User:Mathijs van Oosterhoudt/rwrm/jos

Annotation of; Jos de Mul - The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote about how the age of mechanical reproduction affected art as a whole, and introduces the term aura to discuss a work. A work made before the mechanical reproduction has a specific aura, the work can only exist in the now, at one place, at one time. It is therefor not only art, but also a physical art-piece.

The invention of the tools of reproduction made it easy to reproduce works, of which not one original existed, but which existed in a lot of places at the same time, which thereby loses it's aura as one specific piece, whilst on the other side making it more accessible to the public.

In 2009 Jos de Mul talks about how the new ways of using media and digital technologies influence this aura. Although art is still being reproduced to large extends, it does so in a different way. He talks about how digital works always come back to databases, and comes down to the four basic operations of a computer; Add, Browse, Change and Destroy; The ABCD of computing.

The difference this makes is the endless possibilities this offers. With the digital reproduction each copy becomes unique in it's own way, due to the endless combinations and re-combinations of the piece. De Mul therefor believes that the aura as described by Walter Benjamin has re-entered the work due to these new techniques.