User:Cristinac/Notes on Walter Benjamin, Jos de Mul

The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I. Over the past few centuries methods of reproduction have changed history as we know it, beginning with the founding and stamping of Greek bronzes, terracottas and coins, the woodcut, engraving, etching and lithography. The importance of the latter’s development which allowed graphic art to keep pace with printing, was only surpassed by the apparition of photography, a medium that accelerated the reproduction to the same speed as sound.

II. What distinguishes the original from its mechanical reproduction is its presence in time and space. The latter, on the other hand, can bring out the aspects of the original that are not visible to the naked eye, put it into situations which are not accessible to the original.

III. The aura is the element that goes missing in reproduction and is defined by “the phenomenon of distance, however close it may be”. This distance reinforces the traditional value of cultural heritage, which contemporary mass movements aim to liquidate. Aura rests on two circumstances: the desire of masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly and to overcome the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.

IV. The contextual integration of the original is closely linked with both traditional and ritual cult value. Simultaneously with the rise of socialism, the advent of photography removed the work of art’s parasitical dependence on ritual. Its new dependency is on politics.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination

I. Jos de Mul sets out to reinterpret Walter Benjamin’s essay through an equally ontological recombination process of the digital age. He defines media as being interfaces that mediate not only us and our world, but also us and our fellow man and us and our self-understanding.

II. While in the mechanical reproduction age, the work of art's value shifted from cult to exhibition value, in the digital recombination age it moves away from exhibition value towards manipulation value. De Mul reminds the reader of what Benjamin understood as being auratic qualities: uniqueness and singularity.

III. The auratic work acts as an interface between the sensible and the supersensible, more precisely between the physical materiality of the work of art and its meaningful history. Benjamin also applied these principles to the natural world.

IV. The characteristics of the copy are no longer uniqueness and permanence as in the case of the original, but transitoriness and reproducibility. The copy's value has moved into exhibition value as there is no longer a distinction between copy and original. V. There is a fundamental ambiguity of the development of media in Benjamin's essay whose undertones are melancholic: although the art work loses its aura, it has now gained revolutionary democratic power instead. De Mul uses a computing metaphor to explain media in the digital recombination age, he believes on a fundamental level all share the four basic operations Add, Browse, Change and Destroy, which then form the database ontology.

VI. The advantage of the database is that it can be constantly combined, recombined and decombines, there is an ease of being able to modify the structure of the files according to the user. Relational databases are the newest types of manifestation that enable users to define questions that were not anticipated by the database designers.

VII. According to Manovich, the tool defines the age, so while in the mechanical age, everything became an object for mechanical reproduction, in the case of the digital databases, everything becomes an object for manipulation and recombination. For example, genetic engineering creates possibilities that were not available before, which raises questions as to whether this means of artistic expression can indeed be an art form.

VIII. Another example is the work of Geert Mul, who created an installation of 80 000 photographs from the digital archive of the museum that users could peruse according to specific times, locations and content. The manipulation value confers the interface an autonomous aspect.

IX. Incidentally, by regaining the possibility of uniqueness constructed by individual queries of the user, the aura is reestablished by reenacting its ritualistic dimension. In the digital recombination age we have a series of 'original, auratic copies'. Power is becoming dependent on the ability to manipulate information.

X. Geert Mul created a software that analyses recorded images of television news and commercials, matching them up based on their similarity, one of which is then selected by the author of the script and sent to a mailing list as the match of the day. The cooperation between algorithm and human is key to creating the poetry, humour, beauty or disgust that people respond to, but as we progress De Mul is wondering whether we are the first species that creates its own successors.