»Database of Provincial Life: Database«
Light Box

Keywords
Information
Lev Manovich >
»Database of Provincial Life: Database«, 1997 - 2000
Co-Workers & Funding:
Designer: Jessica Fleishmanhttp://www.manovich.net/TSD/tsd_index.html
Technology
Descriptions & Essays
Database of Provincial Life uses digital computers to accomplish a task which was impossible to achieve using any previous representational medium: documenting EVERYTHING which happen to EVERYBODY who lived in the 20th century. By focusing on the typical rather than the exceptional - provincial existence rather than the major cities and major historical figures - Database of Provincial Life is able to achieve unprecedented level of representational compression: reducing the whole of the 20th century just to ten samples.
This project is a part of the trio of projects Software for the 20th Century. The other two projects are Freud-Lissitzky Navigator and Reality Generator.
How Database is Designed
The Database of Provintial Life (Volume 1: 20th Century Europe) is constructed as follows.
10 different years in the 20th century are first selected: 1904, 1911, 1917, 1923, 1927, 1934, and so on.
No particular importance can be attached to the selected years, although some of them resonate with certain well-known historical events.
For every year, a city in Europe is also selected (Europe defined here quite liberally, from Portugal to Ural Mountains).
Each city-year is represented by a record which contains a number of fields. These fields store media material which documents life in a selected city in a selected year.
Literature
Exhibitions & Events