LEV MANOVICH
INFO-AESTHETICS

Lecture at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
February 14, 2005, at 6 p.m.

Montréal, February 2, 2005. The Université de Montréal’s Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité, McGill University’s Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee and Department of Art History and Communications Studies, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal are proud to present a lecture by Professor Lev Manovich entitled Info-Aesthetics. The lecture will be held, in English, at the Musée on Monday, February 14, 2005, at 6 p.m. Admission is free.

Lev Manovich is Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches new media art and theory. He is the author of The Language of New Media, published in 2001, which the critics hailed as a rigorous, wide-ranging analysis of the new media, and as the most comprehensive history of the media since Marshall McLuhan. Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer and programmer since 1984. His latest art project, called Soft Cinema, was presented as part of the exhibition Future Cinema which travelled to Karlsruhe, Helsinki and Tokyo. He is currently working on a new book, titled Info-aesthetics, which will form the subject of the lecture.

Info-Aesthetics scans contemporary culture to detect emerging aesthetics and cultural forms specific to the information society. Its method is a systematic comparison of our own period with the beginning of the twentieth century, when modernist artists created new aesthetics, new forms, new representational techniques and new symbols of industrial society. In order to limit and justify what objects and phenomena he is looking at, Manovich employs a particular conceptual lens—the opposition between two concepts: information and form. The first two parts of the book rely on this opposition to tease out the specificity of new forms of information society in general, and to contrast them to the forms of industrial modernism. In the third part he relates some of the most interesting and important projects in a variety of areas of contemporary culture (cinema, architecture, product design, fashion, Web design, interface design, information architecture, art, and new media art) to each other, seeing them as the expression of single problem: how to map information into forms.

Lev Manovich’s website is: www.manovich.net

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Source and information:
Danielle Legentil, Media Relations Officer
Tel.: (514) 847-6232
E-mail: danielle.legentil@macm.org