User:ThomasW/Walter synopsis

Synopsis Walter Benjamin

When the mechanical took over from the handmade, the mass production took away the aura from the “item” but with mechanical reproduction it have given people more access to the “item”, democratised. Kittel used the aura to illustrated the add sedimental value to art. Authenticity is based on rituals, mechanical reproduction freed the artwork from the parasitic dependency of the ritual.

Ben:

What is common to every reproduction is its decontextualization from the environment it was made in, but its potential for spreading a message makes up for this. As oppoed to manual reproduction - which deals with the recreation of the original, often less valuable (a forgery) - process reproduction, in photography, can reveal more than was originally shown and increase both the value of the original and reproduction.

The anti-traditionalism of Dadaism critiqued the making of the work of art as a cult object by laying the base for a potential future where all representation of reality had lost its authority, aura, through the iterability of mechanical reproduction (i.e. Kurt Schwitter's street scrap-collages), first expressed through surrealism and now reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a commodified representation of this Dadaist mode of expression.

The mechanical reproduction is more participatory, with the quantity of the masses as the primary interpreters- and representers of reality. In this way art, in the age of mechanical reproduction, has captivated the masses so much as to distract them in various ways, and has more easily allowed them to mobilize together.

Bill Nichols - The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems (1988)

Woodcut graphic opened the door to mechanical reproduced information on larger scale then hand written/drawn information. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work art lacking in one element, its present in time and space” Even that a reproduction my be identical in any present, the fact that it has not exist over time and have made its self a history of existing. The aura is an interface, it bring us closer to the work. Mechanical reproduced does make things closer to use, but on the sacrifice of no aura on the basis of reproducibility. The machine reproduction my make the aura go away, but it gives people access to it. A computer is nothing more special in the world of mechanical reproduced as a typewriter or a photo-camera. Its is just is new form. Database is a structured collection of data or information in physical or data form. Phonebook, Databases in a modern world mainframes like software, search engines, wikis, spreadsheets.

Ben:

The act of mechanically reproducing our environment as well as representations of our world gives us a new look at the world, beyond ritual. This practice of reproducing our world to give us new perspectives of it, creates a sense of mystique among objects without aura. In the preset world the computer chip is the 'soulless' mediator of expression. The illusion of possessing the potential of cybernetic systems etch social aspects in a more preset situation as he fetischization of data (?) reaches the real. (...) The Zoo or botanical garden can be seen as an early example of constructing a representative reality around a perception of the real world. The cybernetic system extended upon this through the logical prediction of environmental changes and increasingly complex simulations of reality.