MEDIA THEORY OF LEV MANOVICH

ABOUT PROJECT

In media theory, after Marshall McLuhan, there were no more influential researchers than Lev Manovich, who arrived in Kyiv in mid-October 2010 at the invitation of NGO Cultural Project to give two lectures. The lectures raised questions about the forms of humanitarian research in leading western universities and the tremendous results they achieved, as well as how the cultural landscape changed with the transition of humanity to digital media and which transformations await art in the near future.

As of 2018, Ukraine has an archive of media art and generally possesses information about the Ukrainian media history of the 1980s-90s. Also, for the last the seven years there has appeared an understanding of what media art is like. In 2010, there was a very narrow field of researchers in Ukraine that provoked discourse in a cultural environment about how artists collaborated with technology and in general media art as a phenomenon. This was caused by the need to create an event that would popularize and disseminate the idea of media art as an artistic instrument on the brink of technology and art in the professional environment. Lev Manovich perfectly understood the possible gap between the context in which he works and where his audience is. Therefore, it was he who was the key person who could clearly fill the gap in the understanding of the professional environment, popularize the topic and familiarize the Ukrainian audience with the latest research in a global context.

The meeting with Lev Manovich had a powerful impact on the professional community having paid the attention to technology as an instrument for artists.