User:Grrrreat/research/notes-16-01-12

Artists have always used media in the sense of 'means for presenting information'. Media are interfaces that can mediate between us and the external world (designation), our fellow man (communication) and ourselves (self-understanding).

Walter Benjamin sez: Cult value is (was) being replaced by exhibition value of the work of art.

Nowadays the database constitutes the ontological model of the work of art. Here the exhibition value is being replaced with the so-called 'manipulation value'. This manipulation value is not limited to the realms of art or aesthetics. In the 'age of informatization' it can also be applied to the digital manipulation of nature and culture.

Cult value vs. exhibition value

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After mechanical reproduction became a major artistic technique (engraving, etching, lithography) it took until the invention of photography to make it the 'dominant cultural interface'. Before that uniqueness and singularity were major aspects to a work of art, but also easily achieved since there was no major art practice around that was inherently lacking these two factors. Therefore an 'aura' after Benjamin was easily found in many works of art. This 'aura' consisting of the historicity and authenticity of the art piece itself was prone to give the object a cult value. The auratic work of art "acts as an interface between the physical materiality of the work of art and its meaningful history". This aura is not necessarily always linked to a work of art, but can also be found in natural objects like stones, trees etc.

In times of mechanic reproduction the distinction between original and copy loses its meaning. Things are being produced in focus of their reproduction. Therefore the cult value is vanishing. It can still be restored by, for instance, printing limited, signed editions of photographs. But this practice, by trying to restore something that was not inherent of the actual work, only confirms the loss of the aura of the work itself.

Therefore the exhibition value of objects and symbols got more and more important. This exhibition value is precisely situated in the endless reproduction of the copies and rises with them.

Benjamin mourns the loss of the aura but at the same time he sees revolutionary potential in the 'mechanical media'. Jos de Mul reflects this and says that this potential imagined by Benjamin has not been realized to an extent that would make a difference nowadays. He says that mechanical reproduction is an ambiguous matter that opened a new path bringing along new opportunities as well as new dangers.

Database Ontology

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The computer has to be regarded as a new stage in the development of media despite its qualities to mimic other, more traditional media (typewriter, sound recorder etc.). It combines uncountable individual forms of media in one machine. Even though it does that Jos de Mul's thesis is that all media art works sahre some basic characteristics, based on the four basic operations of persistent storage, Add, Browse, Change and Destroy (or in SQL: Insert, Select, Update and Delete) utilized by every single modern workstation computer. They constitute the dynamic elements of what might be called a database ontology.

In a basic sense the word database can be applied to any collection of items that is ordered in one way or another. "Database ontology is dynamic because the data elements can be constantly combined, decombined and recombined." This flexibility may, in reality not adhere to every database, but the trend is definitely towards a database being built more and more flexibly structured.

Databases are not limited to a virtual realm. They can function as a 'conceptual metaphor' which structures our experience of ourselves and the world.