This week's reading investigated the recent innovations of digital technologies and how they interact with our culture and art. Although Lee Manovich's article The Database seems very dated, the ideas presented provided a fresh way for me to understand the relationships present in digital media and art. I found the comparison of digital image construction and language construction to be interesting: "In fact, it can be compared to construction a sentence by choosing each successive word from a paradigm of other possible words, a new media user creates a sequence of screens by clicking on this or that icon at each screen."(418). Its easy to see digital art as a very inhuman process, but Manovich points out that there is still an interaction present.

Secondly, Manovich relates this comparison to language to the invention of cinema. Manovich states "Why does new media insist on this language-like sequencing? My hypothesis is that they follow the dominant semiological order of the twentieth century - that of the cinema." (418) To me, this seems like a valid idea. Manovich explains this relation by pointing out how drastically cinema redefined narrative by present a sequence of images similar to the sequence of images used in digital art(418). I found that these comparisons within the article helped me to understand the relation of digital art to previous art forms, and how it is merely a new step in a continuing progression. I am normally somewhat appalled by computer generated images, but perhaps this stems from a lack of understanding of how it began. Since I have lived my entire life in a completely digitally manipulated culture, and being bombarded daily with kitschy computer based effects, I have lost an appreciation for computer based images to be an art form. Manovich's article presented ideas that I would not have considered and perhaps helped me take digital art more seriously.

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. 1st ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005. 409-410. Print.