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SoftwareStudies

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SoftwareStudies

Posts from Cultural Analytics Lab directed by Lev Manovich. (The lab was called Software Studies until 2016).

We use data science and data visualization to study culture. See our projects: http://manovich.net/index.php/exhibitions.

10/26/2026

The Chinese translation of our book Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media is now out.

Chinese title: 《AI美学》 (AI Aesthetics)
Communication University of China Press, 2026

Many thanks to the translator, Che Lin (车琳), Associate Professor at Communication University of China, for the time and care she put into this work. (She also translated my The Language of New Media into Chinese.) And thanks to everyone at the press who made it possible.

Book details and where to buy: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_6WB42TVbdbYpjzBPZXtZg

10/24/2026

Generative AI brings back a cultural norm that modern art abolished. With a twist.

10/21/2026

Speaking tomorrow at “Mapping Digital Art,” MU Hybrid Art House, Eidhoven (part of Dutch Design Week). My presentation is based on a recent article “Seven Worlds of Digital Art”: https://zurl.co/J6mSR

10/20/2026

I’ll be speaking at PROMPT: Art & Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven.

Join us for presentations, a performance, and a discussion exploring the future of AI as a creative medium, alongside the launch of PROMPT, edited by Peter Lunenfeld and Mieke Gerritzen.

Friday 23 October 2026 · 18:30–21:00
Next Nature Museum · Eindhoven, Netherlands

Details and tickets: https://nextnature.org/en/events/prompt

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.

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