Lev Manovich, 2008

How to Represent Information Society?

Miltos Manetas is a painter of contemporary life. He paints joysticks, computers, computer game consoles and computer cables (lots of them). He also paints people intensely engaged with consumer electronic devices, such as playing a computer game, without ever showing what games they are playing or what images they're looking at. Instead, he focuses on human-computer interface: hands clutching a joystick, a face looking at a screen, a body stretched across the floor in intense concentration or, alternatively, relaxing beside a laptop, computer console or TV.  

Manetas’s works can be seen within a well-established tradition in modern painting of representing modern people in their particularly modern settings. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire published the essay The Painter of Modern Life, where he anticipated the soon to appear works of the Impressionists that captured modern dress, mannerisms and new modern spaces. Other artists soon followed. Think of Matisse’s bourgeois interiors, or George Grosz, Otto Dix and other artists identified with the New Objectivity movement who captured city dwellers as though illuminated by medical lights or photographed for a police mug shot; or American realist painters between the First and Second World Wars making satirical images of people in bars, on the beach, or in other leisure spaces. All such paintings struck their contemporaries as being quintessentially modern and therefore sometimes caused scandal, as for example did Manet’s Olympia. In fact, they were consistent with the established portraiture tradition of showing a person in their specific surroundings. There is, therefore, a direct line running from the portraits of Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer to the works of Pierre Bonnard and Grosz.

We can also think of another art tradition which is more unique to the modern period: representing people engaged in specifically modern forms of labor, e.g. working in a factory, operating machinery, making steel in a mill or doing research in a scientific laboratory. Whilst we can already find such paintings in the second part of the nineteenth century (for instance, Van Gogh’s early painting of a loom worker), with their appearance corresponding to the Realist and Naturalist movements in the arts, they began to be produced systematically in Russia after the 1917 revolution and in the Soviet Block countries (Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, North Korea) after World War II. In these Communist countries representation of work became one of the main genres of visual art. Eventually such paintings become academic, template-driven and not overly interesting; but in the 1920s and the first part of the early 1930s, Russian artists created some of the most poetic artworks of the twentieth century depicting people engaged in labor. In these works, humans and machines are neither reduced to common decorative abstract forms, as in the works of Fernand Leger, nor do they aggressively push into each other, as in photomontages by Dadaists. In other words, they do not follow the typical cyborg schema which became popular in Europe after World War I. Instead, we see humans working in harmony with machines to produce parts, goods and further machines. 

The creative role of labor was one of the cornerstones of Karl Marx’s theory. Later, the constant discussions of fulfilling and satisfying labor under Communism versus the degrading and exploitative labor under Capitalism was one of the favorite topics of Soviet media and art critics. However, the lyrical Russian paintings from the 1920s and 1930s did not illustrate these theories and dogmas. Instead, humans and machines are shown co-existing in a poetic dream-like world, a kind of “industrial classicism”. 

Today, we no longer live in an industrial society and factory work is no longer a symbol of our times. We live in an information society. All kinds of work are reduced to manipulating data on one’s computer screen – in short, processing information. As you walk or drive past office buildings in any city, the offices regardless of the company all appear the same, with rows of computer screens and keyboards. Regardless of their actual profession, financial analysts, city officials, secretaries, architects, accountants and pretty much everybody else is doing the same thing: processing information.

If we want to represent work specific to information society or create symbols of this society, what approaches can we take? In retrospect, we can see that the artists working in the first part of the twentieth century had an easier job than we do now. Industrial society created new and distinct forms: trains, cars, airplanes, bridges, factory buildings and industrial machinery itself. To create symbols of an industrial age, all artists had to do was to depict these new forms. If we look through the pages of the avant-garde publications of the 1920s such as L’Esprit Nouveau, published by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant in Paris between 1920 and 1925, we encounter endless images of the modern industrial icons: the Fiat Lingotto factory with its roof serving as a car race track, American grain elevators, Ford cars. These images traveled from one magazine to another; they were equally favored by architects, filmmakers, photographers and poets. 

Industrial society was also depicted by using the body of a worker. Paintings, photographs and films represented workers naked from the waist up so that their strong muscles were fully visible: workers carrying their instruments of labor; workers’ bodies moving in graphical patterns as they work. This last strategy was particularly important. Different kinds of factory work involved distinct and usually repetitive patterns of body movements. Modernist art and cinema are filled with representations of these movements. For instance, while Vertov ‘s Enthusiasm, Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times respectively celebrate, criticize and caricature modern work, they all use similar visual strategies. They emphasize the regularity of workers’ movements, abstract and iconize these movements and establish parallels between the movements of bodies and the movements of machines.

In contrast to industrial society, which easily provides images and icons with which artists can represent it, information society can be said to “resist visualization.” That is, it does not offer specific visual icons, forms or movement patterns. In fact, I would even go further and suggest that the essential activities which define it are “anti-visual”. As I already noted, typical information labor involves people in front of computers, control panels and other human-machine interfaces. There are no graphical body movements and, regardless of the concept of the work and the type of industry, it all looks the same: a relatively static figure in front of the screen with his hands on a keyboard. Similarly, if the industrial technologies typically involve visible movements of the parts – the wheels of a train or a car, the cylinders of a combustion engine, propeller of a plane and so on – there is nothing visibly moving in information technology. Of course, every second millions of bits move between the hard drive, the memory, the graphics card, the processor and the network, but we can't see it happen. Similarly, we can’t see information that flows between network routers, between a Wi-Fi point and nearby computers, between parts containing a RFID chip and a RFID reader, and so on. All these movements take place beyond the scale of our perception and cognition; beyond our bodies. 

The fact that it's difficult to visually represent information society doesn't mean it can't be done, but it's definitely not easy. So far, only a few artists have systematically tried to do this and Manetas is one of them. You would think that more artists would want to represent what millions of humans actually do – the unique form which humanity assumed in the early twenty-first century. They no longer hunt, work in the fields or operate heavy machinery – instead, they stare into computer screens and mobile phones, type on keyboards, play computer games and operate various other human-computer interfaces. Manetas is the only contemporary painter who has made this reality the focus on his paintings. Manetas, therefore, is a true “painter of information life”. This is already amazing and remarkable in itself.

In thinking about the strategies of Manetas’s paintings, I can place his paintings in a room next to some of the most accomplished figurative artists of the twentieth century: Edward Hopper, Balthus, Alexander Deineka. Similarly to these artists, Manetas slightly abstracts the human forms and the forms of the human environment. He extracts these forms from the everyday reality and places them within the space of a painting. What matters now are the contrasts between empty fields of color and the elegant arabesques articulating or going over these fields, or between the sharp lines and flowing soft brushstrokes. 

At the same time, the specificity with which Manetas represents his subjects – for instance, particular types of cable connections or particular models of game consoles – makes his paintings the very precise documents of the time in which they are painted. This tension between the modern painterly tradition to which Manetas’s paintings clearly belong and the concrete and uniquely contemporary detail in these paintings is what gives them their surprising and unique quality. Normally, we do not expect a modern figurative painting to have the specificity of a consumer electronics catalog. 

If we look at various nineteenth and twentieth century figurative painters who worked on the same problem as Manetas – representing modern humans inside their specifically modern environments – we notice that the “light abstraction” filter which they applied to physical reality often affected the specificity of the details as shown in their paintings. Visually, this is what happens when you take a digital photograph and run the “Blur more” filter in Photoshop. All contours get slightly blurred and the image acquires more of an abstract quality, but at the same time its historical specificity is removed. The blur filter invented by Manetas, so to speak, is more selective. While it evens out the color and tone gradations inside the shapes and backgrounds, it preserves the sharpness of contours and, consequently, the historical specificity of the selective details. These details unmistakably identify one shape as a PowerBook G3, another shape as a VGA cable, etc. For instance, in Girl (2005), we can’t discern any details of the girl’s face, yet we clearly can read Nike Swoosh logo on her sneakers.

Painting a human being in his or her interior environment is a tradition that goes back many centuries. Perhaps the main difference between twentieth century artists who created such paintings and their classical predecessors is the treatment of space around a human figure. From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, the figure is placed inside a realistic looking interior. This interior may be staged to contain the symbols of wealth and power such as precious fabrics, furniture or other paintings but it's normally still plausible, with the placed objects confirming to a perspectival space. But twentieth century figurative artists were aware of the new language of abstraction, which can create meaning purely through formal contrasts. (In fact, many painters creating figurative works in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s first went through an abstract period). Consequently, twentieth century artists started using a new strategy: positioning human figures against empty areas of space. Some such as Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon made this space completely neutral and abstract. Others, such as Balthus, presented this the space as realistic (i.e., it is three-dimensional and consistent with a human figure inside it), but arranged it to be completely empty of any objects. In this way, seemingly representational space becomes abstract and symbolic. Hopper was probably the best user of this technique. The unspoken drama in many of his paintings revolves around the contrast between a figure and the seemingly infinite and indifferent space in which it exists – such as the dark cosmos of a street at night, or the uniform field of grass outside of a motel.

Manetas also uses this technique of placing the figures inside seemingly realistic but actually staged and abstracted space. Often, he paints his figures from above so this space is a floor. (This birds’ eye view, which is typical of video games, has, to the best of my knowledge, never before been systematically used in painting). It can also be a wall which can contain suggestions of furniture. The fact that, even at its most abstract, this space can be unmistakably identified as an interior already gives this space a different meaning: it is not infinite as Hopper’s street at night but definitely finite. I would not call it domestic but it is certainly not alienating as with Hopper, Giacometti or Bacon. So what is this space?

In my view, Manetas conceptualizes an interior space as an equivalent of a computer desktop, which is there whenever we use a computer. In other words, it is a background against which we arrange our lives and carry out our everyday activities. We place icons and folders on this desktop; similarly, people in Manetas’s paintings place laptops, game consoles, TVs, cables, pieces of clothing and their own bodies within the empty interior space. This space does not frame or define our identities. Its emptiness does not have any existential quality typical of the figurative art of the 1940s-1960s. Nor it is the charged “negative space” of modernism in general and it does not evoke the special feeling of lightness and disappearance effects of supermodern architecture. (This term was introduced in 1997 by Hans Ibelings to describe the sensibility of buildings such as Foundation Cartier by Jean Nouvel, 1994, and French National Library in Paris by Dominique Perrault, 1989). Instead, the space painted by Manetas is simply a neutral “background” and nothing more. 

This visual treatment of space as a neutral “background” also has another meaning. The space in Manetas’s paintings can be thought of as the space of electronic communication: a vacuum constantly traversed by electronic signals. Therefore, this space is never completely empty but is full of activity and movement and this is how Manetas paints it. We see different colored lines, dots and various small shapes that stand out against the stillness of the background. The network of hectic lines creates an impression of constant busyness and movement. The quality of this movement is very different from what we find in portraits by Giacometti where the dramatic swirling brushstrokes encircle the subject or in Bacon where the thrusting lines alternatively define and blur the subject. In Manetas’s paintings, this movement is like a constant barely audible buzzing of electronic equipment. Numerous bits of data are always moving but, in contrast to the parts of industrial machinery, we don’t see anything – we only hear a light, persistent buzz.

In painting the spaces of information society, Manetas is particularly interested in human-computer interface: the way in which humans communicate with and control computers and other devices. In his paintings, the large cyclical and repetitive movements of workers of the industrial era are replaced by small movements of the hand and fingers operating the interface of a Playstation or a Sony VAIO laptop. These new body movements are also repetitive but they are no longer cyclical. That is, while a hand repeatedly presses buttons on a joystick or keys on a keyboard, the pattern is no longer predictable and regular. This irregularity of body movements is as specific to information (i.e. cognitive) labor as was regularity to industrial labor. In the latter, body followed the regular movement of a machine; in the former, an interactive computer responds to actions initiated by a human who thinks – which is not a uniform fixed process. 

Sometimes Manetas paints a hand that is not clutching anything but is simply resting on a knee. Sometimes we see complete figures resting but more often, they are engaged in play. The intensity of their concentration and the immobility of their tense bodies make you think that they may actually be working: monitoring a telecommunication network, flying a large plane with hundreds of passengers or studying protein structures in a lab. In some way they are: just as a scientist analyzes visualized data or an operator of automated factory scans the monitors, Manetas’ figures analyze what is on the screen in front of them to make immediate decisions. In other words, while they are engaged in leisure as opposed to work, their perceptual, cognitive and bodily activities are work-like. So, although Manetas does not literally paint information work, he is directly engaged with the new kind of human-machine relationship which is central to both info-work and info-leisure activities today. 

Looking at Manetas’s representations of our information environment from his very first paintings to the very latest, we see a change. The early paintings of the 1990s reflected the popular understanding of the computer as a kind of unfamiliar and foreign presence, even an alien; computer work as immersion and withdrawal from the physical surrounding; the laptop, the games console “sucking in” the user away from the immediate space. This understanding was already prefigured in earlier fiction: for instance, TV in David Cronenberg’s 1982 Videodrom; the plot of Tron (Steven Lisberger. 1982); or the characters in Wiiliam Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The orgy of electronic cables in Manetas’s early paintings that seems to grow and multiply also reminds me of visions of alien techno-beings in movies such as the Alien series and the Matrix. 

In contrast, the 2005 painting Girls in Nike represents technology as being completely integrated and fused with the living environment: items of fashionable clothing and computer cables portrayed as complementary; the atmosphere is decorative and festive. Technology is no longer threatening; nor is it an outside force that has been domesticated. Rather, it is playful and playable: it brings a party into the everyday. The sounds which accompany our interaction with the icons; the icons in the Dock in MAC OS X’s Aqua interface which playfully unfold into windows; colorful desktop backgrounds; shiny metallic reflective surfaces – all this makes electronics and computer consumer devices technology stand out from the everyday grayness and routine. Technology is a pet which surprises us, sometimes disobeying and even annoying us – but is always animated, always entertaining, always fun and almost fashionable. This is exactly how it is represented in Girls in Nike and other recent paintings. Thus, Manetas’s paintings document the shift which took place within one decade of computer culture: from the vision of alienating immersion, exemplified by the popularity of VR in the middle 1990s, to the concept of fusion between computers and everyday life, exemplified by the growing popularity of pervasive computing and ambient intelligence research by the middle 2000s.

My visit to the famous Colette store in Paris in October 2005, the same day I saw Girls in Nike in Manetas’s studio, only confirmed this new identity of computer technology. Colette, www.colette.fr, is a legendary store that introduced a new concept in the middle of the 1990s – a store as a curated collection of the most interesting objects being designed around the world with an obligatory hip café and changing art exhibitions. I have been to Colette a number of times but when I visited in October 2005, I saw something structurally new. The display, which was positioned right in the center of the store across the store entrance, housed the latest cell phones, PDAs and a portable Sony Playstation (PSP). These “techo-jewels” came to dominate the store, taking the space away from albums, perfumes, cloves and various design objects which all were delegated to the perimeter. Just as in Manetas’ new paintings, the techo-objects did not look dominating, threatening or alien. They seemed to acquire the same status as perfume, photography books, clothes and the other items in the store. Put differently, they were no longer “technology” but had become simply “objects” giving them the same rights as other objects which we use daily: to be beautiful and elegant, to have interesting shapes and textures, to reflect who we are and at the same time allow us to reinvent ourselves. In short, they now belonged to the world of design and fashion rather than engineering.

And yet, this visual similarity should not deceive us. These playful fashion-conscious objects are not like any objects we have ever interacted with previously. Connected through always-on networks, everyone is just another nerve of information society. Although we encounter and participate in this society daily, capturing its typical or essential dimensions visually has so far eluded practically all artists. Manetas is one of the few who has been systematically working to represent these new dimensions. Therefore, unlike many other artists today, he can truly be called “the painter of contemporary life”