Department for Image Science presents Conference Lectures "Challenges of Digital Art for Our Societies" MUMOK, Vienna Lev MANOVICH (New York): Archiving and Analyzing Digital Art the scale of Big Data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYSd0hoBFZA Lev MANOVICH explores how digital art and technology has fundamentally changed how we perceive and interact with images, outlining a framework for cultural analysis using big data analysis and its visualisation as a 'medium.' Also discussed are the characteristics of visual social media relevant for the study of cultural and social patterns, including questions of connectivity and engagement; how exceptional events are represented in social media platforms and how social media can be used to predict socio-economic indicators; the visual signatures of cities, their sampling and aggregating images from social media platforms; and large-sample mapping of cultural fields such as those of news media such as "Time" Magazine, the MoMA photograph collection, and artistic movements such as that of the French impressionists. Lev MANOVICH is professor at CUNY Graduate Center, USA, Director of the Software Studies Initiative at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (http://manovich.net/). He is author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005) and Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury, 2013). The Language of New Media (2001) was reviewed over 50 times and can be regarded as one of the most far-reaching media histories since Marshall McLuhan (Telepolis). In 2004 MANOVICH was included in the list of 50 "most interesting people building the future" (The Verge), and in 2013 he appeared on the List of 25 People Shaping the Future of Design. At present, MANOVICH investigates strategies of visualization of Big Data in the sciences and humanities. Department for Image Science, Danube University, Austria http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dbw ADA – Archive of Digital Art http://www.digitalartarchive.at