the digital aura: riffs on walter benjamin
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Talk to the 'Material Witness' workshop on 'The Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction', 31 May 2014TRANSCRIPT
The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, 31 May 2014
PLENARY(SYMPOSIUM(The$Work$of$Art$in$the$Age$of$Digital$Reproduction$31$May$2014$King’s$College$London,$Guy’s$Campus,$Lecture$Room$2.$New$Hunt’s$House,$London$SE1$1UL$!This symposium explores the implications of Walter Benjamin’s prescient essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction in the digital age. This event is the third of four plenary events in Material Witness, a training programme for humanities researchers who work with physical artefacts in the CHASE consortium of universities, and thanks to the support of the AHRC’s ‘Digital Transformations’ theme, we are delighted to welcome a wider audience to this event. The day has been organised by Alixe Bovey (University of Kent) and Andrew Prescott (Kings’s College London). For more information about Material Witness, please visit our blog: materialwitness.me.!
10:00! Registration & coffee!
10:30 Session 1: Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction
• Andrew Prescott (King’s College London): The Digital Aura!
• Neil Cox & Dana MacFarlane (University of Edinburgh): Workshopping Benjamin and Heidegger !
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Session 2: The Age of Digital Reproduction
Anchor paper: Michael Takeo Magruder (King’s College London): reproduction/remixing/redistribution: artistic processes for a born-digital age!
Michael is currently a Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence at KCL, where he is working on a body of collaborative new media artworks entitled De/coding the Apocalypse, based on The Book of Revelation. He has recently published a new monograph, entitled (re)mediations 2000-2010 (2012, Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery, UK), that outlines the last decade of his work within the areas of news media, mobile devices and virtual worlds.!
Material Witness scholars:
• Sarah Biggs (Courtauld Institute/British Library): Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age !
• Elinor Carmi (Goldsmiths, University of London): Are you spam or not? The aura of authenticity in social network sites (SNS)!
• Sara Choudhrey (University of Kent): Islamic Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction !
• Alexandra Reghina Draghici (Goldsmiths, University of London): Material Relations: Embodiment as Reproduction !
3:30 Tea
4:00 Keynote: Mark Leckey: UniAddDumThs
!Mark is a British artist and curator who works with collage, music, and film. His film Industrial Lights and Magic won the Turner Prize in 2008. He recently curated the show The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, which explored the relationships between objects, digital avatars, and people, a configuration that he describes as ‘technoanimism’.!
5:00 Reception
material witness
University of Trinity St David, Lampeter
Sidney Curnow Vosper's celebrated watercolour, Salem (1908), epitomises the kind of plain, visually deprived culture of the early years of Lampeter. In this context, what did the richly
visually library collections built up there by impact collectors such as Thomas Phillips (not tyne Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill)
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The Digital Aura: riffs on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Technical Reproduction’
Andrew Prescott Material Witness Workshop
31 May 2014
William Hogarth, Marriage-A-la-Mode, Plate 2 (After the Marriage): one of the large collection of Hogarth printer donated to Lampeter by Thomas Bowdler.
!
Thomas Phillips (1760-1851). Portrait by H. C. Mornwick at Llandovery College. Phillips donated over 22,000 books to the new St Davids College at
Lampeter: http://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/rbla/online-exhibitions/thomas-phillips-exhibition/
Boddam Hours: Use of Rouen, late 15th century. Presented by Thomas Phillips to the College at
Lampeter in 1846.
Conrad Gesner, Historia Animalium (1576)
Englebert Kaempfer, History of Japan (1728)
Edward Young. The Complaint, and the Consolation or, Night thoughts. London, 1797.
[Illustrated by William Blake]
Plate from William Alexander, The Costume of China (1805).
19th-century facsimile of an Aztec Book of Fate, presented by
Thomas Phillips to Lampeter
J. C. Bourne, Drawings of the London and Birmingham Railway, 1838. Phillips’s donations included many visual
records of modern life.
• What impression did the rich visual diet that Phillips prepared make in a grey monochrome Wales?
• Do we see Phillips’s interest in creating a visual library as reflecting Benjamin’s emphasis on mass assimilation of cultural objects through reproduction?
• Is Phillips’s visual library an expression of a shift towards an exhibition view of art?
• Phillips’s interest in Lampeter was part of a wider concern with the modernisation of Wales. Was a richer visual culture part of modernity?
Over 4 billion images have been uploaded to Flickr in a period of ten years
Some YouTube Statistics!!•!More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month! !•!Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on
YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth!!•!100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! !•!80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US! !•!YouTube is localised in 61 countries and across 61
languages!!•!According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults
aged 18-34 than any cable network!!•!Millions of subscriptions happen each day. The number of
people subscribing daily is up more than 3 times since last year, and the number of daily subscriptions is up more than 4 times since last year
Apple states that, “iTunes users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date, and they are purchasing over 800,000 TV episodes and
over 350,000 movies per day.”
Computers are machines which
count very fast, but counting is the last
thing we do with them.
It brings us images, movies,
sound, 3D reconstructions, entertainment,
culture…
• Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935-6) appears increasingly prescient as we become flooded with images: ‘The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open is enjoyed in a private room’.
• Digitisation of existing cultural artefacts is a means of rendering them reproducible
• Demand for digitisation and access: ‘the desire of the present-day masses to “get closer to things”… by assimilating it as reproduction
• But as the digital corpus grows, issues of authenticity (not just manipulation but scale, colour, cropping, etc)
• This reproducibility changes their cultural status, although the exact nature of this change unclear (do they become more open or more controlled?)
• Benjamin’s emphasis on changes in the nature of cultural labour and production seem particularly pertinent
• New types of involvement in cultural labour: crowd-sourcing, out-working, team working
• New relationship between the audience and the artwork
• Erosions of distinction between author and user (anticipates Web 2.0?)
• For Benjamin, film was a means of the masses reconciling themselves to new technology
• We can see our use of computers for entertainment as a means of humanising a technology which poses serious issues in terms of privacy, surveillance, identity and control.
• The collapse of distinctions between cultural objects
• In a digital environment, distinctions in format between print, manuscript, oil, watercolour, sound, movie, material object collapse
• All objects can be stored and documented in a digital form
• The only differences between libraries, archives, museums and art galleries are differences of file format and metadata
• Is this the liquidation of tradition that Benjamin anticipated?
Books, archives and museum objects integrated in a single catalogue system: Library and Museum of Freemasonry:
www.freemasonry.london.museum
• Benjamin argued that the reproducibility of works of art weakened the sense of aura
• He welcomed the prospect of the liquidation of tradition and undermining of old distinctions - ‘a shattering of tradition which is a renewal of humanity’
• ‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will films … All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, all the founders of religions, indeed, all religions await their celluloid resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gates’
• I want to examine briefly three areas where the position might be more complicated in the digital environment than Benjamin suggests
• Rather than undermining ‘aura’, photographs and digital images can have their own considerable sense of time and place which amounts to a ‘digital aura’
• ‘Authenticity’ is difficult: digital representations can sometimes have claim to greater authenticity
• Rather than liquidating traditions, digital reproducibility may instead be reinforcing them
ii The Pencil of Nature
PLATE III. ARTICLES OF CHINA.
PLATE III. ARTICLES OF CHINA.
From the specimen here given it is sufficiently manifest, that thewhole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might bedepicted on paper in little more time than it would take him tomake a written inventory describing it in the usual way. Themore strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, themore advantage in having their pictures given instead of theirdescriptions.And should a thief afterwards purloin the treasures—if the
mute testimony of the picture were to be produced against him incourt—it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what
PLATE III. ARTICLES OF CHINA.
PLATE III. ARTICLES OF CHINA.
From the specimen here given it is sufficiently manifest, that thewhole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might bedepicted on paper in little more time than it would take him tomake a written inventory describing it in the usual way. Themore strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, themore advantage in having their pictures given instead of theirdescriptions.And should a thief afterwards purloin the treasures—if the
mute testimony of the picture were to be produced against him incourt—it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what
PLATE V. BUST OF PATROCLUS.
PLATE V. BUST OFPATROCLUS.
Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generallywell represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly,in consequence of their whiteness.
PLATE IX. FAC-SIMILE OF AN OLD PRINTED PAGE.
PLATE IX. FAC-SIMILE OF ANOLD PRINTED PAGE.Taken from a black-letter volume in the Author's library,containing the statutes of Richard the Second, written in Norman
Utrecht Psalter, produced in Epernay between 816 and 819
Illustrations from J.O. Westwood, ‘Archaeological Note of a Tour in Denmark, Prussia and Holland’, Archaeological Journal 16 (1859). Westwood had noticed an 1832 discussion of the manuscript by Baron van Tiellandt, and travelled to the Netherlands to see it. !
Silver nitrate photographs of the Utrecht Psalter commissioned by the British Foreign Office to assist in dating the manuscript,
1872
Edward Augustus Bond (1815-98), who intervened to bring the Utrecht Psalter to London and secure higher quality
auto types
Photographs of the Utrecht Psalter made in the British Museum using the autotype process, 1876
• The Norman Conquest moved into cyberspace yesterday as the Domesday Book's online edition was launched (Guardian, 2006)
• FANS of Chaucer will soon be able see the original 15th-century printed pages of his Canterbury Tales from the comfort of their homes (Liverpool Echo, 2003)
• Call it virtual Vincent. Amsterdam's famed Van Gogh Museum on Monday launched a new site on the World Wide Web aimed at ensuring art lovers get a glimpse of the Dutch master's work - including rare paintings, drawings, watercolors and letters not on display anywhere else. (Associated Press, 2003)
• Austria's traditionally conservative Salzburg festival is launching Mozart into cyberspace this summer with an updated production of one of his most popular operas.On a stage littered with television and computer monitors, the real world meets the virtual as singers serenade projected images in the 18th century composer's opera The Abduction from the Seraglio (Reuter 1997)
Is this the Apotheosis of Benjamin? As we enter a post-digital age, will art became more pervasive but less reproducible?
"Alba", the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene
What do we make a bio-art? One of the best exemplars is the work of Eduardo Kac: http://www.ekac.org/transgenicindex.html. Does this transcend technological reproducibility?
Specimen of Secrecy About Marvelous Discoveries
A series of works comprised of what Kac calls "biotopes", that is, living pieces that change during the exhibition in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions. Each of Kac’s biotopes is literally a self-sustaining ecology comprised of thousands of very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials.