Databank of the everyday - CD
ROM (1996)
Databank of the Everyday
"A stockhouse of gestures, routines and habits", Natalie
Bookchin's classic CD-ROM Databank Of The Everyday addresses the death
of photography in the electronic age, fusing the computer database with
a stock photography catalogue.
Manifesto in style, its subject is the everyday use of computers in our culture
- the storage, transmission and dissemination of massive bodies of information
- and the impact of such usage on the human body. The computer loop represents
the body's desires, habits and compulsions."
Center of Contemporary Photography, Australia
"The Databank of the Everyday suggests that the loop
can be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age. In her ironic
manifesto which parodies the avant-garde manifestos from the earlier part
of the century, Bookchin reminds us that the loop gave birth not only to
cinema but also to computer programming. Programming involves altering
the linear flow of data through control structures, such as "if/then" and "repeat/while";
the loop is the most elementary of these control structures.
"
As digital media replaces film and photography, it is only logical that
the computer program's loop should replace photography's frozen moment
and cinema's linear narrative. The Databank champions the loop as a new
form of digital storytelling; there is no true beginning or end, only a
series of the loops with their endless repetitions, halted by a users's
selection or a power shortage." [Natalie Bookchin]
The computer program's loop makes
its first "screen debut" in one particularly
effective image from The Databank of the Everyday. The screen is divided
into two frames, one showing a video loop of a woman shaving her leg,
another - a loop of a computer program in execution. Program statements
repeating over and over mirror the woman's arm methodically moving back
and forth. This image represents one of the first attempts in computer
art to apply a Brechtian strategy; that is, to show the mechanisms by
which the computer produces its illusions as a part of the artwork. Stripped
of its usual interface, the computer turns out to be another version
of Ford's factory, with a loop as its conveyer belt.
Bookchin also also explores alternatives to cinematic montage, in
her case replacing its traditional sequential mode with a spatial one.
Ford's assembly line relied on the separation of the production process
into a set of repetitive, sequential, and simple activities. The same
principle made computer programming possible: a computer program breaks
a tasks into a series of elemental operations to be executed one at a
time. Cinema followed this principle as well: it replaced all other modes
of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots which
appear on the screen one at a time. A sequantial narrative turned out
to be particularly incompatible with a spatialized narrative which played
a prominent role in European visual culture for centuries. From Giotto's
fresco cycle at Capella degli Scrovegni in Padua to Courbet's A Burial
at Ornans, artists presented a multitude of separate events (which sometimes
were even separated by time) within a single composition. In contrast
to cinema's narrative, here all the "shots" were accessible to a viewer
at one.
Cinema has elaborated complex techniques of montage between different
images replacing each other in time; but the possibility of what can be
called "spatial
montage" between simultaneously co-exiting images were not explored. The
Databank of the Everyday begins to explore this direction, thus opening
up again the tradition of spatialized narrative suppressed by cinema. In
one section we are presented with a sequence of pairs of short clips of
everyday actions which function as antonyms, for instance, opening and
closing a door, or pressing up and down buttons in an elevator. In another
section the user can choreograph a number of miniature actions appearing
in small windows positioned throughout the screen.
Lev Manovich, What is Digital Cinema
Buy it (May not run on newer operating systems)