New Media objects lack this strong narrative component, they don’t have a beginning or an end but can start or stop at any point.
Lev Manovich first related the database to cinema [2] in his effort to understand the changing technologies of filmmaking techniques in media landscapes.
Manovich considers filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Dziga Vertov as pioneers in his database cinema genre.
[3] He explains how Greenaway sees the linear pursuit as standard format of filmmaking lagging behind modern literature in experimenting with narrative.
Manovich cites Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) as the most important example of database imagination in modern media art.
By the use of meaningful effects, discovering the world by this ‘kino-eye’ Vertov uses the normally static and objective database as a dynamic and subjective form.
The semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm (originally formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure and later worked on by Roland Barthes) helps to define the relationship between the database-narrative opposition.
Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs.
In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of software cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity.
It takes advantage of the assumption that, given different sets of images and footage, the viewer will connect what is seen and create their own structured narrative.
Like previous works, the images shown each hold unique parameters which the soft-cinema software chooses from when viewed by the user.