User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Annotation: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination
Annotation: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination by Jos de Mul
Jos De Mul's short essay revisits Benjamin's classic text, and considers how digital manipulation might call for an update to Benjamin's vision of the impact of mass reproduction on (visual) culture. De Mul summarises Benjamin's notion of a shift from the "cult value" or aura of a unique artwork, towards greater emphasis on "exhibition value", with the advent of mass photographic reproduction. He then suggests that, in the age of digital media, our treatment of images is no longer confined merely to reproduction as discussed by Benjamin, but extends to infinite "manipulation".
De Mul summarizes this shift as one towards a society in which the database - infinitely rearrangable, queryable, etc - has become a dominant cultural metaphor. Paradoxically, this extreme form of image circulation actually re-introduces a sense of aura, as each database query is a unique performance: "...each query becomes a unique recombination. And as a consequence, the digitally recombined work of art regains something of its ritual dimension." (de Mul, 2009 p.103)
As De Mul explains, this shift has implications far beyond the arts: "In the age of digital databases, everything - nature and culture alike - becomes an object for recombination and manipulation." -p.101. He closes by raising the anxieties provoked by the extent of this re-combining power of digital technology; the possbility that "it will gradually outstrip our skills to add, browse, change and destroy. And that we might become the ultimate object of digital manipulation." (ibid p.104)
Notes & Connections
- De Mul's mention of the idea that "we might become the ultimate object of digital manipulation" links in to other discussions about the psychological resistance to, for example, remix culture. There is a link here to Laric's observation that the remix is condemned in terms of idolatry - a 'pure' authorship/subjectivity is contaminated or degraded.
- De Mul mentions the 'distance' which for Benjamin is inherent in the auratic artwork. He says that digitization reduces this feeling of distance: "mechanical reproduction of images brings things closer, spatially and temporally." Is there a link here between other forms of closeness/distance - for example, the way that Haraway predicted the dissolving of boundaries between entities more generally?
- Performance - De Mul's notion of the way that digital objects are "like the performing arts process rather than product" echoes Laric's thesis that each unique iteration of a meme is a performance, which re-introduces aura.
de Mul, J. (2009) 'The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination' in van den Boomen, M., Lammes, S. et al (eds) Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press).