Manovich "Database Logic"

The Database is New Media's answer to narrative. It is a structure of information that can be more or less organized, and functions as a means of modeling the disparate collections of unstructured data in the post-modern world. The Database can can be seen as the new dominant structural form of the computer age, as powerful as linear perspective was to the Rennaisance, or scientific reasoning to the Enlightenment. Structured as a database, multimedia work needs no overt narrative. We can think of a museum as a database, and a multimedia CD-ROM is, essentially, a virtual museum. The web assumes a database structure, but is unique in that its content is not fixed; the information is continually augmented. Early artists working in digital media did not understand the potential for databases; they filled CDs with content, but failed to meaningfully organize it.
Computer games may contain databases, but are primarily algorythems. They present an ideal pattern of behavior for the user to discern and perform. Complex computer systems, we can thus see, consist of these two elements. The database is an arrangement of information and an algorythem creates the means of accessing that information. In our modern database era, we are seeing virtually all information being digitized and catalogued. One of our cultural algorythems is now: reality to media to data to database. With the breathless proliferation of databases, we are witnessing the production of catalogues outpace the production of the catalogued. The internet is the perfect example of this: there are more indexes of information than info itself, creating a vast network of differently categorized, but shared content.
A database, in its purest form, is a group of items with no order. A narrative is a series of events presented as causes and effects. Traditionally, New Media works are databases with a variety of interfaces. Even what is often refered to as nonlinear, or hyper narrative is only a fixed database with a variety of interfaces. Such works only become truly narratives if the system of creating trajectories through the data (the interface algorythem) is designed to create meaning. Film techniques such as montage can create either unreality (that which cannot be) or hyper-reality (an expression of reality that is closer to the lived experience than unlayered expression). This logic can be applied to New Media as well.
Symbolic systems can be divided into two groups: sytagmatic and paradigmatic, or the signs that are supported in space (or manifest) and how those signs are grouped to create meaning (or interpreted). In traditional story telling, the narrative is syntagmatic and explicit and the paradigm from which it arises is implicit. In database structures, the paradigm is manifest, while the narrative is implied. The user becomes the creator, and her choices of which screen to view create meaning just as the author chooses words to form sentences. New Media need not follow such a linear syntactic pattern, but such thinking is a convention established by cinema. Form is not derived from media type, however, books function equally well as databases or as narratives. Database and narrative are both human needs, and the two can be well integrated.
This reconciliation between database and narrative has already been accomplished. Despite ending up as a narrative, cinema is produced as a database. Only after compiling the footage is the data arranged into a storyline. Cinema can also be created as a random database of events. A third style, however, is exemplified by Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. Vertov combines events from the creation, consumption, and plot of a fictional move and uses virtually every cinematographic technique to create a cohesive, but non linear database narrative. Watching the film, the viewer develops an algorythem to discern the meaning. As New Media aritsits, we must remember this lesson. To advance our art, the endless progression of technologies must be harnessed to method for the creation of meaningful trajectories.