As the digital computer comes to function as a gateway to all culture, a filter through which all cultural communication passes, computer concepts are being superimposed on traditional cultural concepts, categories and distinctions.

Concepts such as variable, parameter, file, object, input and output, storage, database, data and program, which define the computer's ontology, so to speak, are now being projected onto traditional cultural categories: author and reader, text and image, reading and viewing, form and content, library and museum.

This superimposition is taking place on many levels, and we are currently witnessing its very early stage. The viewer, listener and reader are replaced by the user - a change which in itself signifies a range of new conditions: active relationship to a message which the user can change; the user possessing a certain degree of competency in the language of the message be it Wordperfect, Photoshop, Director or HTML, and, least but not the last, the human-computer interface itself. This is a different regime of perception which involves physical actions, planning and constant decision-making (I purposely have not used the term interactivity but tried to spell out some of the conditions which this all too general term implies). Catalogue, library, museum - in fact any collection of cultural objects in any media - are replaced by a computer database. An individual cultural object itself - a painting, a photograph, an essay and a novel, a film and a performance - but also less tangible but equally important cultural objects, such as a dialogue between two people or a public discussion, are replaced by kinds of objects unique to a computer. For example, a file, an object (in the sense this term has in object-oriented programming) or a computer program. One also infers the combination of parts when referring to data or computer program - this is the fate of any cultural object. Something which is no longer only read, viewed, listened to, but also compiled, executed, inputted and outputted. Culture is becoming software.

Right now, the most visible examples of this trend are search engines and databases. Both are emerging as the new cultural forms of a computer age. Both come with their own logic, a logic very diffirent from that which culture has previously used. Narrative, a scene, a shot, dramatic development, a table of contents, hierarchical organization, perspective. What kind of aesthetics do a search engine and a database call for? Where would we find its principles?

More generally, the main question facing artists and critics in a computer age can be formulated in this way:

How do we 'synchronise' (translate) between older cultural/theoretical concepts and the concepts which describe organization/operation of a digital computer? How do we understand computer concepts as cultural categories?

We could begin by making pairs between traditonal cultural concepts and computer concepts. Here is my list, so far:

Lev Manovich [manovich@ucsd.edu]