If the strongest point of the N. Katherine Hayles’ seminar was her superb framing of the theoretical issues, the strongest aspect of Lev Manovich’s talk was that it seemed to gain more and more momentum as time went on. Which is to also say, Manovich got into the swing of things a tad more slowly. Indeed, as he was being introduced he made last minute amendments to his presentation. And the whole set up was rather punk – no PowerPoint here friends, though plenty of computation.

Another difference from the Hayles was that Manovich’s seminar didn’t have a theoretical preamble. Instead, the talk was largely taken up with Manovich outlining a recent project of his, which applies different techniques of data visualisation to an unexpected terrain: the objects of the arts and humanities, such as cultural texts and artefacts. As Manovich went through the talk, he nimbly (for the most part) jumped to and fro through various folders on his Mac, opening up different visualizations. For example, every cover of Time magazine over the 20th Century placed edge-to-edge. Or an evenly spaced selection of screenshots from 60 hours of video game play (I can’t recall which game). Or a scattergram of the average film shot lengths over the last century, showing tendencies of films coming out of different national contexts. Or his centrepiece, which he started and ended the talk with: a ‘small’ sample of around 10,000 Manga pages, arranged in a collage, with the position of each page determined by level of contrast (x axis) and level of greyscale (y axis).

Manovich’s point, which by the end I was actually quite convinced by, was that using visualizations like these provides a unique way to observe ‘patterns’. Manovich wasn’t saying such visualizations provide access to some deep meaning or understanding, but rather, that visual patterns are a rather interesting way to open up questions for further exploration (e.g. seeing a pattern in Time magazine covers during a certain period, and then further exploring what transformations might have been taking place). What I liked so much about the talk was how it seemed to rub so uncomfortably against the cherished approaches of much of the arts and humanities. Indeed, once questions rolled around, there were pressing questions directed at Manovich; accusations, for example, that he was wrongly proposing, even promoting, ‘generalisation’. And I loved his eventual answer to these charges: “so!?” His point, as I understood it, was that at the level of pointing to patterns, visualizations are no more a generalisation than Deleuze’s writings from the 1960s (which might also be used in the lead up to a deeper understanding of some particular cultural artefact in the present). And that is an interesting thought.