Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on the work of art in the age of “its technological reproducibility”, argues that, while art has always been theoretically reproducible, the “here and now of the original”, its “authenticity”, its “aura” and its “unique existence”, are obliterated with “mechanical reproduction”. Yet Benjamin also notes that mechanical reproduction enables new kinds of “existences” and encounters, as well as new kinds of human perceptions:
“First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photography technological reproduction can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens . . . but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether . . . Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations to which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.” (Benjamin 2010, 14 [my emphasis])
For Benjamin, these qualities, while novel, were destructive, involving the “liquidation of the value of tradition”, substituting a “mass existence for a unique existence”, and potential weapons for political powers (Benjamin 2010, 14; 35). Yet these new qualities of mechanical reproduction, here relating to photography and film, were also used as productive elements in early filmic experiments. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is one example:
In the midst of a scene showing the group in the motorcar, Vertov shows stills of the action, close-ups of people’s faces, reels of negatives and their contents, as well as the process of piecing reels together to create the film itself. Details of things and behaviors in the world, and the process of image-making itself, are revealed by cinematic techniques. As Benjamin writes, “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious” (2010, 30).
Today, Benjamin’s observations about 1) how new technologies (both positively and negatively) transform collective perceptions and 2) the various ways new technologies both conceal their histories and (re-)production and reveal otherwise unseen or “unconscious” elements in the world are echoed in much of the literature surrounding new digital technologies.
1) On Shifts in Collective Perception
Jeff Malpas’s chapter in New Heritage, following Benjamin, argues that peoples’ perceptions are being further detached from the real (both material and in space/place/time), which in turn changes the way “we understand, experience, and interpret ourselves” (Malpas 2008, 19). In a different vein, Gwyneira Isaac’s paper on the ways new media has become the new museum object shows how new technologies have changed the experience of viewing in museums: “The interplay between . . . digital images and their material referents, has initiated new ways of responding to and experiencing museum objects” (Isaac 2008, 297). Likewise, in Srinivasan et al’s (2010) paper on the digital museum as ‘contact zone’, the attachment of narratives, originating contexts, and diverse knowledges to the audience encounter with an object activates more complex understandings of objects’ meaning.
2) On the Concealing or Revealing of Objects’ Qualities & Contexts
Malpas’ paper also sticks with Benjamin on the topic of objects’ contexts. Malpas argues that digital technologies “dissolve the presence of the thing in its place” (2008, 19). A quality of digital technologies is “not only their capacity for endless reproduction . . . but also their capacity to transform the elements that they reproduce, to produce new such elements, and to juxtapose those elements in new arrangements and forms of connection” (Malpas 2008, 20). His final call to action—to find “ways to deploy new media in ways that maintain, and do not obscure or dissolve, a sense of place” (2008, 26)—is in many ways answered by papers by Srinivasan et. al. and Kimberly Christen (2011). In Srinivas et. al’s perspective, digital technologies’ juxtapositions and digital objects’ “extensionality” and “mutability” in fact reveal “cultural threads” and narratives. Contemporary digital heritage projects like the Museum of Anthropology’s Reciprocal Research Network (Rowley 2010) and the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (Christen 2011) illustrate the ways digital objects can be seen in the context of “the processes and relationships that ground information systems within larger cultural logics and historical events” (Christen 2011, 190) as well as otherwise distant peoples, places, and other things, while maintaining “cultural protocols aimed at maintaining specific types of knowledge” (Christen 2011, 191).
At the same time, Isaac also notes that in digital reproduction, the “copying” of complex codes becomes another form of “technological enchantment”, using Alfred Gell’s terminology. Like the notion of Benjamin’s “aura”, Gell’s notion of “enchantment” involves the idea that a thing is produced in an irreproducible moment of human creativity. When symbols and numbers are copied and reformatted “’the numbers are read and inscribed anew each time’ . . . so that ‘each copy . .. is still an “original” inscription of information’” (Isaac citing Binkley 1997). However, unlike a painter envying another painter’s piece, I wonder whether code experts are equally “enchanted” by these technologies.
So, what are the impacts of new digital technologies on ‘objects’ and our engagements with them? Responses to this question, as with Benjamin’s generation, teeter between fear and optimism. At the same time that new technologies release objects from their original contexts or moments of human creation, they have a potential to enable new productive connections, juxtapositions and encounters that reveal otherwise obscured networks they are a part of or layered knowledges embedded in them.
A Few Questions:
-How are digital technologies changing perceptions or practices of engaging with objects? If digital media are themselves new kinds of objects, as Isaac argues, are there differences between physical objects and digital objects? And what are they?
-How do digital technologies obscure or reveal cultural practices, traditions and histories? Is restricting kinds of access enough to ensure that cultural values are maintained?
-What are the exciting and/or dangerous potentialities for the new contexts and connections digital objects encounter? Can audiences still “misread” objects from their own contexts or worldviews?
-Returning to our discussion last week, why do we feel uneasy when we think of the computerized reproduction of a carving, but perhaps not of a photograph? What qualities of human production are still held sacred?
These were some streams and questions I found interesting, but I’d be interested in other ways you engaged with this topic!
Cited:
Benjamin, W. 2010. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability” [First Version]. Grey Room 39, pp. 11-37.
Christen, K. 2011. “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation. American Archivist 74, pp. 185-210.
Isaac, G. 2008. “Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian. Journal of Material Culture 13(3), pp. 287-310.
Malpas, J. 2008. “Cultural Heritage in the Age of New Media” in New Heritage. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26.
Srinivasan, R. et al. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum. Science, Technology & Human Values 35(5), pp. 735-768.
Rowley, S. et al. 2010 “Building an On-Line Research Community: The Reciprocal Research Network”, www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/rowley/rowley.html.
I would like to thank for these great summary, categorization, and comparisons of different ideas on this topic, and challenging the audience ‘s mind with these critical questions.
I argue that the concept of “original” is tightly related to following factors : 1.Place 2.Time 3.Space 4.Collective perception 5.individual perception based on a summary of these related works ,I included the personal perception myself as an important factor which indeed forms the collective perception. for example, the personal perception of a historian at a medieval era, from an epic event, can shape the collective perception of intellectuals in the same or future centuries.
I argue that, even the concept of “Original” about objects, and historical cultural facts, can be shaped based on a personal perception of human named historian, or cultural intellectual. This can happen , as the collective perception of a new generation can be influenced by personal perception of intellectuals, historians and philosophers in previous generations. So in fact, we can see the word “Original” as a certified copy of a reality in a specific time, place , and contextual space, which has been shaped based on a personal perception.
Personally, I don’t believe to “naive original”, as I see every original, as a certified copy made by an individual perception.
Furthermore, Considering this fact that human culture and generation evolves over time, and space, their understanding from “Original” or “Certified Copy” will evolve and change as well. as new generations hardly can found themselves connected with events happened in the same place but in a previous era.
Living in a culture which is heavily involved with a phenomenon named technology, will impact people perception about objects, as people can see everything in a format of Data in this new age, the concept of object can be transformed to representative data as well in an unconscious manner. so Creating a digital Certified Copy of an object which represents the collective perception of this age intellectuals, can still follow the same pattern that happened during previous ages. I hope this explanation can address some of raised questions.
Very comprehensive post there, Diana 🙂
My son was sick today so I will go to bed shortly(very tired) and then post a comment and also my own blog post about a couple readings tomorrow afternoon sometime…
Diana, I think part of the answer to your questions is within Pierre Levy’s notions of virtuality (1998) – http://innovationwatch.com/becoming-virtual-reality-in-the-digital-age-by-pierre-levy-plenum-press/
Benjamin wrote before technological means could elevate the “virtual” beyond that of mere reproduction. With Malpas’ “Virtualism”, transformation is the key but not just transformation of “authentic” reproductions but also the perpetual mutability inherent in new (unique) virtual creations.
Awesome, Jeremy, thanks!!! This could be most useful in my own doctoral work. I’ll throw it in the cauldron…
With “synthetic realities”, the distinction between “real” and “virtual” becomes anachronistic…So when museums learn to deal with synthetic artifacts and heritage, it will be interesting to see how they would collect and display something that is portable, perpetually transforming shape and meaning without being a reproduction of anything else.
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2008/08/01/_a-warcry-for-birthing-synthetic-worlds_-part-1/
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2008/08/08/_a-warcry-for-birthing-synthetic-worlds_-part-2/
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2008/08/15/_a-warcry-for-birthing-synthetic-worlds_-part-3/
I think Part 3 deals most with the Museum.
Diana, thanks for the great post with lots of yummy flavors to munch on and partake in with the comrades… I am threading this week, rather than posting (I find it more congenial to thread on one person’s post because it feels more like a conversation and I am more confortable with this).
A few observations and musings in response to the excellent questions you raise:
1) Drawing on hermeneutics, specifically Paul Ricoeur’s work, it is somewhat contentious whether knowledge or history can be “embedded” in an object. Because the representation of knowledge is by definition a human construct (i.e. discourse), it has always been a problem for me to view an object as a site of knowledge. Ahhh, if the object could only speak, then it could tell us what it knows…ahhh, but no, I was just pouring my heart out to a friend who was being very empathetic and after much effort on her part in trying to comfort me, we agreed that she, along with everyone else in the world, could never really understand what was in my heart, no matter how well I represented it to her (or others). Such is the human condition…the incommensurability of communicability. “If these walls could talk…” well, they can’ t and even if they could, I could never really fully comprehend them;
2) Isaac’s (2008) article makes such a nice, crunchy wonderful point: the WOC technology (media) used to communicate information about the art/artefacts on display competes against the art/artefacts on display. We could relate that to McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” but I am not sure that really captures the full power of what Isaac suggests. I prefer to go with Isaac’s point that it has important “ideological” implications (i.e. power). Those who own the microphone can pass it own to minority groups so that they can “have their voices heard” but the elephant in the room is that everyone knows who owns the microphone and furthermore (and more to Isaac’s point), the minority groups might have preferred singing their message than standing on stage and speaking it into a microphone. Lesson learned: rhetoricak stretegies not only target language but also the tools used to communicate language;
3) I am uncomfortable with the arguments in Srinivasan (2010) that discuss digital objects as mobile and mutable (pp. 746-747). It is true that digital technologies enable us to produce a multiplicity of digital objects but it seems to me that each of these objects is an “immutable” iteration at a given point in time and space. Of course, it can be changed, but so can a painting. I can paint over a canvas anyday. Digital technologies may be flexible and offer new ways of gathering and disseminating knowledge but digital objects are physically experienced through our senses. They may exist in a “cloud”, but are encountered on an interface made in China;
4) For this reason (point 3), I am a bit at odds with Malpas’ (2008) idea that “new technologies…dissolve the presence of the thing reproduced” (p. 19). Being a translator, I admit to being nit-picky about words. I don’t recall Benjamin using the verb “dissolve” and if he did, it would have been in German so I do wonder about the idea that Malpas’ writing conveys. Does representation dissolve reality? Because this is what we are talking about here is it not?
5) I like the cooperative model for archiving that is described in the Christen (2011) article, which echoes what Dr. Hennessy showed us last week in class with the RRN. This is definitely a dynamic model for knowledge sharing and presentation. Of course, the question with regards to presenting information to non-native site visitors is how much information is too much (at one point, we all turn away from too much reading)? However, I have noticed that some design features allow people to decide whether they want to know more or not (so a tiered approach to showing data). Overall, it’s inspiring.
I’ll leave the rest for class…it’s my tiered approach to conversation…
Wow, fantastic points everyone! (Could you raise that bar a little higher Diana?). I wanted to throw one more issue into the mix, which focuses on the idea of interaction. I think interaction is the most important aspect when discussing digital objects, and would suggest that we consider the ways that interaction shapes the relationship between audience and object. The reduction of the discussion of digital objects seems to me to be, in some ways, a misdirection. Too often it focuses on the immaterial aspects of digital objects, and not the potential materiality of the objects.
Much in the way that the Benjamin noticed how materiality of film (both still and moving) provided new ways of seeing—bringing us closer to an object, or filming in slow motion to reveal things in new ways—so too, I would argue, do digital objects. Isaac writes that the experience of interacting with digital displays at NMAI (National Museum of the American Indian) comes “not solely from the Native American material culture…but from our tactile use of and interaction with digital displays, so that electronic media and our engagement with it, rather than the Native American items, become the object of experiential knowledge” (299).
The key word in this quote for me is “tactile.” In my opinion, the ability to interact tactilely with a digital object changes how we think about that object. It becomes actualized in a way that the original, or “real”, object cannot be, sitting behind glass on display. Suddenly, we can touch it, spin it around to see it from multiple angles…these are not just bells and whistles (which of course they are), but they provide access to something that previously we had no access to at all, and in a decidedly different way than photos and movies. It is no wonder that visitors, especially younger visitors, found the media displays more engaging than items behind a shelf. Isn’t this why so many museums have displays for children that are activity driven, to draw them into the materiality of the objects?
It seems to me that many of the writing around digitization focus on the immaterial affordances of databases and catalogs, such as the Kimberly Christian’s article on the ability to provide custom access based on traditional customs, such as only showing those items appropriate to one’s gender or standing within the community. Or, to be able to add to the database traditional knowledge, in all its varied forms, to the database. These are important and welcome affordances of the digital object, but there are other affordances, other aspects of the object that can allow for a heightened forms of interaction.
This is a fantastic contextualization of the readings (Diana!), and great responses to the post (everyone else! yea!).
One question that repeatedly appears in my head is: now that we live in the presence of media and digital objects, what happens to the conversation if we remove the media component and focus solely back on how an authentic object implies context and interpretation of cultural heritage? Are real objects viewed the same way now that they were pre-‘new’ media? Or even pre-‘old’ media? Are museums considered to be more exciting and engaging now than they were a century ago? Or has the abundance of available objects now overwhelmed the collecting bug that these curio cabinets provoked before?
A key word that stuck out to me in Srinivasan’s paper is ‘performance’ (of course….)(2010). How objects are displayed, regardless of being real or digital, affects how they are perceived. The display of real objects is designed by an authority figure to have control over the knowledge that is being presented (getting back to that Unassailable Voice of Walsh, 1997). Issac took this further by examining audience interaction with the Window on Collections interface. She found that the presentation of BOTH the real and digital objects affected audience’s engagement, perspectives on context and knowledge and the connection of real to digital object. While augmented reality techniques address some design and interaction issues with objects, there are many facets to the design of a system and the design of presentation. Understanding all these facets seem necessary to ensure the ‘proper’ (or desired) performance of the display.
I do love Lowe’s artistic presentation of lithics in the WOC project (Issac, 2008). I completely agree that by taking fun and exciting risks in presentation, the audience will engage in fun and exciting exploration. There is something there about agency and engagement and a challenge to dive in.