SoftwareStudies

10/13/2026

Contemporary "digital / media arts and culture" was built by a number of pioneering festivals founded between the late 1970s and 2000. For many years, my own identity, writing and artworks were shaped by regularly attending many of these festivals.

How do they describe themselves today? The list shows great diversity, and frequent use of longer phrases instead of short terms. No single word dominates: even "digital" and "media", the most common, each appear in only 5 of the 12 descriptions.

09/29/2026

Soft Cinema II is a software system for making films. The artist supplies the media and defines general rules, and the software assembles a film in real time. The system was designed by Lev Manovich and coded with Claude. It has more than a hundred parameters, which allows a variety of films using different editing principles, types of media, and screen layouts.

The first film made with the system is illustrated here. Lev Manovich wrote the narrative and shot most of the video. Every run tells the same voice-over story, but the visuals and their layout on the screen change each time.

09/26/2026

My new project Soft Cinema II is shown at Responsive Dreams festival (Barcelona, 2026).

09/21/2026

Soft Cinema II.

Premieres at the Responsive Dreams digital arts festival, Granollers (Barcelona), 25–27 September, 2026.

Twenty years after the original Software Cinema.

Details coming soon.
https://zurl.co/4P5EI

09/03/2026

I finished a new essay "Seven Worlds of Digital Art: A Visitor's Guide" :

https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/seven-worlds-digital-art

Digital art is usually defined by its technology — art made with computers — and then divided by tool and output format: net art, interactive installation, data art. This article takes a different approach, borrowed from the sociology of culture (Howard Becker's Art Worlds) and informed by my four decades in the field.

Over those decades digital art did not only grow. It divided. Separate worlds emerged, each with its own audiences, institutions, criteria of evaluation, and support structures. Some did not exist even ten years ago.

I describe seven of these worlds. What distinguishes them is not technique or content but three other things: where the work circulates, who values it, and by what criteria it is judged.

I also analyze the growing connections between these worlds. Many careers now cross from one world into another, and so do tools, works, formats and conventions.

08/27/2026

The inventors of the first personal computer (Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC, the first half of the 1970s) expected its users to program new types of media themselves. The media authoring apps the computer came with were only meant to serve as examples. The computer itself would be infinitely extendable. Half a century later, generative AI brings this vision closer: more and more people are using AI to program all kinds of personal tools.

For example, I was editing a text today — and asked Claude to build a custom display showing my original alongside the edited version. And then I started to think of new functions to add. In these screenshots you can see how I can hover over any correction — and see Claude's explanation of why it was suggested. Every time I use it, I think of more things my text editor should do — and ask Claude to add these features.

Or tomorrow I can throw it away and ask Claude to make something different. Thinking more generally: perhaps we'll be moving from software as it exists today — applications with many functions and periodic updates — to personal tools we quickly make for a specific task and then discard.

Software as a durable object gives way to software as a gesture.

08/24/2026

Rhizome is celebrating its 30-year anniversary next month. Please join me to congratulate everybody involved in running it today — and during all these years!

This anniversary has a special importance for me. Rhizome was founded in 1996 by Mark Tribe. Mark got his MFA from the Visual Art Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1994. I joined the faculty of that same department — also in 1996.

In the first few years of its existence, Rhizome had a number of regional editors — and I was its San Diego editor. And I have been publishing all my texts written in the second part of the 90's also there.

https://zurl.co/LCpzS

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation.

08/12/2026

I asked six leading AI models the same question — who are the key thinkers in media, technology, art, and culture since 1960? The models were ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, alongside Kimi, DeepSeek, and Qwen.

They produced six different maps. Some look similar to each other, while others differ in their categories and rankings. Together, they offer a glimpse of how contemporary AI systems construct an intellectual canon.

Which map looks most correct to you — and what is missing from it?

08/10/2026

I just finished a new short text — "The Map and the Territory: Four Contemporary Art Worlds."

It starts from a single claim: there is no such thing as "contemporary art." There are at least four contemporary art worlds — the market, social media platforms, the institutions, and the local art worlds of artists' societies and and small regional galleries. Each has its own system of support, its own institutions, its own criteria of success. The fourth is not one world but thousands — one per region, each complete in itself.

The four barely intersect. An artist can work successfully for forty years inside one of them without needing to know how the others operate — and recognition earned in one does not convert into recognition anywhere else.

PDF:
https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/the-map-and-the-territory

08/08/2026

I just finished a new article: "Six Worlds of Digital Art: Audiences, Institutions, Values."

Download PDF: https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/is-digital-art-a-visual-art

Abstract -

Digital art is usually defined by its technology — art made with computers — and then divided by tool and output format: net art, interactive installation, data art, etc. This article takes a different approach, borrowed from the sociology of culture and informed by my four decades of working in the field. Over those decades digital art did not only grow; it divided. Separate worlds emerged, each with its own audiences, institutions, criteria of evaluation and support structures. I describe six: historical digital art, digital practice inside contemporary art, the specialist world of festivals and labs, platform digital art, commissioned digital media, and immersive spectacle. What distinguishes them is not technique but three other things — where the work circulates, who values it, and by what criteria it is judged.

I borrow the term “worlds” from the title of an influential book by Howard Becker (Art Worlds, 1982). Becker’s argument is that artistic value and recognition are socially organized. He examines how particular groups collectively define, support, circulate and sustain things as art; meaning emerges through social interaction rather than residing in the object or the artist alone. Different scenes and institutional formations have different cooperative networks and different conventions, and fine art is not the model for all artistic activity: amateur, commercial and craft practices can each be studied as art worlds in their own right. Art is not simply something an artist makes — it is something many people enable, organize, circulate, interpret and recognize together.

Following Becker, I describe these features for each of the six worlds, and then the circulation between them: careers now cross from one world into another, and so do tools, works, formats and conventions. But most digital artists still work inside a single world, and this is why an artist can succeed by the criteria of one world while remaining invisible to all the others.