Javier Lloret - Annotation: The work of art in the age of digital recombination

Jos de Mul is a professor of Philosophy and writer interested in the impact of information technology on humans.

In his essay “The work of art in the age of digital recombination”, de Mul uses “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” as his starting point. From this well-known essay he introduces the idea of the age of digital recombination where the database constitutes the ontological model of the work of art.

De Mul quotes and summaries the part of Benjamin’s essay that is related to the aura of a work of art. Benjamin explained that because of the mechanical reproduction, artworks were loosing their “aura”. Together with the “aura” Benjamin said that the cult value of artworks will gradually vanish.

After that he talks about the computers as a media for artists: “Artists use computers in many different ways to produce, store, display and distribute so-called new media art“. He introduce the concept of database, making a distinction between the basic sense the word “database”, that refers to any collection of items that is ordered in one way or another, and its meaning in the computing context, a structured collection of data records that is stored in a computer and it can be consulted it to answer qweries.

After quoting Manovich statement: “Databases have become the dominant cultural form of the computer age”. De Mul uses as an example the interactive installation W4 for explaining that a database can be both an instance of applied user interface design and a work of art.

In the last part of his essay he states that as the number of recombinations of a database is almost infinite, the work of art in the age of digital recombination brings about a return of the aura that Benjamin said was lost with the age of the mechanical reproduction.