At the occasion of the exhibition "Media Miniature" at Pratt Manhattan Gallery Lev Manovich introduced a new essay from his upcoming book "Infoaesthetics."

Quickly going back and forth between a projected myriad of open browser windows he presented his notion of remix culture.

Manovich anthropomorphized the evolution of new media. He delineated a map of the development of new media and linked stages in that trajectory to the computerized simulation of physical objects. His core suggestion, carefully constructed, was the emergence of hybrid media emerging out of remix culture. Multimedia for Manovich is an inadequate concept that defines media as standing next to each other. Today, "the computer becomes a petri dish in which different media mate, they hybridize, they mix. Media come together and create offspring." Meta media. (roughly quoted from memory). Manovich called himself a biologist of new media observing and reflecting this process. In his visual presentation he quickly switched back and forth between art examples and commercial business applications such as corporate promotional MTV-type video clips, maps.a9.com or mappr.com.
A9 Maps shows a video of the location next to the map of the searched spot. Examples demonstrated included the joining of video, drawing, and 3D objects. Hybrid aesthetics. Manovich indeed treated the computer programs and hybrid media forms like lab test animals. "We are not yet techno-deterministic enough..." he said.

In the question and answer session several problems were posed. Instead of phrasing his media historical map as one aspect of the current media landscape, he argued for these phenomena as the evolution of new media in which one technological development informs the next. The intentionally provocative formalism at play here leaves several facets out of sight. But Manovich's argument undoubtedly sheds light on one detail of the current media development.

Someone in the audience questioned the speaker's decisively formalist approach dissecting the surface of the described media mix without looking at the algorithmic workings of these processes. A perhaps conscious blind spot of Manovich's suggestion, already evident in "Language of New Media," was that "old" and emerging media are somewhat described in a social vacuum. The idea of the isolated petri dish in which one media copulates with the other pushes that notion to its logical extreme. At the talk the question was posed if new media are not conditioned by both, societal driving forces (e.g. the cold war leading to the invention of the Internet) and the cross-pollination of one technological development by previous technological findings. Manovich's response to this question was "Can you prove that social factors were at play?" Manovich’s historical trajectory was also merely linear suggesting that one occurrence leads directly to the next.

A second comment was concerned with another aspect, central to today's media panorama. Sociable media. Manovich's talk did not address the way in which the users of technologies shape their development through their use. Our devices are shaped by us and they in turn shape us. The participatory characteristics of the current culture of sociable web media as well as physical computing were absent from Manovich's mental media history map.

None of the mentioned concerns would have been all that pertinent if Manovich's argument would have been phrased as a micro-history of new media, a snapshot of one aspect, instead of a grand representation of the history of new media at large.

People left Manovich's talk vividly debating, inspired, and provoked to position themselves.

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