Lev Manovich - Commentary

I really admired the elegance and insight of Manovich’s reading of Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera”–which I hadn’t expected to be the culminating point of this chapter. The argument makes me consider a number of other works of the period as narrative-database hybrids. I’m teaching Borges’s Ficciones to some undergraduates this week, and it strikes me that he’s often pushing his short stories to the opposite side of this divide from where the content would take them: stories about narrative literature often get the database treatment (catalogues of works by the fictional Pierre Menard and Herbert Quain), whereas stories about databases get the narrative treatment (tales of discovery and history involving the encyclopedia of “Tlön” or the “Library of Babel”). I’m not as convinced that we can find such hybridity in Cervantes, Swift, or Homer (Manovich 234), except in brief catalogue or meta-narrative moments; but in general I’m taken by the idea that the contest between database and narrative has been perennial. I only wonder, however: does this dichotomy neglect other forms of expression and recording, like lyric, which is neither narrative nor data-driven and yet continues to exert a strong force in our culture (perhaps not in poetry, but at least in music)?

We’re used to museums providing certain narratives in the way we move through them: e.g. movements through art-historical time, from object to context, or from passive learning to applied learning. To the extent that they have a database structure, it’s usually of a higher order; we can choose different sections or galleries, but once we’ve chosen, we’re guided through a micronarrative. To change the usual experience of a museum in the way that Vertov changed the usual experience of film, it would be interesting to flip this model: i.e. to have a museum where visitors follow a narrative path overall, but where each section is completely open to open wandering about in database-like collections. (Though I worry that maybe I’ve just described IKEA.)

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