The Database

Last year while in Los Angeles I visited The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Its an odd place with a strange collection of objects. As I meandered through the museum, I came to realize the museum itself is the exhibit. The collections and information within its wallls are there to serve this purpose. It’s a simulation of a museum experience, with some real and some obviously fabricated exhibits. What was really important in this experience was the interface of the museum. Its presentation of the artifacts.

This experience came to my mind when Lev Manovich in his book “The Language of New Media” talked about the database as a dominant form in new media. Manovich divides what he terms “new media objects” into two forms, database and narrative. He says “ . . . works in new media can be understood as either constructing the right interface to a multimedia database or as defining navigation methods through spatialized representations.” Most often websites are some form of database, they are an interface to a collection of knowledge. Its easy to cite examples of this form, Facebook is a database containing information about people, what they like, the events they attend, the groups they belong to. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, one of the oldest forms of database. For Manovich,

“The database becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age. Historically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium. Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist. With new media the content of the work and the interface are separated. It is therefore possible to create different interfaces to the same material.”

In social media, the power of the interface is quite apparent. Why do people choose
Facebook over myspace? The information is essentially the same. Its about the way the information is presented and the ease with which we can access it.
Those examples are quite obviously database forms but Manovich asserts that

“Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases . . . a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation.”

The way I understand it is that RPG’s (such as my favorite Final Fantasy VII) have narrative attributes, a storyline, but underneath, there is the database form. Instead of having immediate access to information, the user must perform certain tasks to acquire “skills” or “data”.

Manovich views the database as more than a “structured collection of data” but as a cultural form that is different from reading a story or watching a film. Manovich does not believe the database as cultural form exists solely in new media and cites examples in film such “The Man wth a Movie Camera”. The very structure of the movie is a database of shots arranged in a particular order to become a picture of modern life. Manovich says “. . .we may even call database a new ‘symbolic form’ of the computer age. . . the world appears to us an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database.”

Artists including Lev Manovich are still learning how to merge database and narrative into a new form. Games like The Path and the slow game movement may be the early stages of this new form. Or perhaps the new form will extend into the physical rather than digital world. The and/or Gallery’s YTMND show was a collection of internet memes, images, and animations displayed on video screens. A collection of collections. What is apparent in these exhibits and the Museum of Jurassic technology is that artists are aware of the relationship between interface and database and are using this relationship for expression.