Tuesday, June 17, 2008

A New Operating Manual

Manovich, in chapter 3 of his The Language of New Media, describes three aspects of operation: selection, compositing, and teleaction. He discusses how the art of montage led today's producers and consumers to using the tools of new media to create new forms of montage using digital photographs, audio and visual recordings.

By logging on to youtube.com, one can see millions of examples of people creating their montages by using pre-existing art or products. A very popular montage format is reworking movie trailers. An example is the Brokeback.. to the Future trailer which takes the musical score from Brokeback Mountain and the text breaks discussing basic plot and blends in vague dialogue between Marty McFly and Doc from the Back to the Future trilogy. It makes for a very humorous clip but show how easy it is for people to do.

Movie trailers are really on the beginning as young people today easily use pre-existing photos, sounds images, etc, to create new art. However, with the ease of taking and remaking, do we risk loosing the ability to create new from scratch?

1 comment:

Lance Strate said...

Interesting example, but why not embed the video, or at least include the link?