Lev Manovich defined five principles for what he regards as "new media" in his work The Language of New Media (2001): 1. numerical representation, 2. modularity, 3. automation, 4. variability and 5. transcoding. Therefore he excluded film (regardless it's digital or not) as New Media. Even touchscreen is out of the list, since every piece of content behind the interface is pre-programmed, like a website in traditional way.
I consider that the five principles can also defined the meaning of "interactivity". In fact many so-called interactive medium are lack of variability or random access. Most of them only have pre-programmed content, which are placed in a certain hierarchy and can be accessed simply through determined order of layers.
A student of DFI, Benjamin Busse has won his Future Lion Award with an interactive campaign for Marc Ecko. The brief was: concept and design of an ad campaign for Marc Ecko, which promotes his roots and love for graffiti. His solution was to create digital Citylights, which consist of a LCD and a blue tooth interface. People got the possibility to access the citylight via the blue tooth interface of their cell phones through a simple interface (to choose colour and sprayer) and spray their own grafitti with the cursor of their phone. His work is a convincible example for transcoding - digital images "sprayed" by random passengers have both cultural and digital layers. The graffitis may be perceived by an individual as a visual representation of "spraying", but because the image is a file the computer sees it as a code that needs to be interpreted and displayed in a specific way. This human-computer interface is, as Manovich puts it, "a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it."
Adobe Interactive Wall in NYC
