SoftwareStudies

08/27/2026

The inventors of the first personal computer (Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC, the first half of the 1970s) expected its users to program new types of media themselves. The media authoring apps the computer came with were only meant to serve as examples. The computer itself would be infinitely extendable. Half a century later, generative AI brings this vision closer: more and more people are using AI to program all kinds of personal tools.

For example, I was editing a text today — and asked Claude to build a custom display showing my original alongside the edited version. And then I started to think of new functions to add. In these screenshots you can see how I can hover over any correction — and see Claude's explanation of why it was suggested. Every time I use it, I think of more things my text editor should do — and ask Claude to add these features.

Or tomorrow I can throw it away and ask Claude to make something different. Thinking more generally: perhaps we'll be moving from software as it exists today — applications with many functions and periodic updates — to personal tools we quickly make for a specific task and then discard.

Software as a durable object gives way to software as a gesture.

08/24/2026

Rhizome is celebrating its 30-year anniversary next month. Please join me to congratulate everybody involved in running it today — and during all these years!

This anniversary has a special importance for me. Rhizome was founded in 1996 by Mark Tribe. Mark got his MFA from the Visual Art Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1994. I joined the faculty of that same department — also in 1996.

In the first few years of its existence, Rhizome had a number of regional editors — and I was its San Diego editor. And I have been publishing all my texts written in the second part of the 90's also there.

https://zurl.co/LCpzS

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation.

08/12/2026

I asked six leading AI models the same question — who are the key thinkers in media, technology, art, and culture since 1960? The models were ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, alongside Kimi, DeepSeek, and Qwen.

They produced six different maps. Some look similar to each other, while others differ in their categories and rankings. Together, they offer a glimpse of how contemporary AI systems construct an intellectual canon.

Which map looks most correct to you — and what is missing from it?

08/10/2026

I just finished a new short text — "The Map and the Territory: Four Contemporary Art Worlds."

It starts from a single claim: there is no such thing as "contemporary art." There are at least four contemporary art worlds — the market, social media platforms, the institutions, and the local art worlds of artists' societies and and small regional galleries. Each has its own system of support, its own institutions, its own criteria of success. The fourth is not one world but thousands — one per region, each complete in itself.

The four barely intersect. An artist can work successfully for forty years inside one of them without needing to know how the others operate — and recognition earned in one does not convert into recognition anywhere else.

PDF:
https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/the-map-and-the-territory

08/08/2026

I just finished a new article: "Six Worlds of Digital Art: Audiences, Institutions, Values."

Download PDF: https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/is-digital-art-a-visual-art

Abstract -

Digital art is usually defined by its technology — art made with computers — and then divided by tool and output format: net art, interactive installation, data art, etc. This article takes a different approach, borrowed from the sociology of culture and informed by my four decades of working in the field. Over those decades digital art did not only grow; it divided. Separate worlds emerged, each with its own audiences, institutions, criteria of evaluation and support structures. I describe six: historical digital art, digital practice inside contemporary art, the specialist world of festivals and labs, platform digital art, commissioned digital media, and immersive spectacle. What distinguishes them is not technique but three other things — where the work circulates, who values it, and by what criteria it is judged.

I borrow the term “worlds” from the title of an influential book by Howard Becker (Art Worlds, 1982). Becker’s argument is that artistic value and recognition are socially organized. He examines how particular groups collectively define, support, circulate and sustain things as art; meaning emerges through social interaction rather than residing in the object or the artist alone. Different scenes and institutional formations have different cooperative networks and different conventions, and fine art is not the model for all artistic activity: amateur, commercial and craft practices can each be studied as art worlds in their own right. Art is not simply something an artist makes — it is something many people enable, organize, circulate, interpret and recognize together.

Following Becker, I describe these features for each of the six worlds, and then the circulation between them: careers now cross from one world into another, and so do tools, works, formats and conventions. But most digital artists still work inside a single world, and this is why an artist can succeed by the criteria of one world while remaining invisible to all the others.

08/04/2026

If you work in design, art, or film - I highly recommend these famous Soviet avant-garde animated films from the 1920s (all available on YouTube).
1. Interplanetary Revolution (1924), created by Nikolai Khodataev, Yuri Merkulov, and Zenon Komissarenko.
2. The Post (1929), by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky.
3. Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov) contains a great deal of animation. In 1924, he made Soviet Toys, the first Soviet animated film.

07/28/2026

Call for papers: International Conference on the History of Media Arts and Technology 2027.

07/23/2026

My advice about organizing non-fiction books, academic dissertations, and master's theses. I have written 12 books, plus 3 exhibition catalogs and 2 collections of my articles. Each time I ended up following one of two popular structures: hub and spoke (modular) or cumulative (scaffolded).

In hub and spoke (modular), each chapter or section is completely separate from the rest. You can move them around, take any out, and add new ones at any time. Often there is one exception: a first chapter that establishes the key terms, which the later chapters rely on. But apart from that, the chapters are independent of each other.

This is, in my experience, the easiest way to assemble a larger piece of writing (book or thesis).

But in cumulative (scaffolded) organization, each chapter or section depends upon the previous ones. There is always more work than we expected. I

t takes far longer and sometimes turns into a real struggle. If possible, don't do it - unless your topic really needs it.

(Academic theses sometimes have their own structural requirements. Even then, try to make at least some parts modular.)

My main (longer) books and their organization -

The Language of New Media (2001) - modular
Software Takes Command (2007/2013) - cumulative
Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017) - modular
Cultural Analytics (2020) - cumulative
Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media (2024) - modular
A new book I am working on now - modular

07/20/2026

“Quantifying institutional gender inequality
in contemporary visual art” - a very important quantitative study published in Science journal.

The authors use exhibition data for 65,768 contemporary artists in 20,389 institution around the world (museums and galleries). This is the first quantitative study that uses such large data. Although we all are aware of the overall lack of gender balance in the art world, this study reveals concrete patterns and differences between countries, and also relation between exhibitions and auctions.

Full paper: https://zurl.co/rH1VU

07/17/2026

What was the subject of my very first two published articles? Between 1984 and 1993, I worked in the emerging field of 3D computer animation — and it became the subject of these articles, which focused on photorealism in CG. To my knowledge, they were the first discussion of this new medium from a humanities and media theory perspective.

In “Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics” (Afterimage, 1992), I analyzed how photorealism in computer graphics differs fundamentally from realism in analog media such as photography and film. A photograph captures all of reality at once; a synthetic image assembles the world from different algorithms, each simulating a different phenomenon. As a result, synthetic realism is partial and uneven — some parts of the real are rendered convincingly while others lag far behind. With the CG technology of the early 1990s, you could simulate a face but not hair, metal but not cloth.

Thirty-five years later, this analysis has lost none of its force. Only the details change. While today almost everything can be visually simulated, not everything has the same precision. The underlying logic — reality assembled from separate algorithms, with uneven results — endures.

Realism has been a recurring theme throughout the history of media. Photography kept advancing — faster exposures, finer detail, black and white giving way to color. Cinema followed the same path, adding synchronized sound at the turn of the 1930s. Video games went from minimal sprites to today’s atmospheric, highly detailed worlds. And over the last few years, AI image and video generation has taken up the same quest — each new model chasing more convincing faces, light, and motion. The pursuit of the “real” keeps returning in new technical form.

PDFs of both articles:

https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/real-wars-esthetics-and-professionalism-in-computer-animation

https://zurl.co/pc6ZS