User:Pleun/rwrs/de Mul and Plato

The work of art in the age of digital recombination

Jos de Mul (2008)
→ Walter Benjamin (1936)
“... mechanical reproduction.”

Describes three ages with all three different ways of valuing art.

Cult Value

Age of historical authenticity
first artworks originated in service of (religious) ritual function

aura: auratic work serves as interface between physical materiality and it’s meaningful history.
uniqueness in time and place
unique phenomenon of distance no matter how close the work may be

Exhibition Value

Age of mechanical reproduction
loss of aura
identical copies
easy acces
neither can be hailed as cultural progress nor doomed as cultural decline: simply a new way

Manipulation Value

Age of digital recombination
what is art
return of aura
versions of the work
political power in extend of openness for manipulation not only ditigitally recombined to be political but also reflective. reflect on the politics of manipulation.

databases: any collection of ordered items all media artworks share some basic

characteristics: add, browse, change, destroy

as soon as database play becomes a goal in itself, it becomes an autonomous work of art

Non-human character of the new medium we invented
Human beings might be first species that creates its own succesors in the evolutions of life and by doing so making itself redundant.
Alienation: seperation between medium and body
inaccesablity
Nostalgia of Walter Benjamin to aura isn’t necessary

Notes:
Al discourse networks are control mechanisms
produce different forms of subjectivity

discourse: seperation

Nietzsches relation to the typewriter
program or be programmed
production of knowledge is at stake