Professor Lev Manovich will discuss New Media: A Field of Study, a Means of Scholarship. Currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, Lev Manovich holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture. He has worked with computer media as a theorist, artist, designer, animator, computer programmer and teacher. He is currently working on a new book, Info-Aesthetics, as well as engaging in artistic projects, including a set of digital films.

Last month's University Seminar on New Media Teaching and Learning raised a number of questions including: What's the relationship between technology and thinking, between simulations and learning, or between remembering and understanding? Higher education sits within a historical, social, and linguistic context. Our lives are saturated with "new media"; computer assisted, created, or manipulated images, texts, tools, and practices. Databases, computer languages, interfaces, standards, protocols: what are the contours of this present? How did we get here and how can we design an educational environment in the midst of the objects, tools and products of computing? Just how "new" are the "new media"?

In The Language of New Media (MIT Press: 2001), Lev Manovich offered a systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He placed new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. Professor Manovich's work approaches new media as a hybrid of the traditions and techniques of software development and traditional media forms (such as cinema and the book). This research paradigm assumes that to understand new media and the computerization of culture in general requires utilizing concepts from both the humanities and computer science.

On Monday, Professor Manovich will address the following:

• The emergence of new media/digital culture studies as a field of study
• The differences between US and European approaches to media/new media studies
• The use of digital media as a new publishing/distribution platform, utilizing his own work as an example.

We eagerly look forward to a stimulating discussion.