Lev Manovich describes how he enrolled at a mathematical secondary school whose syllabus was extended with programming, even though he had originally wanted to become a painter. Today the teaching of programming seems almost comical: for the first two years the students saw nothing that even remotely resembled a computer, and all the “programming” took place on paper. Literally. The teacher marked such programs by lowering the grade for forgotten semicolons and other offences that today our favourite editor or IDE points out to us within milliseconds. After two years, Manovich goes on, they actually saw a computer, in a place that normally required a permit. Yet when the program was entered, nothing happened, because Manovich (and most likely the others too) was seeing a keyboard for the first time in his life, and so instead of a “zero” he typed (they typed) an “O”.

After his secondary school, Manovich applied to study architecture at a university in Moscow. To get through the sieve of the entrance exams, he took a two-year drawing course. The effort paid off, since for his drawing, Venus, he received the best grade – an A. Manovich describes how his drawing was much more demanding than, for example, a head of Socrates, because unlike the head, Venus has no well-defined edges. Moreover, the object had to be shaded entirely, that is, the original guide lines could not be visible. Later Manovich learns that in the 1970s computer scientists were tackling the problem of how to render a well-shaded 3D object on a computer. The first algorithm that managed this was developed at the University of Utah at the same time as Manovich began his drawing lessons.

In New York, Manovich started working for a company that creates computer animation for the film industry. In the 1980s it is one of the first companies of its kind. Manovich learns to operate the computer and software programmed in APL. It will be some time yet before a designer can create complex 3D models with software, and before the Internet allows anyone to download ready-made 3D objects. The software Manovich has to struggle with can only model the result from primitive geometric objects such as cubes, cylinders and spheres. The software works with vectors and can create and recalculate perspective in seconds. Several images Manovich created appeared at a New York exhibition of computer art, but at that time few people wanted or cared about animation or computer art.

In 1995, the most prestigious festival of computer art, Ars Electronica, drops the computer graphics category and replaces it with “net art”. The computer is no longer just a production tool; it also serves for storage, distribution and playback. The World Wide Web crystallises this fact. At the level of language, digital art settles in as early as around the nineties. At the same time computers host new kinds of media: websites, computer games, hypermedia CD-ROMs and interactive installations, in short, “new media”. By this time it is no longer necessary to spend hours modelling “primitive” 3D objects; ten years later it is already possible to choose many ready-made 3D models from the menus of cheap software tools, including detailed human figures and faces. Moreover, such software can run on entirely ordinary computers.

Manovich recapitulates the year 1995. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the tension that had fed creativity and imagination on both sides of the Iron Curtain disappeared. Dichotomies such as freedom versus prison, interactivity vs. predetermination, the consumer society of the West vs. something artists and thinkers would call the spirituality of the East also faded away. In their place the culture of consumption and commerce settled firmly; large organisations dictate to us through advertising what, how and when will happen or is happening in our lives. It is something artists and thinkers would call by the term “globalisation”.