New Media Chapters 3-4

I was immediately interested in “The Illusion” chapter of the book. Manovich started out with an example of the legendary Greek painter painting grapes of such quality that birds were deceived, making them think that they were real grapes. I have seen many examples today where artists aim to replicate real life as closely as possible so its interesting to see the early examples. Manovich separates the chapter into three different sections: Synthetic Realism and its discontents, synthetic image and its subject, and illusion, narrative, and interactivity. His approach seemed philosophical at first, but the detail made it interesting. Usually his detail is very technical, but I found that he tried to simplify the explanations of the generated digital art, like the Computer Generated Imaging.

I enjoyed the Jurassic Park comparison with Socialist Realism. It was interesting to see his perspective that although Jurassic Park was a huge movie in the 90’s we “shouldn’t be too impressed.” Now knowing that photorealistic computer graphics first appeared in the 1840’s, his opinion does seem understandable. Explaining that Social Realism wanted to show the future by projecting the perfect world and comparing it to Jurassic Park seemed really out there, but as you read on somehow I seemed to understand the comparison. Here is where Manovich makes the connection: Just "as Socialist Realist paintings blended the perfect future with the imperfect reality, Jurassic Park blends future supervision of computer graphics with the familiar vision of the film image." These chapters were a very interesting read for me, especially because film is a definite interest for me.