographs, illustrations, layouts, ads-created on computers and then printed on paper? Where shall we stop?

As can be seen from these examples, the popular understanding of new medlia identifies it with the use of a computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production. Accordingly, texts distributed on a computer (Web sites and electronic books) are considered tobe new media, whereas texts distributed on paper are not. Similarly, photographs that are put on a CD-ROM and require a computer to be viewed are considered new media; the same phorographs printed in a book are not.
从这些例子可以看出，公众对新媒体的理解主要是将其与使用计算机进行分发和展示联系在一起，而不是生产。因此，在计算机上分发的文本（如网站和电子书）被视为新媒体，而在纸上分发的文本则不算。同样，放在 CD-ROM 上并需要计算机查看的照片被认为是新媒体；而同样的照片如果印刷在书中则不算。
Shall we accept this definition? If we want to understand the effects of computerization on culture as a whole, I think it is too limiting. There is no reason to privilege the computer as a machine for the exhibition and distribution of media over the computer as a tool for media production or as a media storage device. All have the same potential to change existing cultural languages. And all have the same potential to leave culture as it is.
我们要接受这个定义吗？如果我们想要理解计算机化对整个文化的影响，我认为这个定义太过局限。没有理由将计算机视为媒体展示和分发的工具，而不把它作为媒体生产或存储的设备。它们都有改变现有文化语言的潜力，也都有保持文化现状的可能。

The last scenario is unlikely, however. What is more likely is that just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the ninereenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern society and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolutionthe shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, discribution, and communication. This new revolution is arguably more profound than the previous ones, and we are just beginning to register its initial effects. Indeed, the introduction of the printing press affected only one stage of cultural communication-the distribution of media. Similarly, the introduction of photography affected only one type of cultural communication-still images. In contrast, the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of media-texts, still images, mowing images, sound, and spatial constructions.
然而，最后一种情况不太可能。更有可能的是，正如十四世纪的印刷机和十九世纪的摄影对现代社会和文化的发展产生了革命性的影响一样，今天我们正处于一场新的媒体革命之中——所有文化都在向计算机介导的生产、分发和交流形式转变。这场新的革命可以说比以往的革命更为深刻，而我们才刚刚开始感受到它的初步影响。实际上，印刷机的引入只影响了文化交流的一个阶段——媒体的分发。同样，摄影的引入只影响了一种文化交流的形式——静态图像。相比之下，计算机媒体革命影响着沟通的各个阶段，包括获取、处理、存储和分发；同时，它也影响着所有类型的媒体文本、静态图像、动态影像、声音以及空间构造。

How shall we begin to map out the effects of this fundamental shift? What are the ways in whicis the use of computers to record, store, create, and distribute media makes it “new”?
我们该如何开始描绘这一根本性转变的影响？使用计算机来记录、存储、创建和分发媒体的方式有哪些使其变得“新”？

In the section “Media and Compucation,” I show that new media represents a convergence of two separate historical crajectories: compuring and media technollogies. Both begin in the 1830 s with Babbage"s Analyrical Engine and Daguerre’s daguerreotype. Eventually, in the middle of the twentieth century, a modern digital computer is developed to perform calculations on numerical data more efficiently; it takes over from numenous mechanical cabulators and calculators widely employed by companies and gowernments since the turn of the century. In a parallel movement, we witness the rise of modern media technologies that allow the storage of images, image sequences, sounds, and text using different material forms-photographic plates, film stocks, gramophone records, etc. The synthesis of these two histories? The translation of all existing media into numerical data accossible through computers. The result is new media-graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have become computable; that is, they comprise simply another set of computer data. In “Principles of New Media,” I look at the key consequences of this new status of media. Rather than focusing on familiar categories such as interactivity or hypermedia, I suggest a different list. This list reduces all principles of new media to five-nnumerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcoding. In the last section, “What New Media Is Not,” I address, other principles that are often attributed to mew media. I show that these principles can already be found at work in older cultural forms and media technologies such as cinema, and therefore in and of themselves are in sufficient to distinguish new media from old.
在“媒体与计算”一节中，我展示了新媒体是计算技术和媒体技术两条独立历史轨迹的融合。这两者都起源于 1830 年代，巴贝奇的分析机和达盖尔的照相术。到了 20 世纪中叶，现代数字计算机被开发出来，以更高效地处理数字数据，取代了自世纪之交以来公司和政府广泛使用的各种机械计算器。在这一过程中，我们见证了现代媒体技术的崛起，这些技术能够以不同的物质形式（如摄影板、胶卷、留声机唱片等）存储图像、图像序列、声音和文本。这两种历史的结合是什么？是将所有现有媒体转化为可以通过计算机访问的数字数据。结果是新的媒体图形、动态图像、声音、形状、空间和文本，这些都变得可以计算；也就是说，它们仅仅是另一组计算机数据。在《新媒体的原则》一书中，我探讨了这种新媒体状态的关键影响。与其关注互动性或超媒体等熟悉的类别，我提出了一个不同的列表。这个列表将所有新媒体的原则简化为五个：数字表示、模块化、自动化、可变性和文化转码。在最后一部分“新媒体不是什麼”中，我讨论了其他常常被归因于新媒体的原则。我指出这些原则在旧的文化形式和媒体技术中，例如电影，已经得到了应用，因此它们本身并不足以区分新媒体与旧媒体。
How Media Became New
媒体是如何变得新的

On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institute in Paris was filled with curious Parisians who had come to hear the formal description of the new reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, allready well known for his Diorama, called the new process daguerreotype. According to a contemporary, “a few days later, opticians” shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky." The media frenzy had begun. Within five months more than thirty different descriptions of che technique had been published around the worldBarcelona, Edinburgh, Naples, Philadelphia, Sr. Petersburg, Stockholm. At first, daguerreorypes of amchitecture and landscapes dominated the public’s imagination; two years later, after warious technical improvements to the process had been made, portrait galleries had opened everywhere-and everyone rushed to have her picture taken by the new media machine.?
1839 年 8 月 19 日，巴黎的学院宫里挤满了好奇的巴黎人，他们前来听取路易·达盖尔对新复印技术的正式介绍。达盖尔因其立体画而声名显赫，他将这一新技术称为达盖尔摄影。根据当时的一位目击者的说法，“几天后，光学商店”里挤满了渴望购买达盖尔摄影设备的业余爱好者，随处可见相机对准建筑物。每个人都想记录自己窗外的景色，能够在第一次尝试中拍到屋顶轮廓与天空相映的人是幸运的。媒体的狂热已经开始。在短短五个月内，全球出版了超过三十种不同的技术描述，巴塞罗那、爱丁堡、那不勒斯、费城等地均有出现。彼得堡，斯德哥尔摩。最初，建筑和风景的银版画引发了公众的想象；两年后，经过各种技术改进，肖像画廊在各地纷纷开张——每个人都迫不及待地想通过这台新媒体机器拍摄她的照片。

In 1833 Charles Babbage began designing a device be called “the Analyticall Engine.” The Engine contuained most of the key features of the modern digital computer. Punch cards were used to enter both datata and instructions. This information was stored in the Engine’s memory. A processing unit,
在 1833 年，查尔斯·巴贝奇开始设计一种被称为“分析机”的设备。这台机器具备现代数字计算机的大部分关键特性。使用穿孔卡片输入数据和指令，这些信息被存储在机器的内存中。一个处理单元，

ed. (New York Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 18.
纽约现代艺术博物馆，1964 年，第 18 页。
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which Babbage referred to as a “mill,” performed operations on the data and wrote the results to memory; final results were to be printed out on a printer. The Engine was designed to be capable of doing any mathemarical operation; not only would it follow the program fed into it by cards, but it would also decide which instructions to execute next, based on intermediate results. However, in contrast to the daguerreotype, not a single copy of the Engine was completed. While the invention of the daguerreotype, a modern media tool for the reproduction of reality, impacted society immediately, the impacr of the computer was yet to be seen.
巴贝奇所称的“磨坊”对数据进行了处理，并将结果写入内存；最终结果将通过打印机输出。该引擎被设计为能够执行任何数学运算；它不仅会按照卡片输入的程序执行，还会根据中间结果决定接下来执行哪些指令。然而，与银版画不同的是，没有一台引擎被完成。尽管银版画的发明作为一种现代媒体工具立即对社会产生了影响，但计算机的影响尚未显现。

Interestingly, Babbage borrowed the idea of using punch cards to store information from an earlier programmed machine. Around 1800, J. M. Jacquard invented a loom that was automatically controlled by punched paper cards. The loom was used to weave intricate figurative images, including Jacquard’s portrair. This specialized graphics computer, so to speak, inspired Babbage in his work on the Analytical Engine, a general computer for numerical calculations. As Ada Augusta; Babbage’s supporter and the first computer programmer, put it, “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical parterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

^{3}

Thus a programmed machine was already synthesizing images even before it was pur to processing numbers. The connection between the Jacquard lloom and the Analyrical Engine is not something historians of camputers make much of, since for them computer image synthesis represents just one application of the modern digital computer among thousands of others, but for a historian of new media, it is full of significance.
有趣的是，巴贝奇借鉴了早期编程机器使用穿孔卡片存储信息的想法。大约在 1800 年，J. M. 雅卡尔发明了一种由穿孔纸卡自动控制的织机。这台织机能够编织复杂的图案，包括雅卡尔的肖像。可以说，这台专门的图形计算机激励了巴贝奇在分析机上的研究，分析机是一种用于数值计算的通用计算机。正如巴贝奇的支持者、第一位计算机程序员阿达·洛夫莱斯所说：“分析机编织代数模式，就像雅卡尔织机编织花朵和叶子一样。”

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因此，这台编程机器在处理数字之前就已经能够合成图像了。雅克卡德织机与分析机之间的联系并未受到计算机历史学家的重视，因为在他们看来，计算机图像合成只是现代数字计算机成千上万种应用中的一种。然而，对于新媒体历史学家而言，这一联系却具有重要的意义。

We should noit be surprised that both trajectories-the development of modern media and the development of computers-begin around the same time. Both media machines and computing machines were absolurely necessary for the functioning of modern mass sociecies. The ability to disseminate the same texts, images, and sounds to millions of citizens-chus assuring the same ideological beliefs-was as essential as the ability to keep track of their birth records, employment records, medical records, and police records. Photography, film, the offset printing press, radio, and television
我们不应该感到惊讶，现代媒体和计算机的发展轨迹大约在同一时间开始。媒体设备和计算设备对于现代大众社会的运作至关重要。将相同的文本、图像和声音传播给数百万公民的能力——从而确保相同的意识形态信仰——与记录他们的出生、就业、医疗和警方记录的能力同样重要。摄影、电影、胶印机、广播和电视。
3. Charles Eamues it Canguter Perspective: Backgromal to the Cousputer Age (Camburidge, Mass: Harvand Uniwersity Press, 1990), 18. made the former possible while computers made possible the latter. Mass media and dara processing are complementary rechnologies; they appear together and develop side by side, making modern mass society possible.
查尔斯·伊默斯的《计算机时代的背景：从古典到计算机时代》（剑桥，马萨诸塞州：哈佛大学出版社，1990 年），第 18 页。前者的实现得益于计算机的进步。大众媒体和数据处理是互补的技术，它们共同出现并相互发展，使现代大众社会成为可能。

For a long time the two trajectories ran in parallel without ever crossing כaths. Throughour the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, numerous mechanical and electrical tabulators and calculators were developed; they gradually became faster and their use more widespread. In a parallel movement, we witness the rise of modern media that allow the storage of images, image sequences, sounds, and texts in different material formsphotographic plates, film stock, gramophone records, etc.
很长一段时间，这两条轨迹平行运行，从未交叉。十九世纪和二十世纪初，许多机械和电动的制表机与计算器相继问世；它们逐渐变得更快，使用也愈加普及。同时，现代媒体的兴起使得我们能够以不同的物质形式存储图像、图像序列、声音和文本，例如摄影板、胶卷和留声机唱片等。

Let us continue tracing this joint history. In the 1890 s modern media took anorher step forward as still photographs were pur in motion. In January 1893, the first movie studio-Edison’s, “Black Maria”-started producing twenty-second shorts that were shown in special Kinetoscope parlors. Two years later the Lumière brothers showed their new Cinématographie camera/projection hybrid, first to a scientific audience and later, in December 1895 , to the paying public. Within a year, audiences in Johannesburg, Biombay, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, Mexico City, and Osaka were subjected to the new media machine, and they found it irresistible.

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Gradually scenes grew longer, the staging of reality before the camera and the subsequent editing of samples became more intricate, and copies multiplied. In Chicago and Calcutta, London and St. Petersburg, Tokyo and Berlin, and thousands of smaller places, film images would soothe movie audiences, who were facing an increasingly dense information environment outside the theater, an enviromment that no longer coulld be adequately handlled by their own sampling and data processing systems (i.e., their brains). Periodic trips into the dark relaxation chambers of movie thearers became a routine survival technique for the subjects of modern sociery.
让我们继续追溯这段共同的历史。在 1890 年代，现代媒体又向前迈出了重要一步，静态照片被赋予了运动。1893 年 1 月，第一家电影制片厂——爱迪生的“黑玛丽亚”——开始制作二十秒的短片，这些短片在专门的电影放映室中播放。两年后，卢米埃尔兄弟首次向科学观众展示了他们的新型电影摄影机与放映机的混合体，随后在 1895 年 12 月向付费观众展示。在短短一年内，约翰内斯堡、孟买、里约热内卢、墨尔本、墨西哥城和大阪的观众都体验到了这一新媒体机器，他们对此感到无法抗拒。随着场景逐渐延长，现实在镜头前的呈现和后续样本的编辑变得愈加复杂，复制品也不断增加。在芝加哥、加尔各答、伦敦、圣彼得堡、东京、柏林以及成千上万个小地方，电影画面为观众带来安慰，他们在剧院外面面临着越来越密集的信息环境，这种环境已无法被他们的大脑等自身的采样和数据处理系统充分应对。定期进入电影放映厅的黑暗放松室，成为现代社会人们的一种常规生存技巧。

The 1890s was the crucial decade not only for the development of media, bur also for computing. If individual brains were overwhelmed by the amount of information they had to process, the same was true of corporations and of governments. In 1887, the U.S. Census Bureau was still
1890 年代不仅是媒体发展的关键十年，也是计算机发展的重要时期。如果个人的大脑被需要处理的信息量所压倒，那么公司和政府同样面临着这样的挑战。在 1887 年，美国人口普查局仍然在进行相关工作。
4. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Ant: Am Intradumbur, Sth ed. New York: MicGraw-Hilil), 15.
4. 大卫·博德维尔和克里斯汀·汤普森，《电影蚂蚁：入门指南》，第三版。纽约：麦格劳-希尔出版社，15 页。
interpreting figures from the 1880 census. For the 1890 census, the Census Bureau adopted electric cabulating machines designed by Herman Hollerith. The data collected on every person was punched into cards; 46,804 enumerators completed forms for a totall population of

62, 979, 766

. The Hollerith tabulator opened the door for the adoprion of calculating machines by business; during the next decade electric tabulators became standard equipment in insurance companies, public utility companies, railroad offices, and accounting departments. In 1911, Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company was merged with three other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company; in 1914, Thomas J. Watson was chosen as its head. Ten years later its business tripled, and Watson renamed the company the “International Business Machines Corporation,” or IBM."
解释 1880 年人口普查的数据。对于 1890 年的人口普查，人口普查局采用了赫尔曼·霍勒里斯设计的电动计算机。每个人的数据都被打孔到卡片上；46,804 名普查员为总人口

62, 979, 766

填写了表格。霍勒里斯的制表机为商业界引入计算机铺平了道路；在接下来的十年里，电动制表机成为保险公司、公用事业公司、铁路办公室和会计部门的标准设备。1911 年，霍勒里斯制表机公司与另外三家公司合并，成立了计算-制表-记录公司；1914 年，托马斯·J·沃森被任命为公司负责人。十年后，公司的业务增长了三倍，沃森将公司更名为“国际商业机器公司”，简称 IBM。"

Mowing into the twentiech century, the key year for the history of media and computing is 1936. British mathematician Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper entitled “On Computable Numbers.” In it he provided a theoretical description of a general-purpose computer later named after its inventor: “the Universal Turing Machine.” Ewen though it was capable of only four operations, the machine could perform any calculation chat could be done by a human and could also imitate any ocher computing machine. The machine operated by reading and writing numbers on an endless tape. At every step the tape would be advanced tor retriewe the next command, read the data, or write the result. Its diagram looks suspiciously like a film projector. Is this a coincidence?
进入 20 世纪，媒体和计算机历史上一个关键的年份是 1936 年。英国数学家艾伦·图灵发表了一篇名为《可计算数》的开创性论文。在这篇论文中，他提供了一个通用计算机的理论描述，后来以他的名字命名为“通用图灵机”。尽管这台机器只能执行四个操作，但它能够完成任何人类可以进行的计算，并且还可以模仿其他任何计算机。该机器通过在无尽的带子上读取和写入数字来进行操作。在每一步，带子都会向前推进，以检索下一个命令、读取数据或写入结果。它的图示看起来可疑地像一个电影放映机。这是巧合吗？

If we believe the word cimematograph, which means “writing mowement,” the essence of cinema is recording and storing visible data in a material form. A film camera records data on film; a film projector reads it off. This cinematic apparatus is sImilar to a compurer in one key respect: A computer’s program and data also have to be stored in some medium. This is why the Universal Turing Machine looks like a film projector. It is a kind of film camera and film projector at once, reading instructions and data stored on endless tape and writing them in other locations on this tape. In fact, the development of a suitable storage medium and a method for coding data represent important parts of the prehistory of both cinema and the com-
如果我们相信“电影摄影机”这个词，它的意思是“记录运动”，那么电影的本质就是以物质形式记录和存储可见数据。电影摄影机在胶卷上记录数据，而电影放映机则读取这些数据。这个电影设备在一个关键方面与计算机相似：计算机的程序和数据也必须存储在某种介质中。这就是通用图灵机看起来像电影放映机的原因。它既是电影摄影机又是电影放映机，能够读取存储在无尽胶带上的指令和数据，并将其写入胶带的其他位置。实际上，适合的存储介质和数据编码方法的发展，构成了电影和计算机史前的重要部分。
5. Eames,

A

Computer Perppective, 22-27, 46-51,90-91. puter. As we know, the inventors of cinema eventually setrled on using discrete images recorded on a strip of celluloid; the inventors of the computerwhich needed much greater speed of access as well as the ability to quickly read and write data-eventually decided to store it electronically in a binary
5. 伊姆斯，

A

计算机视角，22-27，46-51，90-91。正如我们所知，电影的发明者最终选择在胶卷上记录离散图像；而计算机的发明者则需要更快的访问速度和快速读写数据的能力，最终决定以二进制的电子方式存储数据。
code. 代码。

The histories of media and computing became further entwined when German engineer Konrad Zuse began building a computer in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin-the same year that Turing wrote his seminal paper. Zuse’s computer was the first working digital computer. One of his innovations was using punched tape to control computer programs, The tape Zuse used was actually discarded 35 mm movie film.

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媒体与计算的历史在德国工程师康拉德·楚泽于其父母位于柏林的公寓客厅中开始建造计算机时进一步交织在一起——恰好是图灵撰写其开创性论文的同一年。楚泽的计算机是第一台可工作的数字计算机。他的创新之一是使用穿孔带来控制计算机程序，而楚泽所用的带子实际上是被丢弃的 35 毫米电影胶卷。

One of the surviving pieces of this film shows binary code punched over the original frames of an interior shot. A typical movie scene-two people in a room involved in some action-becomes a support for a set of computer commands. Whatever meaning and emotion was contained in this movie scene has been wiped out by its new function as data carrier. The pretense of modern media to create simulations of sensible reality is similarly canceled; media are reduced to their original condition as information carrier, nothing less, nothing more. In a technological remake of the Oedjpal complex, a son murders his father. The iconic code of cinema is discatded in favor of the more efficient binary one. Cinema becomes a slave to the computer.
这部电影中幸存下来的片段之一展示了在原始室内镜头上打孔的二进制代码。一个典型的电影场景——两个在房间里进行某种活动的人——变成了一组计算机命令的载体。这个场景中所蕴含的任何意义和情感都被其作为数据载体的新功能所抹去。现代媒体假装创造出合理现实的模拟，这种假装同样被取消；媒体被简化为其作为信息载体的原始状态，既不多也不少。在技术重拍的俄狄浦斯情结中，一个儿子杀死了他的父亲。电影的标志性代码被抛弃，取而代之的是更高效的二进制代码。电影成为计算机的奴隶。

Bur this is not yer the end of the story. Our story has a mew twist-a happy one. Zuse’s film, with its strange superimposition of binary over iconic code, anticipates che convergence that will follow half a century later. The two separate historical trajectories finally meet. Media and computerDaguerre’s daguerreorype and Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the Lumière Cinématographie and Hollerith’s tabulator-merge into one. All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short, media become
但这并不是故事的终点。我们的故事迎来了一个新的转折——一个快乐的转折。祖斯的电影通过奇特的二进制与标志性代码的叠加，预示着半个世纪后将要发生的融合。这两条独立的历史轨迹最终交汇。媒体与计算机——达盖尔的摄影术和巴贝奇的分析机，卢米埃尔的电影摄影术和霍勒里斯的制表机——合并为一体。所有现有的媒体都被转化为可供计算机访问的数字数据。结果是：图形、动态图像、声音、形状、空间和文本变得可计算，简单来说，它们成为计算机数据的集合。简而言之，媒体变得
new media. 新兴媒体。

This meeting changes the identicy of both media and the computer itself. No longer just a calculator, control mechanism, or communication device,
这次会议改变了媒体和计算机本身的角色。它不再只是一个计算器、控制工具或通信设备，
the computer becomes a media processor. Before, the compurer could read a row of numbers, outpurring a statistical result or a gun rrajectory. Now in can read pixel values, blurring the image, adjusting its concrast, or checking whether it contains an outline of an object. Building on these lower-level operations, it can also perform more ambitions ones-searching image databases for images sumilar in composition or content to an input image, detecting shor changes in a movie, or synthesizing the movie shot itself, complete with setting and actors. In a historical loop, the computer has teturned to its origins. No longer just an Analytical Engine, suitable only for crunching numbers, it has become Jacquard’s loom-a media synthesizer and manipulator.
计算机已成为媒体处理器。过去，计算机只能读取一行数字，输出统计结果或枪械轨迹。现在，它可以读取像素值，模糊图像，调整对比度，或检查图像中是否有物体的轮廓。基于这些基础操作，它还可以执行更复杂的任务——在图像数据库中搜索与输入图像在构图或内容上相似的图像，检测电影中的短暂变化，或合成电影镜头，连同场景和演员。在历史的循环中，计算机回到了它的起源。它不再只是一个适合处理数字的分析引擎，而是成为了雅卡尔的织机——一个媒体合成和操控的工具。

Principles of New Media
新媒体的基本原则

The identity of media has changed even more dramatically than that of the computer. Below I summarize some of the key differences berween old and new media. In compiling this list of differences, I tried to arrange them in a logical order. That is, the last three principles are dependent on the first two. This is not dissimilar to axiomatic logic, in which certain axioms are taken as starring points and further theorems are proved on cheir basis.
媒体的身份变化比计算机的身份变化更加显著。以下是我总结的一些旧媒体与新媒体之间的关键差异。在编制这个差异列表时，我尽量将它们按逻辑顺序排列。也就是说，最后三个原则依赖于前两个原则。这与公理逻辑相似，在公理逻辑中，某些公理被视为起点，进一步的定理则在其基础上被证明。

Not every new media object obeys these principles. They should be considered not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization. As computerization affects deeper and deeper layers of culture, these tendencies will increasingly manifest themselves.
并非所有新媒体对象都遵循这些原则。它们应被视为文化在计算机化过程中表现出的普遍趋势，而非绝对法则。随着计算机化对文化更深层次的影响，这些趋势将愈加明显。

1. Numerical Representation
数字的表示方式

All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or conwerted from analog media sources, are composed of digiral code; they are numerical representations. This fact has two key consequences:
所有新媒体对象，无论是从头在计算机上创建的，还是从模拟媒体源转换而来的，都是由数字代码构成的；它们是数字的表现形式。这一事实带来了两个关键的后果：

A new media object can be described formally (mathematically). For instance, an image or a shape can be described using a mathematical function.
新的媒体对象可以用正式的方式（数学上）进行描述。例如，图像或形状可以通过数学函数来表达。
A new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation. For instance, by applying appropriate algorithms, we can autornatically remove “noise” from a photograph, improve its contrast, locate the edges of the shapes, or change its proportions. In short, media bensmer prugrammzable.
新的媒体对象会受到算法的影响。例如，通过使用合适的算法，我们可以自动去除照片中的“噪音”，提高对比度，找到形状的边缘，或调整其比例。总之，媒体是可以编程的。

When new media objects are created on computers, they originate in numerical form. But many new media objects are converted from various forms of old media. Although most readers understand the difference between analog and digital media, a few notes should be added on the terminology and the conversion process itself. This process assumes that data is originally continuous, that is, “the axis or dimension that is measured has no apparent indivisible unit from which it is composed.” Converting continuous data into a numerical representation is called digitization. Digitization consists of two steps: sampling and quantization. First, data is sampled, most often at regular intervals, such as the grid of pixels used to represent a digital image. The frequency of sampling is referred to as verolution. Sampling turns continuous data into discrete data, that is, data occurring in distinct units: people, the pages of a book, pixels. Second, each samplle is quazatijed, that is, it is assigned a numerical value drawn from a defined range (such as

0 - 255

in the case of an 8 -bit greyscale image).

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当新的媒体对象在计算机上创建时，它们以数字形式存在。然而，许多新媒体对象是从各种旧媒体形式转换而来的。虽然大多数读者能够理解模拟媒体与数字媒体之间的区别，但关于术语和转换过程本身仍需补充一些说明。这个过程假设数据最初是连续的，也就是说，“被测量的轴或维度没有明显的不可分割的单位。”将连续数据转换为数字表示的过程称为数字化。数字化分为两个步骤：采样和量化。首先，数据会在规则的时间间隔内进行采样，例如用于表示数字图像的像素网格。采样频率被称为采样率。采样将连续数据转换为离散数据，也就是说，数据以不同的单位出现：人、书页、像素。其次，每个样本都会被量化，也就是它会被分配一个从定义范围内抽取的数值（例如，在 8 位灰度图像中为

0 - 255

）。

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While some old media such as photography and sculpture are trully continuous, most involve the combination of continuous and discerte coding. One example is motion picture film: each frame is a continuous photograph, but time is broken into a number of samples (frames). Video goes one step further by sampling the frame along the werticall dimension (scani lines). Similarly, a photograph printed using a halftone process combines discrete and continuous representations. Such a photograph consists of a number of orderly dots (i.e., samples), although the diameters and areas of dots vary continuously.
虽然一些旧媒体，如摄影和雕塑，确实是连续的，但大多数媒体则是连续与离散编码的结合。一个例子是电影胶卷：每一帧都是一张连续的照片，但时间被分成多个样本（帧）。视频更进一步，通过在垂直方向上对帧进行采样（扫描线）。同样，使用半色调工艺打印的照片也结合了离散和连续的表现。这种照片由多个有序的点（即样本）组成，尽管这些点的直径和面积是连续变化的。

As the last example demonstrates, while modern media contain levels of discrete representation, the samples are mever quantified. This quantification of samples is the cricial step accomplished by digitization. But why, we may ask, are modern media technologies often in part discrete? The key assumption of modern semiotics is that communication requires discrete units. Without discrete units, there is no lamguage. As Roland Barthes put it, "Language is, as it were, that which divides reality (for instance, the contin-
正如最后一个例子所示，尽管现代媒体包含离散表示的层次，但样本从未被量化。样本的量化是数字化过程中至关重要的一步。但是，我们可能会问，为什么现代媒体技术在某种程度上往往是离散的？现代符号学的一个关键假设是，交流需要离散的单位。没有离散单位，就没有语言。正如罗兰·巴特所说，“语言就是将现实划分开来的东西（例如，连续的——”
7. Isaac Wicror Kerlov and Judson Rosebbush, Compitater Graphici for Designers and Atristsy (New York: Wan Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 14.
7. 艾萨克·维克罗·凯尔洛夫与贾德森·罗斯布什合著，《设计师与艺术家的计算机图形学》（纽约：万诺斯特兰德·雷恩霍尔德，1986 年），第 14 页。
8. Ibid,., 21. wous spectrum of the colors is verbally reduced to a series of discontinuous terms)

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In assuming that any form of communication requires a discrete representation, semioticians took human language as the prototypical exumple of a communication system. A human language is discrete on most scales: We speak in sentences; a sentence is made from words; a word consists of morphemes, and so on. If we follow this assumprion, we may expect that media used in cultural communacation will have discrete lewels. At first this theory serms to work. Indeed, af film samples the continuous cime of human existrence into discrete frames; a draming samples visible reality into discrete lines; and a printed phorograph samples it into discrece dots. This assumption does not universally wrork, however: Photographs, far instance, do not have any apparent units. (Indeed, in the 1970 s semiotics was cricicized for its linguistic bias, and most semionichans came to recognize that a languagebased model of distinct units of meaning cannot be applied to many kinds of culcural communication,) Mare important, the discrete units of modern media are usually not units of meanings in the way morphemes are. Neither film frames nor halftone dots hawe any relation to how a film or phorograph affects the viewer (except in modern art and avant-garde film-think of paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and films of Paul Sharits-which often make the “material” units of media into units of meaning).
8. 同上，21. 颜色的光谱在语言上被简化为一系列不连续的术语）

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在假设任何形式的交流都需要离散表示的情况下，符号学家将人类语言视为交流系统的典型例子。人类语言在大多数层面上是离散的：我们用句子交流；句子由单词组成；单词由语素构成，等等。如果我们遵循这个假设，我们可以期待文化交流中使用的媒介将具有离散的层次。起初，这个理论似乎是有效的。确实，电影将人类存在的连续时间分割成离散的帧；动画将可见现实分割成离散的线条；而印刷的照片则将其分割成离散的点。然而，这一假设并不普遍适用：例如，照片并没有明显的单位。（事实上，在 1970 年代，符号学因其语言偏见而受到批评，大多数符号学家开始意识到，基于语言的不同意义单位模型无法适用于许多文化交流。）更重要的是，现代媒体的离散单位通常并不是像形态素那样的意义单位。电影帧和半色调点与电影或照片对观众的影响之间没有任何关系（除了在现代艺术和先锋电影中——比如罗伊·利希滕斯坦的画作和保罗·沙里茨的电影——这些作品常常将媒体的“物质”单位转化为意义单位）。

The most likely reason modern media has discrete levels is because it emerged during the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, a new orgiatization of production known as the factory spstem gradually replaced artisan labor. It reached iss classical form when Henry Ford installed the first assembly line in his factory in 1913. The assembly line rellied on two principles. The first was standardization of parts, already employed in the production of military uniforms in the nineteenth century. The second, newer principle was the separation of the production process into a set of simple, repetitive, and sequential activities that could be executed by workers who did not have co master the entire process and could be easily replaced.
现代媒体之所以具有离散级别，最可能的原因是它在工业革命期间出现。在十九世纪，一种称为工厂系统的新生产组织逐渐取代了手工业劳动。1913 年，亨利·福特在他的工厂中安装了第一条流水线，标志着这一系统达到了经典形式。流水线依赖于两个原则。第一个是零件的标准化，这在十九世纪的军装生产中已经得到应用。第二个更新的原则是将生产过程分解为一系列简单、重复和顺序的活动，这些活动可以由不需要掌握整个过程的工人来执行，并且可以轻易替换。

Not surprisingly, modern media follows the logic of the factory, not only in trenms of division of labor as witnessed in Hollywood film studios, animation
不出所料，现代媒体遵循工厂的逻辑，这不仅体现在好莱坞电影制片厂的劳动分工上，也体现在动画制作中
9. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hiill and Whang. 1968), 64.
9. 罗兰·巴特，《符号学要素》，翻译：安妮特·拉弗斯和科林·史密斯（纽约：希尔与旺，1968 年），第 64 页。
studios, and television production, but also on che level of material organization. The invention of typesetting machines in the 18805 industrial ized publishing while leading to a standardization of both type design and fonts (number and rypes). In the 1890 s cinema combined automatically produced images (via photography) with a mechanical projector. This required standardization of both image dimensions (size, frame ratio, contrast) and temporal sampling rate. Even earlier, in the 1880 s , the first telewision systems alteady involved standardization of sampling both in time iand space. These modern media systems also followed factory logic in char, once a new “model” (a fillm, a phorograph, an audio recording) was introduced, numerous identicall media copies would be produced from this master. As I will show, new media follows, or actually runs ahead of, a quite different logic of post-industrial society-that of individual customization, rather than mass standardization.
工作室和电视制作不仅涉及材料组织的层面。1880 年代排版机的发明使出版业实现了工业化，同时也导致了字体设计和字体（数字和类型）的标准化。在 1890 年代，电影将自动生成的图像（通过摄影）与机械投影仪结合在一起，这需要对图像尺寸（大小、画幅比例、对比度）和时间采样率进行标准化。更早在 1880 年代，第一代电视系统已经开始对时间和空间的采样进行标准化。这些现代媒体系统在特征上也遵循了工厂逻辑，一旦引入新的“模型”（如电影、照片或音频录音），就会从这个母版中生产出大量相同的媒体副本。正如我将展示的，新媒体遵循的，实际上是后工业社会中一种完全不同的逻辑——个性化定制，而非大规模标准化。

2. Modularity 2. 模块化设计

This principle can be called the “fractal structure of new media.” Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities. The objects chemselves can be combined into even larger objects-again, without losing their independence. For example, a multimedia “movie” authored in popular Macromedia Director software may consist of hundreds of still images, QuickTime movies, and sounds that are stored separately and loaded at run time. Because all elements are stored independently, they can be modified at any time withous having to change the Director “movie” itself. These “movies” can be assembled into a larger “movie,” and so on. Anorther example of modularity is che concept of “object” used in Microsaft Office applications. When an “object”" is inserted into a document (for instance, a media clip inserted into a Word document), it concinues to maintain its independence and can always be edited with che program originally used to create ir. Yer another example of modullarisy is the structure of an HTMI document: With the exemption of text, it conssists of a number of separate objectsGIP and JPEG images, media clips. Wirtuial Reality Modeling Langiuage (VRML) scenes, Shockwawe and Flash movies - which are all stored independently, locally, andor on a network. In short, a new media object consists of independent parts, each of which consists of smaller independent parts, and so on, down to the level of the smallest “atoms”-pixells, 3-D points, or text characters.
这个原则可以称为“新媒体的分形结构”。就像分形在不同尺度上保持相同的结构，新媒体对象在各个层面上也具有一致的模块化结构。媒体元素，无论是图像、声音、形状还是行为，都被视为离散样本（像素、多边形、体素、字符、脚本）的集合。这些元素被组合成更大规模的对象，但仍然保持各自的独立性。这些对象本身也可以进一步组合成更大的对象，同样不会失去它们的独立性。例如，在流行的 Macromedia Director 软件中创作的多媒体“电影”可能由数百张静态图像、QuickTime 电影和声音组成，这些元素都是单独存储并在运行时加载的。由于所有元素都是独立存储的，因此可以随时进行修改，而无需更改导演“电影”本身。这些“电影”可以组合成更大的“电影”，以此类推。模块化的另一个例子是微软 Office 应用程序中的“对象”概念。当一个“对象”被插入到文档中（例如，插入到 Word 文档中的媒体剪辑）时，它仍然保持独立性，并且始终可以使用最初创建它的程序进行编辑。另一个模块化的例子是 HTML 文档的结构：除了文本外，它由多个独立的对象组成，如 GIF 和 JPEG 图像、媒体剪辑。虚拟现实建模语言（VRML）场景、Shockwave 和 Flash 电影等都独立存储在本地或网络上。简而言之，一个新媒体对象由独立的部分构成，每个部分又由更小的独立部分组成，直到最小的“原子”——像素、三维点或文本字符。

The World Wide Web as a whole is also completely modular. It consists of numerous Web pages, each in its turn consisting of separate media elements. Every elememt can always be accersed on irs own. Normally we think of elements as belonging to their corresponding Web sites, but this is just a convention, reinforced by commercial Web browsers. The Netomar browser by artist Maciej Wisnewski, which extracts elements of a particullar media type from different Web pages (for instance, images only) and displays them together withour identifying the Web sites from which they are drawn, highlights for us this fundamentally discrete ond nonhienarchical organization of the Web.
整个万维网实际上是完全模块化的。它由众多网页构成，每个网页又包含独立的媒体元素。每个元素都可以单独访问。通常我们认为这些元素属于各自的网站，但这只是一个约定，由商业网页浏览器所强化。艺术家 Maciej Wisnewski 的 Netomar 浏览器能够从不同网页中提取特定类型的媒体元素（例如，仅提取图像），并将它们一起展示，而不标识它们来源的网站，这突显了网络的根本离散性和非等级化的组织结构。

In addition to using the metaphor of a fractal, we can also make an analogy between the modularity of new media and structured computer programming. Structural computer programming, which became standard in the 1970 s, involves writing small and self-sufficient modules (called in different computer languages subroutines, functions, procedures, scripts), which are thera assembled into larger programs. Many new media objects are in fact computer programs that follow structural programming style. For example, most interactive multimedia applications are written in Macromedia Dinector’s Lingo. A Lingo program defines scripts that control various repeated actions, such as clicking on a button; these scripts are assembled into larger scripts. In the case of new media objects that are not computer programs, an analogy with structural programming still can be made because their parts can be accessed, modified, or substituted without affecting the overall structure of an object. This analogy, however, has its limits. If a particular module of a computer program is deleted, the program will not run. In contrast, as with traditional media, deleting parts of a new media object does not render it meaningless. In fact, the modular structure of new media makes such deletion and substitution of parts particularly easy. For example, since an HTML document consists of a number of separate objects each represented by a line of HTML code, it is very easy to delete, substitute, or add new objects. Similarly, since in Photoshop the parts of a digital image usually kept placed on separate layers, these parts can be deleted and substitured with a click of a button.
除了使用分形的比喻，我们还可以将新媒体的模块化与结构化计算机编程进行类比。结构化计算机编程在 1970 年代成为标准，涉及编写小而自足的模块（在不同的计算机语言中称为子程序、函数、过程或脚本），这些模块随后被组合成更大的程序。许多新媒体对象实际上是遵循结构化编程风格的计算机程序。例如，大多数互动多媒体应用程序是用 Macromedia Director 的 Lingo 编写的。Lingo 程序定义了控制各种重复动作的脚本，例如点击按钮；这些脚本被组合成更大的脚本。对于不是计算机程序的新媒体对象，可以与结构化编程进行类比，因为它们的组成部分可以被访问、修改或替换，而不会影响对象的整体结构。然而，这种类比是有局限性的。如果删除计算机程序的某个特定模块，程序将无法运行。相比之下，与传统媒体一样，删除新媒体对象的部分并不会使其失去意义。实际上，新媒体的模块化结构使得这种部分的删除和替换变得特别简单。例如，由于 HTML 文档由多个独立的对象组成，每个对象由一行 HTML 代码表示，因此删除、替换或添加新对象非常容易。类似地，由于在 Photoshop 中，数字图像的各个部分通常保存在不同的图层上，因此可以通过点击一个按钮轻松删除和替换这些部分。

3. Automation 3. 自动化技术

The mumerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.

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媒体的数字编码（原则 1）和媒体对象的模块化结构（原则 2）使得许多与媒体创作、处理和访问相关的操作可以实现自动化。因此，人类的意图在创作过程中可以在一定程度上被去除。

Following are some examples of what can be called “low-level” automation of media creation, in which the computer user modifies or creates from scratch a media object using templates or simple algorithms. These techniques are robust enough so that they are included in most commercial software for image editing, 3-D graphics, word processing, graphics layout, and so forth. Imageediting programs such as Photoshop can automatically correct scanned images, improving contrast range and removing noise. They also come with filters that can automatically modify an image, from creating simple variations of color to changing the whole image as though it were painted by Van Gogh, Seurat, or another brand-name artist. Other computer programs can automatically generate 3-D objects such as trees, landscapes, and human figures as well as detailed ready-to-use animations of complex natural phenomena such as fire and waterfalls. In Hollywood films, flocks of birds, ant colonies, and crowds of people are automatically created by AL (artificial life) software. Word processing, page layout, presentation, and Web creation programs come with “agents” that can automatically create the layout of a document. Writing software helps the user to creace literary narratives using highly formalized genre conwentions. Finally, in what may be the most familiar experience of automared media generation, many Web sites automatically generate Web pages on the fy when the user reaches the site. They assemble the information from databases and formar it using generic templates and scripts.
以下是一些被称为“低级”媒体创作自动化的例子，其中计算机用户使用模板或简单算法来修改或从零开始创建媒体对象。这些技术足够强大，因此大多数商业软件，如图像编辑、3D 图形、文字处理和图形布局等，都包含了这些功能。像 Photoshop 这样的图像编辑程序可以自动修正扫描图像，改善对比度范围并去除噪声。此外，它们还配备了可以自动修改图像的滤镜，从简单的颜色变化到将整个图像转换为仿佛是由梵高、修拉或其他知名艺术家创作的效果。其他计算机程序可以自动生成三维物体，如树木、风景和人形，以及复杂自然现象（如火和瀑布）的详细动画。在好莱坞电影中，鸟群、蚁群和人群都是由人工生命（AL）软件自动创建的。文字处理、页面布局、演示和网页创建程序都配备了可以自动生成文档布局的“代理”。写作软件帮助用户使用高度规范化的体裁约定来创作文学叙事。最后，在可能是自动媒体生成中最为熟悉的体验中，许多网站在用户访问时会自动生成网页。他们从数据库中汇总信息，并使用通用模板和脚本进行格式化。

Researchers afe also working on what can be called “high-level” automation of media creation, which requires a computer to understand, to a certain degree, the meanings embedded in rhe objects being generated, that is, their
研究人员也在探索一种被称为“高级”媒体创作自动化的技术，这要求计算机在一定程度上理解生成对象中所蕴含的意义
10. I discuss particular cases of compurer automanion of visual communication in more detail in “Antomation of Sight from Photography to Computer Vision,” Electromic Cublare: Technology and Wiswal Requesentation, ed. by Tirmorthy Druckrey and Michael Sand (New York: Aperture, 1996) 229-239; and in “Mapping Space: Berspective, Radas, and Computer Graphics,” SIG. GRAPH '93 Visual Procedings, ed. be Thomas Linehan (New York: ACM, 1993), 14² -147. semantics. This research can be seen as part of a larger projecr af artificial intelligence (AD). As is well kuown, the AI project has actiewed only limited success since its beginnings in the 1950 s. Correspondingly, work on media generation that requires an understanding of semantics is also in the research stage and is rarely included in commercial software. Beginning in the 1970 s, computers were often used to generate poetry and fiction. In the 1990 , frequenters of Internet chat rooms became familiar with “bous”-computer programs that simulate human conwersation. Researchers at New York Uniwersity designed a “virtual theater” composed of a few “wirtual actors” who adjusted their behavior in real-time in response to a user’s actions.

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The MIT Media Lab developed a number of different projects devoted to “high-level” automation of media creation and use: a “smart camera” that, when given a script, automatically follows the action and frames the sthocs;

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ALIVE, a virtual environment where the user interacts with animated churacters;

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and a new kind of human-computer interface where the computer presents itself to a user as an animated talking character. The character generated by a computer in real-time, communicates with the through user naturall language; it also tries to guess the user’s emotional state and to adjust the style of interaction accordingly.

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10. 我在《从摄影到计算机视觉的视觉通信自动化》一文中更详细地讨论了计算机自动化的特定案例，收录于《电子文化：技术与视觉表现》，由 Tirmorthy Druckrey 和 Michael Sand 编辑（纽约：Aperture，1996 年）229-239；以及在《映射空间：透视、雷达和计算机图形》一文中，收录于 SIG. GRAPH '93 视觉程序，由 Thomas Linehan 编辑（纽约：ACM，1993 年），14² -147。语义。这项研究可以视为人工智能（AI）更大项目的一部分。众所周知，自 1950 年代以来，人工智能项目的成功一直非常有限。相应地，涉及语义理解的媒体生成工作仍处于研究阶段，且很少被应用于商业软件。从 1970 年代开始，计算机常常被用来创作诗歌和小说。在 1990 年代，互联网聊天室的常客们熟悉了“bous”——一种模拟人类对话的计算机程序。纽约大学的研究人员设计了一个“虚拟剧院”，由几个“虚拟演员”组成，他们能够根据用户的行为实时调整自己的表现。麻省理工学院媒体实验室开发了多个项目，专注于“高级”媒体创作和使用的自动化：一个“智能相机”，在接收到剧本后，能够自动跟随动作并进行构图；ALIVE，一个用户可以与动画角色互动的虚拟环境；以及一种新型的人机界面，计算机以动画对话角色的形式与用户进行交流。计算机实时生成的角色通过自然语言与用户沟通，并试图猜测用户的情感状态，从而相应地调整互动风格。

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The area of new media whene the average computer user encountered

A

in the 1990 s was not, howewer, the human-computer interface, but computer games. Almost every commercial game included a component called an “AI engine,” which stands for the part of the game’s computer code that controls its characters-car drivers in a car race simulation, enemy forces in a strategy game such as Command and Conquer single attackers in first-person shooters such as Quake. AI engines use a variety of approaches to simulate human intelligence, from rule-based systems to neural networks. Like AI expert systems, the characters in computer games have expertise in some well-defined but narrow area such as artacking the user. But because computer games are
在新媒体领域，普通计算机用户在 1990 年代接触到的

A

并不是人机界面，而是计算机游戏。几乎每款商业游戏都包含一个称为“AI 引擎”的组件，这部分代码控制着游戏中的角色——在赛车模拟中是汽车驾驶员，在《命令与征服》等策略游戏中是敌军，在《雷神之锤》等第一人称射击游戏中是单个攻击者。AI 引擎采用多种方法来模拟人类智能，从基于规则的系统到神经网络。与 AI 专家系统类似，计算机游戏中的角色在某些明确但狭窄的领域中具有专业知识，例如攻击用户。然而，由于计算机游戏的特性，
11. hetp://wwa:mrl. nyu.edatimprows
11. hetp://wwa:mrl.nyu.edu/improws
12. http://www-white.nedia mitedu/vismod/demosismarcam/.
13. htep://pattie.wwm.media_mit.edu/people/partie/CACM-95/alife-cacm95.html.
14. This research was pursued ar different groups at the MIT lab. See, for instance, the home page of the Gesture and Narracive Lamguage Group, hetp://gn. www,media.mit. edu/groups/gn:
14. 这项研究在麻省理工学院的不同团队中进行。例如，可以查看手势与叙事语言组的主页，网址是：http://gn.www.media.mit.edu/groups/gn:
highly codified and rule-based, these characters function very effectively; that is, they effectively respond to the few things the user is allowed to ask them to do: run forward, shoor, pick up an object. They cannor do anything else, bur then the game does not provide the opportunity for the user to test this. For instance, in a martial arts fighting game, I can"t ask questions of my opponent, nor do I expect him or her to start a conversation with me. All I can do is “attack” my opponent by pressing a few buttons, and within this highly codified situation the computer can “fight” me back very effectively. In short, computer characters can display intelligence and skills only because programs place severe limits on our possibule interactions with them. Put differently, computers can pretend to be intelligent only by tricking us into using a wery smill part of who we are when we communicate with them. At the 1997 SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery) convention, for example, I played against both hrman and computer-controlled characters in a VR simulation of a nonexistent sports game. All my opponents appeared as simple bliobs covering a few pixels of my VR display; at this resolution, it made absolutely no difference who was human and who was not.
这些高度规范化和规则化的角色运作非常有效；也就是说，他们能够有效地回应用户被允许要求他们做的少数事情：向前跑、射击和捡起物体。他们无法执行其他操作，但游戏并没有给用户提供测试这一点的机会。例如，在一款武术格斗游戏中，我无法向对手提问，也不指望他或她和我展开对话。我能做的只是通过按几个按钮“攻击”对手，在这种高度规范化的情况下，计算机可以非常有效地“反击”我。简而言之，计算机角色之所以能够展示智能和技能，仅仅是因为程序对我们与他们的互动施加了严格的限制。换句话说，计算机只能通过欺骗我们，让我们在与它们交流时只使用我们的一小部分，来假装自己是智能的。在 1997 年的 SIGGRAPH（计算机图形学协会特别兴趣小组）大会上，我在一个虚拟现实模拟的虚构体育比赛中与人类和计算机控制的角色对战。我的所有对手看起来都是简单的像素块，只覆盖了我虚拟现实显示器上的几个像素；在这样的分辨率下，根本无法区分谁是人类，谁是计算机。
Along with “low-level” and “high-level” automation of media creation, another area of media use subjected to increasing automation is media access. The switch to computers as a means of storing and accessing enormous amounts of media material, exemplified by the “media assets”" stared in the databases of stock agencies and global entertainment conglomerates, as well as public “media assets” distributed across numerous Web sites, created the reeed to find more efficient ways to classify and search media objects. Word processors and other text-management software has long prowided the capacity to search for specific scrings of rext and automatically index documents. The UNIX operating system also included powerful commands to search and filter text files. In the 1990 s softwate designers started to provide media users with similar abilities. Virage introduced Virage VIR Image Engine, which allows one to search for wisually similar image content among milllions of images as well as a set of video search tools to allow indexing and searching video files.

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By the end of the 1990s, the key W/eb search engines
除了“低级”和“高级”媒体创作的自动化，另一个日益受到自动化影响的领域是媒体访问。计算机作为存储和访问大量媒体材料的手段，尤其是“媒体资产”，这些资产存储在股票机构和全球娱乐集团的数据库中，以及分布在众多网站上的公共“媒体资产”，促使人们寻找更高效的方式来分类和搜索媒体对象。文字处理器和其他文本管理软件早已具备搜索特定文本字符串和自动索引文档的能力，而 UNIX 操作系统也提供了强大的命令来搜索和过滤文本文件。在 1990 年代，软件设计师开始为媒体用户提供类似的功能。Virage 推出了 Virage VIR 图像引擎，允许用户在数百万张图像中搜索视觉上相似的内容，并提供一套视频搜索工具，以便对视频文件进行索引和搜索。到 1990 年代末，关键的网络搜索引擎
15. Siee hartpol/twwwinirage.corm/producrs. already included the option to search the Internet by specific media such as images, wideo, and audio.
15. Siee hartpol/twwwinirage.corm/producrs. 已经提供了按特定媒体（如图片、视频和音频）搜索互联网的选项。
The Internet, which can be thought of as one huge distributed media database, also crystallized the basic condition of the new information society: owerabundance of information of all kinds. One response was the poptilar idea of software “agents” designed to automate searching for relevant information. Some agents act as filters that deliver small amounts of information given the user’s criteria. Others allow users to tap into the expertise of other users, following their selections and choices. For example, the MIT Software Agents Group developed such agents as BUZZwarch, which " disrills and tracks trends, themes, and topics within collections of texts across time" such as Internet discussions and Web pages; Letizia, “a user incerface agent that assists a user browsing the Would Wide Web by … scouting ahead from the user’s current position to find web pages of possible interest”; and Footprints, which “uses information left by other people to help you find your way around.”."

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互联网可以被视为一个庞大的分布式媒体数据库，它体现了新信息社会的基本特征：各种信息的过剩。对此，流行的软件“代理”概念应运而生，旨在自动化搜索相关信息。一些代理充当过滤器，根据用户的标准提供少量信息，而另一些则允许用户借助其他用户的专业知识，跟随他们的选择和决策。例如，麻省理工学院的软件代理组开发了像 BUZZwarch 这样的代理，它“在时间的文本集合中提取和跟踪趋势、主题和话题”，例如互联网讨论和网页；Letizia 是“一个用户界面代理，帮助用户在万维网中浏览，通过从用户当前位置向前侦察，寻找可能感兴趣的网页”；还有 Footprints，它“利用其他人留下的信息来帮助你找到方向。”。

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By the end of the twentieth century, the problem was no longer how to create a new media object such as an image; the new problem was how to find an object that already exists somewhere. If you want a particular image, chances are it already exists-but it may be easier to create one from scratch than to find an existing one. Beginning in the nineteenth century, modern sociery developed technologies that automated media creation-the photo camera, film camera, tape recorder, videorecorder, etc. These technologies allowed us, over the course of 150 years, to accumulate an unprecedented amount of media materials-photo archives, film libraries, audio archives. This led to the next stage in media evolution-the need for new technologies to store, organize, and efficiently access these materials. The new technologies are all computer-based-media databases; hypermedia and other ways of organizing media material such as the hierarchical file system itself; text management soffware; programs for content-based search and retrieval. Thus automation of media access became the next logical stage of the process that had been put into motion when the first photograph was taken. The emergence of new media coincides with this second stage of a
到了二十世纪末，问题不再是如何创造新的媒体对象，比如图像；新问题是如何找到已经存在的对象。如果你想要一幅特定的图像，很可能它已经存在——但有时候从头开始创造一幅图像可能比找到现有的更容易。从十九世纪开始，现代社会发展了自动化媒体创作的技术——如照相机、电影摄影机、录音机和录像机等。这些技术使我们在 150 年间积累了前所未有的媒体材料——照片档案、电影库和音频档案。这导致了媒体演变的下一个阶段——需要新的技术来存储、组织和高效访问这些材料。新技术都是基于计算机的媒体数据库，包括超媒体和其他组织媒体材料的方式，如层次文件系统；文本管理软件；以及用于内容搜索和检索的程序。因此，媒体访问的自动化成为了拍摄第一张照片后，推动这一进程的下一个逻辑阶段。新媒体的兴起与第二阶段相吻合
16. thetprdagenes.wwe.media.mit.edw/groupslagents/projects/.
media society, now concerned as much with accessing and reusing existing media objects as with creating new ones.

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现在的媒体社会不仅关注创造新的媒体对象，也同样重视获取和重用现有的媒体资源。

4. Variability 4. 变异性分析

A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. This is another consequence of the numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (primciple 2).
新的媒体对象并不是固定不变的，而是可以以不同的、潜在无限的版本存在。这是媒体数字编码（原则 1）和媒体对象模块化结构（原则 2）带来的另一个结果。

Old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence. This sequence was stored in some marerial, its order determined once and for all. Numerous copies could be run aff from the master, and, in perfect correspondence with the logic of an industrial society, they were all identical. New media, in contrast, is characterized by variability. (Other terms that are often used in relation to new media and that might serve as appropriate synonyms of variable are mutable and liqwid) Instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions. And rather than being created completely by a human author, these versions are often in part automatically assembled by a computer. (The example of Web pages automatically generated from databases using templates created by Web designers can be invoked here as well.) Thus the principle of variability is closely connected to automation.
旧媒体是由人类创作者手动将文本、视觉和/或音频元素组合成特定作品或序列。这些序列存储在某种材料中，其顺序一旦确定便不再改变。可以从母版制作出许多相同的副本，这与工业社会的逻辑完美契合。相比之下，新媒体的特点是可变性。（与新媒体相关的其他术语，如可变和液态，常被用作同义词）新媒体对象通常会产生许多不同的版本，而不是相同的副本。这些版本往往不是完全由人类作者创作，而是部分由计算机自动组装而成。（这里也可以提到由网页设计师创建的模板自动生成的数据库网页示例。）因此，变异性原则与自动化紧密相连。

Variability would also not be possible without modularity. Stored digitallly, rather than in a fixed medium, media elements maintain their separare identities and can be assembled into mumerous sequences under program control. In addition, because the ellements themselves are broken into discrete samples (for instance, an image is represented as an artay of pixels), they can be created and customized on the lly.
变异性不可能在没有模块化的情况下存在。媒体元素以数字形式存储，而不是固定介质中，这使得它们保持独立的身份，并可以在程序控制下组装成多种序列。此外，由于这些元素被分解为离散的样本（例如，一幅图像以像素阵列的形式表示），因此可以根据需要进行创建和定制。
The logic of new media thus corresponds to the postindustrial logic of “production on demand” and “just in time” delivery logics that were themselves made passible by the use of computers and computer networks at all stages of manufacturing and discribution. Here, the “culture industry”
新媒体的逻辑与“按需生产”和“及时交付”的后工业逻辑相对应，这些逻辑的实现得益于在制造和分配各个阶段使用计算机和计算机网络。在这里，“文化产业”
17. See myy “Awant-Garde as Sofcrare,” in Ostrwawente, ed. Stephen Kowats (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Werlag, 1999 ) (hatcpt/wisarts. ucosd/.edu/ Manovich). (a term coined by Theodor Adorno in the 1930s) is actually ahead of most other industries. The idea that a customer might determine the exact features of her desired car at the showroom, transmit the specs to the factory, and hours later receive the car, remains a dream, but in the case of computer media, such immediacy is reality. Because the same machine is used as both showroom and factory, that is, the same computer generates and displays media-and because the media exists not as a material object but as data that can be sent through wires at the speed of light, the customized version created in response to the user’s input is delivered almost immediately. Thus, to continue with the same example, when you access a Web site, the server immediately assembles a customized Web page.
17. 请参见我在斯蒂芬·科瓦茨编辑的《奥斯特瓦文特》中所写的“前卫作为软体”（法兰克福和纽约：校园出版社，1999 年）（hatcpt/wisarts.ucosd/.edu/ Manovich）。这是西奥多·阿多诺在 1930 年代创造的一个术语，实际上在大多数其他行业之前。顾客在展厅中确定所需汽车的具体特征，将规格传送到工厂，并在几个小时后收到汽车的想法，仍然是一个梦想，但在计算机媒体的情况下，这种即时性已经成为现实。由于同一台机器既是展厅又是工厂，也就是说，同一台计算机生成和展示媒体，而媒体并不是作为物质对象存在，而是以数据的形式存在，可以通过光速传输。因此，根据用户输入创建的定制版本几乎可以立即交付。因此，继续以同样的例子，当你访问一个网站时，服务器会立即生成一个定制的网页。

Here are some particular cases of the variability principle (most of them will be discussed in more detail in later chapters):
这里有一些关于变异原则的具体案例（大部分将在后续章节中详细讨论）：

Media elements are stored in a media database; a variety of end-user objects, which vary in resolution and in form and content, can be generated, either beforehand or on demand, from this database. At first, we might think that this is simply a particular technological implementacion of the variability principle, but, as I will show in the “Database” section, in a computer age the database comes to function as a cultural form in its own right. It offers a particular model of the world and of the human experience. It also affects how the user conceives the dara it contains.
媒体元素存储在媒体数据库中；可以从这个数据库中生成各种终端用户对象，这些对象在分辨率、形式和内容上各不相同，可以是预先生成的，也可以是按需生成的。起初，我们可能会认为这只是变异原则的一种特定技术实现，但正如我将在“数据库”部分中展示的那样，在计算机时代，数据库作为一种文化形式发挥着重要作用。它提供了一个特定的世界观和人类经验的模型，同时也影响用户对其所包含数据的理解。
It becomes possible to separate the levels of “content” (data) and interface. A number of different intuerfanes can be created from the same data. A new media object can be defined as one ar more interfaces to a multimedia database. $^{18}$
可以将“内容”（数据）与界面分开。可以基于相同的数据创建多种不同的界面。一个新的媒体对象可以被定义为一个或多个多媒体数据库的接口。 $^{18}$
Information abowt the aser cans be bused by a conatputer programn to custonize au-
用户信息可以被计算机程序用于个性化定制

Web sites use information about the type of hardware and browser or user’s network address to customize automatically the site the user will see; interactive computer installations use information about the user’s body movements to generate sounds, shapes, and images, or to control the behaviot of artificial creatures.
网站会根据用户的硬件类型、浏览器或网络地址自动定制用户所看到的内容；交互式计算机系统则利用用户的身体动作生成声音、形状和图像，或控制人工生物的行为。
18. For an experiment in creating different rnultimedia interfaces to the same text, see my Fremed-Lissizzey Nayigator (herps/wisarts.ucsd.edu/ manovich/FLN).
18. 关于为同一文本创建不同多媒体界面的实验，请查看我的 Fremed-Lissizzey 导航器（herps/wisarts.ucsd.edu/manovich/FLN）。
4. A particular case of this customization is bramobing-type interactivity (sometimes also called “menz-based interactivity”). The term refers to programs in which all the possible objects the user can visit form a branching tree structure. When the user reaches a particular object, the program presents her with choices and allows her to choose among them. Depending on the walue chosen, the user advances along a particular branch of the tree. In this case the information used by a program is the ourput of the user’s cognitive process, rather than the network address or body position.
4. 这种定制的一个特定案例是 bramobing 类型的互动（有时也称为“基于 menz 的互动”）。这个术语指的是用户可以访问的所有可能对象形成的分支树结构。当用户到达某个特定对象时，程序会向她提供选择，并允许她进行选择。根据所选的选项，用户沿着树的特定分支前进。在这种情况下，程序使用的信息是用户认知过程的输出，而不是网络地址或身体位置。
5. Hypernedia is anorher popular new media structure, which is conceptiaally close to branching-type interactivity (because quite often the elements are connected using a branch tree structure). In hypermedia, the multimedia elements making a document are connected through hyperlinks. Thus the elements and the structure are independent of each other-rather than hard-wired togerher, as in eraditional media. The World Wide Web is a particular implementation of hypermedia in which the elements are distributed throughour the network. Hypertext is a particular case of hypermedia that uses only one media type-text. How does the principle of variability work in this case? We can think of all possible parths through a hypermedia document as being different versions of it. By following the links, the user retrieves a particular version of a document.
超媒体是另一种流行的新媒体结构，概念上与分支型互动非常接近（因为元素通常通过分支树结构连接）。在超媒体中，构成文档的多媒体元素通过超链接相互连接。因此，元素和结构是相互独立的，而不是像传统媒体那样紧密结合在一起。万维网是超媒体的一种特定实现，其中元素分布在整个网络中。超文本是超媒体的一个特定案例，仅使用一种媒体类型——文本。在这种情况下，变异性原理是如何运作的？我们可以将超媒体文档中的所有可能路径视为其不同版本。用户通过点击链接，可以获取文档的特定版本。
6. A mother way in which different versions of the same media objects are commondy gemerated in computer culture is through periodic updates. For instance, modern software applications can periodically check for updates on the Internet and then download and install these updates, sometimes withour any action on the part of the user. Most Web sites are also periodically updared either manually or automatically, when the data in the darabases that driwe the sites changes. A particularly interesting case of this “updateability” feature is those sites that conitinuously update informarion such as stock prices or weather.
在计算机文化中，不同版本的相同媒体对象通常通过定期更新的方式生成。例如，现代软件应用程序可以定期在互联网上检查更新，然后下载并安装这些更新，有时用户无需任何操作。大多数网站也会定期更新，无论是手动还是自动，当驱动网站的数据的数据库发生变化时。这种“可更新性”特征的一个特别有趣的例子是那些持续更新信息的网站，例如股票价格或天气。
7. One of the most basic cases of the wariability principle is scalability, in which different wersions of the same media object can be generated at various sizes or lewels of detail. The metaphor of a map is useful in thinking about the scallability principle. If we equate a new media object with a physical territory, different versions of this object are like maps of this territory generated at different scales. Depending on the scale chosen, a map provides more or less detail abour the territory. Indeed, different versions of a new media object may wary strictly quantitatively, that is, in the amount of de- tail present: For instance, a full-size image and its icon, automatically generated by Photoshop; a full text and its shorter version, generaced by the “Autosummarize” command in Microsaft Word; or the different versions that can be created using the “Outline” command in Word. Beginning with version 3 (1997), Apple’s QuickTime format made it possible to embed a number of different versions that differ in size within a single QuickTime movie; when a Web user accesses the movie, a version is automatically selecred depending on connection speed. A conceptuilly similar technique called “distancing” or “level of detail” is used in interactive wirtual worlds such as VRML scenes. A designer creates a number of models of the same object, each with progressively less detail. When the virtual camera is close to the object, a highly detailled model is used; if the object is far away, a less detailed version is automatically substituted by a program to save unnecessary computation of detail that cannor bé seen anyway.
可变性原则最基本的案例之一是可扩展性，即可以生成同一媒体对象的不同版本，具有不同的大小或细节级别。在思考可扩展性原则时，地图的比喻非常有用。如果我们将一个新媒体对象视为一个物理领土，那么这个对象的不同版本就像是在不同尺度下生成的该领土的地图。根据选择的尺度，地图提供的领土细节会有所不同。确实，不同版本的新媒体对象在数量上可能会有严格的变化，即在细节的数量上有所不同：例如，一个全尺寸的图像及其由 Photoshop 自动生成的图标；一个完整的文本及其由 Microsoft Word 中的“自动摘要”命令生成的简短版本；或者使用 Word 中的“大纲”命令创建的不同版本。从第 3 版（1997 年）开始，苹果的 QuickTime 格式使得在单个 QuickTime 电影中嵌入多个不同大小的版本成为可能；当网络用户访问电影时，会根据连接速度自动选择一个版本。在交互式虚拟世界中，如 VRML 场景中，使用了一种概念上类似的技术，称为“距离”或“细节级别”。设计师制作了多个相同物体的模型，每个模型的细节逐渐减少。当虚拟相机靠近物体时，会使用高细节的模型；而当物体远离时，程序会自动替换为细节较少的版本，以节省不必要的计算，因为那些细节根本无法被看到。

New media also allow us to create versions of the same object that differ from each other in more substantial ways. Here the comparison with maps of different scales no longer works. Examples of commands in commonly used software packages that allow the creation of such qualitatively different versions are “Variations” and “Adjustment layers” in Photoshop 5 and the “writing style” option in Word’s “Spelling and Grammar” command. More examples can be found on the Internet where, beginning in the mid-1990s, it become common to create a few different versions of a Web site. The user with a fast connection can choose a rich multimedia version, whereas the user with a slow connection can choose a more bare-bones wersion that loads faster.
新媒体使我们能够创建在实质上有显著差异的同一对象的不同版本。在这种情况下，与不同尺度的地图的比较不再适用。常用软件中允许创建这种质上不同版本的命令示例包括 Photoshop 5 中的“变体”和“调整图层”，以及 Word 的“拼写和语法”命令中的“写作风格”选项。自 1990 年代中期以来，互联网中出现了许多创建不同版本网站的例子。快速连接的用户可以选择丰富的多媒体版本，而慢速连接的用户则可以选择加载更快的简化版本。

Among new media antworks, David Blair’s Waxs Web, a Web site that is an “adaptation” of an hour-long video narrative, offers a more radical implementation of the scalability principle. While interacting with the narrative, the user can change the scale of representation at any point, going from an image-based outline of the movie toa complete script or a particular shor, or a WRML scene based on this shot, and so on.

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Anorher example of how use of the scalability principle can create a dramatically new experience of an old
在新媒体网络中，David Blair 的 Waxs Web 网站是一个“改编”的一小时视频叙事，提供了更为激进的可扩展性原则的实现。在与叙事互动时，用户可以随时改变表现的尺度，从基于图像的电影大纲到完整的剧本，或特定的镜头，甚至是基于该镜头的 WRML 场景，等等。

^{19}

另一个例子展示了如何利用可扩展性原则创造出一种全新的旧体验。
19. hutpiljefterson willagevirginia.edu/waxd.
19. hutpiljefterson 村 virginia.edu/waxd.
media object is Stephen Mamber’s database-driven representation of Hitchcock’s The Bitrds. Mamber’s software generates a still for every shot of the film; it then automatically combines all the stills into a rectangular matrix one shot per celll. As a result, time is spatialized, similar to the process in Edison’s early Kinetoscope cylinders. Spatializing the film allows us to study its different teruporal structures, which would be hard to observe otherwise. As in WaxWWtb, the user can at any point change the scale of representation, going from a complete film to a particular shot.
媒体对象是斯蒂芬·曼伯基于数据库的希区柯克《鸟》的表现形式。曼伯的软件为电影的每个镜头生成一张静态画面，并自动将所有静态画面组合成一个矩形矩阵，每个单元格对应一个镜头。因此，时间被空间化，类似于爱迪生早期运动影像筒的过程。空间化电影使我们能够研究其不同的时间结构，这在其他情况下是很难观察到的。与 WaxWWtb 类似，用户可以随时调整表现的尺度，从完整的电影到特定的镜头。

As can be seen, the principle of variability is useful in allowing us to connect many important characteristics of new media that on first sight may appear unrelated. In particular, such popular new media structures as branching (or menu) interactivity and hypermedia can be seen as particular instances of the wariability principle. In the case of branching interactivity, the user plays an active role in derermining the order in which alneady gemerated elements are accessed. This is the simplest kind of interactiviry; more complex kinds are also possible in which both the elements and the structure of the whole object are either modified or generated on the fy in response to the user’s interaction with a program. We can refer to such implementations as open interactivity to distinguish them from the closed int teractivity that uses fixed elements arranged in a fixed branching structure. Open inceractivity can be implemented using a variety of approaches, including procedural and object-oriented computer programming,

AI, AL

, and neural networks.
如所示，变异性原则在帮助我们连接许多看似无关的新媒体重要特征方面非常有用。特别是，像分支（或菜单）互动和超媒体这样的流行新媒体结构可以视为变异性原则的具体实例。在分支互动中，用户积极参与决定已生成元素的访问顺序。这是最简单的互动形式；更复杂的形式也可能出现，其中整个对象的元素和结构会根据用户与程序的互动而被修改或生成。我们可以将这种实现称为开放交互，以便与使用固定元素并排列在固定分支结构中的封闭交互区分开。开放交互可以通过多种方式实现，包括过程式编程、面向对象编程、

AI, AL

和神经网络。

As long as there exists some kernel, some structure, some procorype that remains unchanged throughout the interaction, open interactivity can be thought of as a subset of the variability principle. Here a useful analogy can be made with Witugenstein’s theory of family resemblance, later developed into the theory of protorypes by cognitive psychologists. In a family, a number of relatives will share some features, although no single family member may possess all of the features. Similarly, according to the theary of prototypes, the meanings of many words in a nacural language deriwe not through logical definition but through proximity to a certain prototype.
只要存在某种内核、结构或原型在互动中保持不变，开放的互动性就可以被视为变异原则的一个子集。在这里，可以用维特根斯坦的家庭相似性理论作为类比，后来这一理论被认知心理学家发展为原型理论。在一个家庭中，许多亲属会共享一些特征，尽管没有一个家庭成员可能具备所有特征。同样，根据原型理论，许多自然语言中单词的意义并不是通过逻辑定义得出的，而是通过与某个原型的接近程度来理解的。

Hypernedia, the other popular structure of new media, can also be seen as a particular case of the more general principle of variability. According to the definition by Halasz and Schwartz, hypermedia systems "provide their users with the ability to create, manipulate and/or examine a network of information- containing nodes intercomnected by relational links."20 Because in new media individual media elements (images, pages of text, etc.) always retain their individual identity (the pritaiple of modularity), they can be “wired” together into more than one object. Hyperlinking is a particular way of achieving this wiring. A hyperlink creates a connecrion berween two elements, for example, between two words in two different pages or a sentence on one page and an image in anorher, or two different places within the same page. Elements connected through hyperlinks can exist on the same computer or on different computers connected on a network, as in the case of the World Wide Web.
超媒体，另一种流行的新媒体结构，可以被视为更一般的可变性原则的一个特例。根据哈拉兹和施瓦茨的定义，超媒体系统“使用户能够创建、操纵和/或检查由关系链接相互连接的信息节点网络。”由于在新媒体中，单个媒体元素（如图像、文本页面等）始终保持其独特身份（模块化原则），因此它们可以“连接”在一起形成多个对象。超链接是一种实现这种连接的特定方式。超链接在两个元素之间建立连接，例如在两个不同页面的两个单词之间，或者在一个页面上的句子与另一个页面上的图片之间，亦或是在同一页面内的两个不同位置之间。通过超链接连接的元素可以在同一台计算机上，也可以在连接到网络的不同计算机上，就像万维网的情况一样。

If in old media elements are “hardwired” into a unique structure and no. longer maintain their separate identity, in hypermedia elements and structure are separate from each other. The structure of hyperlinks-typically a branching tree-can be specified independently from the contents of a document. To make an analogy with the grammar of a natural language as described in Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic theory,

^{21}

we can compare a hypermedia structure that specifies connections between nodes with the deep structure of a sentence; a particular hypermedia text can then be compared with a particular sentence in a natural language. Another useful analogy is computer programming. In programming, there is clear separation berween algorithms and data. An algorithm specifies the sequence of steps to be performed on any data, just as a hypermedia structure specifies a set of navigation paths (i.e., connections between nodes) that potentially can be applied to any set of media objects.
在旧媒体中，元素往往“硬性连接”到一个独特的结构，失去了独立的身份；而在超媒体中，元素和结构是相互独立的。超链接的结构——通常呈现为分支树——可以独立于文档内容进行定义。为了与诺姆·乔姆斯基早期语言学理论中的自然语言语法进行类比，我们可以将超媒体结构中节点之间的连接比作句子的深层结构；特定的超媒体文本则可以与自然语言中的特定句子相比较。另一个有用的类比是计算机编程。在编程中，算法和数据之间有着明确的分离。算法定义了对任何数据执行的步骤序列，类似于超媒体结构定义了一组导航路径（即节点之间的连接），这些路径可以适用于任何媒体对象集合。

The principle of variability exemplifies how, historically, changes in media technologies are correlated with social change. If the logic of old media corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, the logic of new media fits the logic of the postindustrial society, which values individuality over conformity. In industrial mass society everyone was supposed to enjoy the same goods-and to shane the same beliefs. This was also the logic of media technology. A media object was assembled in a media factory (such as a Hollywood studio). Millions of identical copies wene produced from a
变异原则展示了历史上媒体技术的变化与社会变革之间的关系。如果旧媒体的逻辑与工业大众社会的逻辑相符，那么新媒体的逻辑则符合后工业社会的特点，后者更重视个体性而非从众。在工业大众社会中，每个人都应该享有相同的商品，并分享相同的信仰。这也是媒体技术的逻辑。媒体对象是在媒体工厂（如好莱坞制片厂）组装的，并从中生产出数百万个相同的副本。
20. Frank Halasz and Mayer Schwartz, “The Dexter Hypertext Referemce Moded,” Commermizcartiom of the

A C

CH (New York:

A C M, 1994), 30

.
20. Frank Halasz 和 Mayer Schwartz, “The Dexter 超文本参考模型,”

A C

CH 的商业化 (纽约:

A C M, 1994), 30

.
21. Noam Choonusky, Synatic Structrres (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1957).
21. 诺姆·乔努斯基，《句法结构》（海牙与巴黎：穆顿出版社，1957 年）。
master and distributed to all the citizens. Broadcasting, cinema, and print media all followed this logic.
这一信息被掌握并传播给所有公民。广播、电影和印刷媒体都遵循了这一逻辑。

In a postindustrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and “select” her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects/information to a mass audience, markering now tries to targer each individual separately. The logic of new media rechnology reflects this new social logic. Every wisitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom version of the site created on the fly from a database. The language of che text, the contents, the ards displayedall these can be customized. According to a report in USA Today ( 9 November 1999), “Unlike ads in magazines or orher real-world publications, ‘banner’ ads on Web pages change with every page view. And most of the companies that place the ads on the Web site track your movements across the Net, ‘remembering’ which ads you’ve seen, exactly when you saw them, whether you clicked on them, where you were at the time, and the site you have visited just before.”

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在后工业社会中，每位公民都可以构建自己独特的生活方式，并从众多（但并非无限）选择中“挑选”自己的意识形态。市场营销不再是将相同的物品或信息推送给大众，而是试图针对每个个体。新媒体技术的逻辑反映了这种新的社会逻辑。每位访问网站的用户都会自动获得一个根据数据库即时生成的个性化版本。文本的语言、内容和展示的广告都可以进行定制。根据《今日美国》（1999 年 11 月 9 日）的一份报告，“与杂志或其他现实世界出版物中的广告不同，网页上的‘横幅’广告会随着每次页面浏览而变化。” 大多数在网站上投放广告的公司会跟踪您在网络上的活动，"记住"您看到的广告、看到广告的具体时间、是否点击过、当时的位置以及您之前访问的网站。”

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Every hypertext reader gets her own wersion of the complere text by selecting a particular path through it. Similarly, every user of an interactive installation gets her own version of the work. And so on. In this way new media technology acts as the most perfect realization of the utopia of an ideal society composed of unique indiwiduals. New media objects assure users that their choices-and therefore, their underlying thoughts and desiresare uniqué, rather than preprogrammed and shared with others. As though trying to compensate for their earlier role in making us all the same, descendants of the Jacquard loom, the Hollerith tabulator, and Zuse’s cinemacomputer are now working to convince us that we are all unique.
每个超文本阅读者通过选择特定的路径，获得自己版本的完整文本。同样，每个互动装置的用户也会得到自己版本的作品。以此类推。通过这种方式，新媒体技术成为理想社会乌托邦的完美体现，构成了独特个体的集合。新媒体对象向用户保证，他们的选择——以及他们内心的思想和欲望是独特的，而不是预先设定的，与他人共享的。就像试图弥补他们早期让我们都变得相同的角色，雅卡尔织机、霍勒里斯制表机和祖斯的电影计算机的后代现在努力说服我们，我们都是独一无二的。
The principle of wariability as presented here has some parallels to the concept of “variable media,” developed by the artist and curator Jon Ippolito.

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I believe that we differ in two key respects. First, IPpolito uses variability to describe a characteristic shared by recent conceptual and some digital art, whereas I see variability as a basic condition of fall new media, not
这里提出的变异性原则与艺术家兼策展人乔恩·伊波利托所发展的“可变媒体”概念有一些相似之处。

^{23}

我认为我们在两个关键方面存在差异。首先，伊波利托将变异性用来描述最近的概念艺术和某些数字艺术的共同特征，而我则认为变异性是所有新媒体的基本条件，而不是。
22. “How Marketers ‘Profile’ Users,” USA Today 9 November 1999. 2A.
22. “营销人员如何‘刻画’用户，”《今日美国》1999 年 11 月 9 日。2A.
23. See htcp://www, three.org. Our conversations helped me to clacify my ideas, and I am wery griteful to Jon for the ongoing exchange. only art. Second, Ippolito follows the tradition of conceptual art in which an artist can vary any dimension of the artwork, ewen its content; my use of the term aims to reflect the logic of mainstream culture in that versions of the object share some well-defined “data.” This “data,” which can be a wellknown narrative (Psycha), an icon (Coca-Cola sign), a character (Mickey Mouse), or a famous star (Madonna), is referred to in the media industry as “property”. Thus all cultural projects produced by Madonna will be automatically united by her name. Using the theory of prototypes, we can say that the property acts as a protorype, and different versions are derived from this protorype. Moreover, when a number of wersions are being commercially released based on some “property,” usually one of these versions is treated as the source of the “data,” with orhers positioned as being derived from this source. Typically, the version that is in the same media as the original “property” is treated as the source. For instance, when a movie studio releases a new film, along with a computer game based on it, product tie-ins, music written for the movie, etc., the film is usually presented as the “base” object from which other objects are derived. So when George Lucas releases a new Star Warr movie, the original property-the original Star Wars trilogy-is referenced. The new movie becomes the “base” object, and all other media objects released along with it refer to this object. Canversely, when computer games such as Tomb Raider are remade into movies, the original computer game is presented as the “base” object.
23. 见 htcp://www, three.org。我们的对话帮助我澄清了想法，我非常感谢乔恩的持续交流。只有艺术。其次，伊波利托遵循了观念艺术的传统，艺术家可以改变艺术作品的任何维度，甚至是内容；我使用这个术语是为了反映主流文化的逻辑，因为物体的不同版本共享一些明确的“数据”。这些“数据”可以是一个众所周知的叙事（心理），一个图标（可口可乐标志），一个角色（米老鼠），或一个著名明星（麦当娜），在媒体行业中被称为“财产”。因此，麦当娜制作的所有文化项目将自动以她的名字联合在一起。根据原型理论，我们可以认为这个属性是一个原型，而不同的版本则是从这个原型衍生出来的。此外，当基于某个“属性”发布多个商业版本时，通常会将其中一个版本视为“数据”的来源，而其他版本则被视为从这个来源衍生的。一般来说，与原始“属性”在同一媒体上的版本被视为来源。例如，当一家电影公司发布一部新电影时，通常会同时推出基于该电影的电脑游戏、相关产品、为电影创作的音乐等，此时电影通常被视为其他对象的“基础”对象。因此，当乔治·卢卡斯发布一部新的《星球大战》电影时，原作——原始的《星球大战》三部曲——会被提及。新电影成为“基础”对象，所有与之同时发布的其他媒体作品都引用这个对象。相对而言，当像《古墓丽影》这样的电脑游戏被改编成电影时，原始的电脑游戏则被视为“基础”对象。

Although I deduce the principle of variability from more basic principles of new media-numerical representation and modularity of information-. the principle can also be seen as a consequence of the computer’s way of representing data-and modeling the world itself-as wariables rather than constants. As new media theorist and architect Marcos Nowak notes, a computer-and computer culture in its wake-substitutes every constant with a variable.

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In designing all functions and data strucrures, a computer programmer tries always to use wariables rather than constants. On the level of the human-computer interface, this principle means that the user is given many options to modiffy the performance of a program or a media object, be it a
尽管我从新媒体的基本原则——数值表示和信息模块化——中推导出可变性原则，但这一原则也可以看作是计算机表示数据和建模世界的方式的结果——将数据视为变量而非常量。正如新媒体理论家和建筑师马尔科斯·诺瓦克所指出的，计算机及其衍生的文化用变量替代了每一个常量。在设计所有功能和数据结构时，程序员总是尽量使用变量而不是常量。在人机界面层面，这一原则意味着用户可以有多种选择来修改程序或媒体对象的性能，无论它是什么。
24. Marcos Novak, lecture at the “Interactive Frictions” conference, University of Sourtherti Califormia, Los Angeles, 6 June 1999.
24. 马科斯·诺瓦克在“互动摩擦”会议上的演讲，地点：加州南方大学，洛杉矶，时间：1999 年 6 月 6 日。
compurer game, Web site, Web browser, or the operating system itself. The user can change the profile of a game character, modify how folders appear on the desktop, how files are displayed, what icons are used, and so forth. If we apply this principle to culture at large, it would mean that every choice responsible for giving a cultural object a unique identity can potentially remain always open. Size, degree of detail, format, colot, shape, interactive trajectory, trajectary through space, duration, rhythm, point of view, the presence or absence of particular characters, the dewelopment of plot-to name just a few dimensions of cultural objects in different media-can all be defined as variables, to be freely modified by a usser.
计算机游戏、网站、网页浏览器或操作系统本身。用户可以更改游戏角色的配置文件，修改桌面上文件夹的外观、文件的显示方式、使用的图标等。如果将这一原则应用于更广泛的文化领域，这意味着每一个赋予文化对象独特身份的选择都有可能始终保持开放。大小、细节程度、格式、颜色、形状、互动轨迹、空间中的路径、持续时间、节奏、视角、特定角色的存在或缺失、情节的发展——这些都是不同媒体中文化对象的维度——都可以被视为变量，供用户自由修改。

Do we want, or need, such freedom? As the pioneer of interactive filmmaking Grahame Weinbren argues, in relation to interactive media, making a choice involves a moral responsibility.

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By passing on these choices to the user, the author also passes on the responsibility to represent the world and the human condition in it. (A parallel is the use of phone or Web-based automated menu systems by big companies to handle their customers; while companies have turned to such systems in the name of “choice” and “freedom,” one of the effects of this cype of automation is that labor is passed from the company’s employees to the customer. If before a customer would ger the information or buy the product by interacting with a company employee, now she thas to spend her own time and energy navigating through numerous menus to accomplish the same resulc.) The moral anxiety that accompanies the shift from constants to variables, from traditions to choices in all areas of life in a contemporary society, and the corresponding anxiety of a writer who has to portray it, is well rendered in the closing passage of a short story by the contemporary American writer Rick Moody (the story is about the death of his sister):

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我们是否想要或需要这样的自由？正如互动电影的先驱格雷厄姆·温布伦所指出的，涉及互动媒体时，做出选择意味着承担道德责任。

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当作者将这些选择交给用户时，也将代表世界和人类状况的责任转移给了用户。（一个类似的例子是大公司使用电话或网络自动菜单系统来处理客户；虽然公司以“选择”和“自由”为名转向这些系统，但这种自动化的一个后果是，劳动从公司的员工转移到了客户身上。以前客户可以通过与公司员工互动来获取信息或购买产品，而现在她必须花费自己的时间和精力在众多菜单中寻找，才能达到同样的效果。在当代社会生活的各个领域，从常量到变量、从传统到选择的转变所带来的道德焦虑，以及作为作家必须描绘这一切而产生的相应焦虑，在当代美国作家瑞克·穆迪的一篇短篇小说的结尾段落中得到了很好的体现（这个故事讲述了他姐姐的去世）:

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I should fictionalize it more, I should concecall myself. I should consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should conflare her two children into ome, or reverse
我应该更加虚构，隐藏自己的身份。我需要考虑角色塑造的责任，可能将她的两个孩子合并成一个，或者反过来。

(Spring 1995), hutc://www.sva.eduMEJ/jaumalpages/MFJ28/GWOCEAN.HTML.
（1995 年春季），hutc://www.sva.eduMEJ/jaumalpages/MFJ28/GWOCEAN.HTML。

guoced in Wince Passaro, “Unlikely Stories,” Hayper’s Magazine vol. 299, no. 1791 (August 1999 ,

88 - 89

their genders, or ortherwise alter then, I should make her hoyfriend a husband, I showld explicate all the tributaries of my extended family (tits remarriages, its intemecine politics), I should novelize the whole thing, I should make it multigenerarionall, I should work is my forefarthers (stonemasons and nusspepermen), I should Let autifice create an elegant surface, I should make the events orderty, I should wait and write about it later, I should waic untill I’m not angry, I shouldnit clurter a narrative with fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I shmould make Meredith’s death shapely and persuasive, nom bunt and disjunctive, I sthouldn’t have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn’t have ro suffer, I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss you), I should wrice ondy of affection, I should make our travels in this earthly landscape safe and secure, II should have a berter ending, I shouldn’t say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn’t say she had clemams, as I do too.
在温斯·帕萨罗的《不太可能的故事》一文中，发表于海珀杂志第 299 卷。1791 年（1999 年 8 月，

88 - 89

他们的性别，或以其他方式改变他们。我应该把她的女朋友变成丈夫，详细说明我大家庭的所有支流（再婚、内部政治）。我应该将这一切小说化，让它多代相传，研究我的祖先（石匠和报纸商）。我应该让艺术家创造一个优雅的表面，确保事件有序。我应该等待，稍后再写，等到我不再生气。我不应该用片段、仅仅是美好时光的回忆或遗憾来混淆叙述。我应该让梅雷迪斯的死亡形状优美且有说服力，而不是笨拙和不连贯。我不应该考虑不可思议的事情，也不应该受苦，我应该直接在这里对她说y（我想念你的方式），我应该写下爱的诗句，我应该让我们在这片人间的旅程中安全无忧，我应该有一个更好的结局，我不该说她的生命短暂且常常悲伤，我不该说她有清晰的记忆，就像我一样。

5. Transcoding 5. 转换编码

Beginning with the basic, “material” principles of new media-numeric coding and modular organization-we moved to more “deep” and farreaching ones-automation and variability. The fifth and last principle of cultural transcoding aims to describe what in my wiew is the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media. As I have suggested, computerization turns media into computer data. While from one point of view, computerized media still displays structural organization that makes sense to its human users-images feature recognizable objects; text files consist of grammatical sentences; virtual spaces are defined along the familiar Cartesian coordinate system; and so on-from another point of view, its structure now follows the established conventions of the computer’s organization of data. Examples of these conventions are different data structures such as lists, records, and arrays; the already-mentioned substitution of all constants by variables; the separation between algorithms and data structures; and modularity.
从新媒体的基本“物质”原则和模块化组织开始，我们转向更“深刻”和更广泛的原则——自动化和可变性。文化转码的第五个也是最后一个原则旨在描述我认为计算机化媒体最重要的后果。正如我所提到的，计算机化使媒体转变为计算机数据。从一个角度来看，计算机媒体仍然展示出对人类用户有意义的结构组织——图像包含可识别的对象；文本文件由语法正确的句子组成；虚拟空间沿着熟悉的笛卡尔坐标系定义；等等——而从另一个角度来看，其结构现在遵循计算机数据组织的既定规范。这些规范的例子包括不同的数据结构，如列表、记录和数组；前面提到的用变量替代所有常量；算法与数据结构的分离；以及模块化。

The structure of a computer image is a case in point. On the level of representation, it belongs on the side of human culture, automatically entering in dialog with orher images, other culcural “semes” and “mythemes.” But on another level, it is a computer file that consists of a machine-teadable header, followed by numbers representing color values of its pixels. On this level it enters into a dialog with ocher computer files. The dimensions of this dialog are not the image’s content, meanings, or formal qualities, but rather file
计算机图像的结构就是一个典型例子。在表现层面上，它属于人类文化，自动与其他图像及其他文化的“语义”和“神话”进行对话。但在另一个层面上，它是一个计算机文件，由一个机器可读的头部和表示像素颜色值的数字组成。在这个层面上，它与其他计算机文件进行对话。这个对话的维度并不是图像的内容、意义或形式特征，而是文件本身。
size, file type, itype of compression used, file format, and so on. In short, these dimemsions belong to the compurer’s own cosmogony rather than to human culture.
大小、文件类型、使用的压缩方式、文件格式等。简而言之，这些维度属于计算机自身的宇宙观，而非人类文化。

Similarly, new media in general can be thought of as consisting of rwo distincr layers-the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer.” Examples of categories belonging to the culturall layer are the encyclopedia and the short story; story and plot; composition and point of view; mimesis and catharsis, comedy and tragedy. Examples of categories in the computer layer are process and packet (as in dara packets transmitted through the network); sorting and matching; function and variable; computer language and data structure.
类似地，新的媒体通常可以被视为由两个不同的层次组成——“文化层”和“计算机层”。文化层的例子包括百科全书和短篇小说；故事与情节；构图与视角；模仿与净化，以及喜剧与悲剧。计算机层的例子则包括过程与数据包（例如通过网络传输的数据包）；排序与匹配；函数与变量；计算机语言与数据结构。
Because new media is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer wrill affect the cultural layer. The ways in which che computer modells the wortd, represents data, and allows us to operate on it; the key operations behind all computer programs (such as search, match, sort, and filter); the conventions of HCI-in short, whar can be called the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmaticsinfluence the cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres, its contents.
由于新媒体是在计算机上创建、通过计算机分发并存储和归档的，因此可以预期计算机的逻辑会显著影响传统媒体的文化逻辑。也就是说，我们可以预期计算机层会影响文化层。计算机如何建模世界、表示数据以及允许我们对其进行操作；所有计算机程序背后的关键操作（如搜索、匹配、排序和过滤）；人机交互的惯例——简而言之，这些可以被称为计算机的本体论、认识论和实用主义，都会影响新媒体的文化层、其组织、新兴类型及其内容。

Of course, what I call “the computer layet” is not itself fixed but rather changes over time. As hatdware and software keep evolving and as the computer is used for new tasks and in new ways, this layer undergoes conrinuous transformation. The new use of the computer as a media machine is a case in point. This use is having an effect on the computer’s hardware and softuware. especially on the level of the human-computer interface, which increasingly resembles the interfaces of older media machines and cultural technologies-VCR, tape player, photo camera.
当然，我所称的“计算机层”并不是固定不变的，而是随着时间的推移而不断变化。随着硬件和软件的不断进步，以及计算机被用于新的任务和方式，这一层经历着持续的转变。计算机作为媒体机器的新用途就是一个很好的例子。这种用途对计算机的硬件和软件产生了影响，尤其是在人与计算机界面方面，这种界面越来越类似于旧媒体机器和文化技术的接口——录像机、录音机和照相机。

In summary, the computer layer and the culture layer influence each other. To use another concept from new media, we can say that they are being composited together. The result of this composite is a new computer culture-a blend of human and computrer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it.
总的来说，计算机层与文化层相互影响。用新媒体的一个概念来说，它们是相互交融的。这种交融的结果是新的计算机文化——人类与计算机意义的结合，传统人类文化塑造世界的方式与计算机自身的表达方式相结合。

Throughour the book, we will encounter many examples of the principle of transcoding at work. For instance, in “The Language of Cultural Inter- faces,” we will look at how conventions of the printed page, cinema, and traditional HCI interact in the interfaces of Web sites, CD-ROMs, virtual spaces, and computer games. The “Database” section will discuss how a databiase, originally a computer technology to organize and access data, is becoming a new cultural form in its own right. But we can also reinterpret some of the principles of new media already discussed as consequences of the transcoding principle. For instance, hypermedia can be understood as one cultural effect of the separation between an algorithm and a data structure, essential to computer programming. Just as in programming, where algorithms and data structures exist independently of each orher, in hypermedia data is separated from the nawigation structure. Similarly, the modular strucrure of new media can be seen as an effect of the modularity in structural computer programming. Just as a structural computer program consists of smaller modules that in turn consist of even smaller modules, a new media object has a modular structure.
在整本书中，我们将遇到许多转码原则运作的实例。例如，在《文化界面的语言》一章中，我们将探讨印刷页面、电影和传统人机交互的惯例如何在网站、CD-ROM、虚拟空间和计算机游戏的界面中相互作用。“数据库”部分将讨论数据库，这一最初用于组织和访问数据的计算机技术，如何演变为一种新的文化形式。同时，我们也可以将一些已经讨论过的新媒体原则重新解读为转码原则的结果。例如，超媒体可以被视为算法与数据结构分离所带来的文化效应，这在计算机编程中至关重要。就像在编程中，算法和数据结构彼此独立一样，在超媒体中，数据与导航结构是分开的。同样，新媒体的模块化结构可以视为结构化计算机编程中模块化的结果。就像一个结构化的计算机程序由更小的模块组成，而这些模块又可以进一步细分一样，新媒体对象也具有模块化的结构。

In new media lingo, to “transcode” something is to translate it inico another format. The computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural carcegories and concepts. That is, cultural caregories and concepts are subscitured, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that deriwe from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics. New media thus acts as a forerunner of this more general process of culrural reconceprualization.
在新媒体的术语中，“转码”指的是将某种内容转换为另一种格式。文化的数字化逐渐在所有文化类别和概念中实现类似的转码。这意味着，文化类别和概念在意义和/或语言层面上被新的概念所取代，而这些新概念源自计算机的本体论、认识论和实用主义。因此，新媒体成为这一更广泛的文化重新概念化过程的先锋。

Given the process of “conceptual transfer” from the computer world to culture at large, and given the new status of media as computer data, what theoretical framework carn we use to understand it? On one level new media is old media that has been digitized, so it seems appropriate to look at new media using the perspective of media studies. We may compare new media and old media such as print, photography, or television. We may also ask abour the conditions of distribution and reception and parterns of use. We may also ask about similarities and differences in the material properties of each medium and how these affect their aesthetic possibilities.
考虑到“概念转移”这一过程从计算机世界到更广泛的文化，以及媒体作为计算机数据的新地位，我们可以用什么理论框架来理解这一现象？在某种程度上，新媒体是已经数字化的旧媒体，因此从媒体研究的角度来看新媒体是合适的。我们可以比较新媒体与旧媒体，如印刷、摄影或电视。我们还可以探讨分发和接收的条件以及使用模式。我们还可以研究每种媒介的物质属性的相似性和差异，以及这些如何影响它们的美学可能性。

This perspective is important and

I

am using it frequently in this book, bur it is not sufficient. It camnot address the most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent-programmability. Comparing newi media to print, photography, or television will never tell us the whole story. For although from one point of view new media is indeed another type of media, from amother it is simply a particular type of computer data,
这个观点非常重要，我在这本书中经常提到，但这并不足够。它无法涵盖新媒体最根本的特性——可编程性，这一点在历史上是没有先例的。将新媒体与印刷、摄影或电视进行比较，永远无法完整地呈现这个故事。因为从某种角度来看，新媒体确实是一种新的媒体形式，但从另一个角度来看，它仅仅是一种特定类型的计算机数据。
something stored in files and databases, retrieved and sorted, run through algorithms and written to the output device. That the data represent pixels and that this device happens to be an outpuit screen is beside the point. The computer may perform perfectly the nolle of the Jacquard loom, but underneath it is fundamentally Babbage"s Analytical Engine-after all, this was its identity for 150 years. New media may look like media, but this is only the surface.
存储在文件和数据库中的信息被检索、排序，经过算法处理后写入输出设备。数据代表像素，而这个设备恰好是一个输出屏幕，这并不是重点。计算机可能完美地执行雅卡尔织机的功能，但其底层本质上是巴贝奇的分析机——毕竟，这就是它 150 年来的身份。新媒体可能看起来像媒体，但这只是表面现象。

New media calls for a new stage in media theory whose beginnings can be traced back to the revolutionary works of Harold Innis in the 1950 and Marshall McLuhan in the 1960 s. To understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories, and operations that characterize media that became programmable. From media studies, we mone to something that can be called “suytware studies”-from media theory to soffwate theory: The principle of transcoding is one way to start thinking about software theory. Another way, which this book experiments with, is to use concepts from computer science as categories of new media theory. Examples here are “interface” and “database.” And last but not least, along with analyzing “material” and logical principles of computer hardware and software, we can also look at the humancomputer interface and the interfaces of software applications used to author and access new media objects. The two chapters that follow are devoted to these topics.
新媒体呼唤媒体理论的新阶段，其起源可以追溯到哈罗德·伊尼斯在 1950 年代和马歇尔·麦克卢汉在 1960 年代的革命性著作。要理解新媒体的逻辑，我们需要转向计算机科学。在那里，我们可以找到特征化可编程媒体的新术语、类别和操作。从媒体研究转向“软件研究”——从媒体理论到软件理论：转码原理是思考软件理论的一种方式。另一个方法是将计算机科学的概念作为新媒体理论的类别。本书中的例子包括“接口”和“数据库”。“最后但并非最不重要的是，除了分析计算机硬件和软件的“材料”和逻辑原则外，我们还可以研究人机界面以及用于创作和访问新媒体对象的软件应用程序的接口。接下来的两章将专注于这些主题。”

What New Media Is Not
新媒体并非如此

Having proposed a list of the key differences between ruew and old media, I now would like to address other potential candidates. Following are some of the popularly held notions about the difference between new and old media that I will subject to scrutiny:
在列出新媒体和旧媒体之间的主要区别后，我想讨论其他可能的候选者。以下是一些普遍认为的新旧媒体差异的看法，我将对此进行深入分析：

New media is analog media converted to a digitall representation. In contrast to analog media, which is continuous, digitally encoded media is discrete.
新媒体是将模拟媒体转换为数字形式。与连续的模拟媒体不同，数字编码的媒体是离散的。
All digital media (texts, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, 3-D spaces) share the same digital code. This allows different media types to be displayed using one machine-a computer-which acts as a mulcimedia display device.
所有数字媒体（文本、静态图像、视觉或音频时间数据、形状、三维空间）都使用相同的数字代码。这使得不同类型的媒体可以通过一台计算机作为多媒体显示设备进行展示。
New media allows for random access. In contrast to film or videotape, which store daca sequentially, computer storage devices make it possible to access any data element equally fast.
新媒体允许随机访问。与按顺序存储数据的电影或录像带不同，计算机存储设备使得访问任何数据元素的速度都一样快。
Digitization inevitably involves loss of information. In contrast to an analog representation, a digitally encoded representation contains a fixed amount of information.
数字化不可避免地会导致信息的丢失。与模拟表示相比，数字编码的表示方式包含固定量的信息。
In contrast to analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation. 6. New media is interactive. In contrast to old media where the order of presentation is fixed, the user can now interact with a media object. In the process of interaction the user can choose which elements to display or which parhs to follow, thus generating a unique work In this way the user becomes the co-auchor of che work.
与每一份副本质量逐渐下降的模拟媒体相比，数字编码媒体可以无限复制而不会退化。新媒体是互动的。与顺序固定的旧媒体不同，用户现在可以与媒体对象进行互动。在互动过程中，用户可以选择显示哪些元素或遵循哪些路径，从而创造出独特的作品。通过这种方式，用户成为作品的共同创作者。

Cinema as New Media
电影作为一种新兴媒体

If we place new media within a llonger historical perspective, we will see that many of the principles above are nor unique to new media, but can be found in older media technologies as well. I will illustrate this fact by using the example of the technology of cinema.
如果我们从更长的历史视角来看待新媒体，就会发现上述许多原则并非新媒体所独有，而是也可以在旧媒体技术中找到。我将通过电影技术的例子来说明这一点。
(1) New media is analog media converted to a digical representationn. In contrast to analog media, which is continuous, digitally encoded media is discrete.
新媒体是将模拟媒体转换为数字形式的媒体。与连续的模拟媒体不同，数字编码的媒体是离散的。

Indeed, any digital representation consists of a limited number of samples. For example, a digital still image is a matrix of pixels-a 2-D sampling of space. However, cinema was from its beginnings based on sampling-the sampling of time. Cinema sampled time twenty-four times a second. So we can say that cinema prepared us for new media. All that remained was to take this already discrete representation and to quantify it. But this is sumply a mechanical step; what cinema accomplished wias a much more difficult conceptual break-from the continuous to the discrete.
确实，任何数字表示都是由有限数量的样本构成的。例如，数字静态图像是一个像素矩阵——对空间的二维采样。然而，电影从一开始就是基于时间的采样。电影每秒采样二十四次。因此，我们可以说电影为新媒体的出现做好了准备。接下来需要做的就是将这种已经离散的表示进行量化。但这仅仅是一个机械步骤；电影所实现的则是一个更为复杂的概念转变——从连续到离散。
Cinema is not the only media technology emerging toward the end of the ninteenth century that employed a discrete representation. If cimema sampled time, fax transmission of images, starting in 1907, sampledia 2-D space; even earlier, the first television experiments (Carey 1875; Niploww 1884) already involved sampling of both time and space.

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However, reaching mass popularity much earlier than these orher technologies, cinema was the first to make the principle of discrete representarion of the wisual public knowlledge.
电影并不是在十九世纪末出现的唯一一种采用离散表现的媒体技术。如果说电影是对时间的采样，那么从 1907 年开始的图像传真则是对二维空间的采样；甚至更早，第一次电视实验（Carey 1875；Niploww 1884）已经涉及到时间和空间的采样。

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然而，电影比这些其他技术更早地获得了大众的认可，成为第一个让公众了解离散表现原则的视觉媒介。
(2) All digital media (cexts, stell images, visual or audio cime data, shapes, 3-D spaces) share the same digiral code. This allows differemt media rypes to be dlisplawed using one machine-a computer-which acts as a multimedia display dewice.
所有数字媒体（文本、静态图像、视觉或音频数据、形状、三维空间）共享相同的数字代码。这使得不同类型的媒体可以通过一台计算机作为多媒体显示设备进行展示。

Although computer multimedia became commonplace only around 1990, filmmakers had been combining moving images, sound, and text
虽然计算机多媒体直到 1990 年才普及，但电影制作人早已开始将动态影像、声音和文字结合在一起

University of California Press, 19555, 15-24. (whether the intertitles of the silent era or the ritle sequences of the later period) for whole century. Cinema was thus the original modern “multimedia.” We can also point to much earlier examples of multiple-media displays, such as medieval illuminated manuscripts that combine text, graphics, and representational images.
加州大学出版社，1955 年，15-24。（无论是无声电影时代的字幕，还是后期的标题序列）整整一个世纪。因此，电影成为了最早的现代“多媒体”。我们还可以提到更早的多媒体展示例子，比如结合了文本、图形和表现性图像的中世纪彩绘手稿。
(3) New media allow for random access. In contrast to film or wideotape, which store dara sequentially, computer scorage devices make it possible to access any data element equally fast.
新媒体允许随机访问。与顺序存储数据的电影或录像带不同，计算机存储设备使得访问任何数据元素的速度都一样快。

For example, once a film is digitized and loaded in the compurer’s memory, any frame can be accessed with equal ease. Therefore, if cinema sampled time bur still preserved its linear ordering (oubsequent moments of time become subsequent frames), new media abandons this “human-centered” representation altogether-to put represenced time fully under human control. Time is mapped onto two-dimensional space, where it can be managed, analyzed, and manipulated more easily.
例如，一旦电影被数字化并加载到计算机内存中，任何一帧都可以轻松访问。因此，如果电影在采样时间的同时仍保留线性顺序（后续的时间对应后续的帧），那么新媒体则完全放弃了这种“以人为中心”的表现方式——将表现的时间完全置于人类的控制之下。时间被映射到二维空间，在这里可以更方便地进行管理、分析和操作。

Such mapping was already widely used in the nineteenth-century cinema machines. The Phenakisticope, the Zoorrope, the Zoopraxiscope, the Tachyscope, and Marey’s phorographic gun were all based on the same principle-placing a number of slightly different images arciund the perimeter of a circle. Even more striking is the case of Thomas Edison’s first cinema apparatus. In 1887 Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, began experiments to adopt the already prowen technology of a phonograph record for recording and displaying motion pictures. Using a special picture-recording camera, tiny pinpoint-size phorograpths were placed in spirals on a cylindrical cell similar in size to the phonography cylinder. A cylinder was to hold 42,000 images, each so small (

/

a inch wide) that a viewer would have to look at them through a microscope.

^{28}

The storage capacity of this medium was twenty-eight minutestwenty-eight minures of continuous time taken apart, flattened on a surface, and mapped onto a two-dimensional grid. (In short, time was prepared for manipulation and reordering, something soon to be accomplished by film editors.)
这种映射在十九世纪的电影机器中已经被广泛应用。幻影图、动物园轮、动物图像投影仪、快速图和马雷的摄影枪都基于同样的原理——在一个圆的周边放置若干略有不同的图像。更引人注目的是托马斯·爱迪生的第一台电影设备。1887 年，爱迪生和他的助手威廉·迪克森开始实验，利用已经成熟的留声机唱片技术来录制和展示动态影像。通过一种特殊的图像录制相机，微小的摄影图像被以螺旋形放置在一个与留声机圆筒大小相似的圆柱形胶囊中。一个圆柱体可以容纳 42,000 张图像，每张图像都非常小（

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The Language of New Media 新媒体的语言艺术

Lev Manovich 列夫·曼诺维奇

This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc.这本书是由 Graphic Composition, Inc.使用 Bell Gothic 和 Garamond 3 字体排版的。

Printed and bound in the United States of America.在美国进行印刷和装订。

Prologue: Vertov's Dataset序言：维尔托夫的资料集

16

Acknowledgments 致谢

Mobile phone: Nokia. 手机品牌：诺基亚。

1. htrtps//www.netcime.org.

A Personal Chronology 个人时间线

Introduction 引言

Theory of the Present现今理论

Mapping New Media: The Method新媒体的映射：方法论

Mapping New Media: Organization新媒体的映射与组织

The Terms: Language, Object, Representation条款：语言、对象与表现形式

What Is New Media?新媒体是什么？

Principles of New Media新媒体的基本原则

1. Numerical Representation数字的表示方式

2. Modularity 2. 模块化设计

3. Automation 3. 自动化技术

4. Variability 4. 变异性分析

5. Transcoding 5. 转换编码

What New Media Is Not新媒体并非如此

Cinema as New Media电影作为一种新兴媒体

The Language of New Media
新媒体的语言艺术

This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc.
这本书是由 Graphic Composition, Inc.使用 Bell Gothic 和 Garamond 3 字体排版的。

Printed and bound in the United States of America.
在美国进行印刷和装订。

Prologue: Vertov's Dataset
序言：维尔托夫的资料集

Theory of the Present
现今理论

Mapping New Media: The Method
新媒体的映射：方法论

Mapping New Media: Organization
新媒体的映射与组织

The Terms: Language, Object, Representation
条款：语言、对象与表现形式

What Is New Media?
新媒体是什么？

Principles of New Media
新媒体的基本原则

1. Numerical Representation
数字的表示方式

What New Media Is Not
新媒体并非如此

Cinema as New Media
电影作为一种新兴媒体