Essay Research - Douglas Davis

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

(An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995)

Douglas Davis                    

·      There is no clear conceptual distinction now between original and reproduction in virtually any medium based in film, electronics, or telecommunications.

·      In another sense, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far beyond the boundaries of Benjamin’s prophecy into the rick realm of production itself.

·      ‘Virtual’ (it is actually a realer reality or RR), both originality and traditional truth (symbolized by the unadorned photographic ‘fact’ are being enhanced, not betrayed.

·      Arts most provocative extension is into the intimate bowels of our body, mind and spirit.

·      (Art) is a commodity that must reach out to touch many fingers, not just yours or mine.

·      Copying an Audio or video signal in the past always involved a loss in clarity, but digital bits, compatible with the new generation of tools that see, hear, speak and compute, march in precise soldierly fashion, one figure after another. This means that any video, audio or photographic work of art can be endlessly reproduced without degradation, always the same, always perfect.

·      These modes of address and interaction are charged with powerful social and psychological implications.

·      (The computer) is a tool which makes the work of writing (or otherwise) more efficient. (Peter Lyman, Stanford 1984).

·      The moment a painting can be scanned, the original landscape, portrait, or color field can be altered or cloned in the manner of a vintage film.

·      The mind is at issue, too, most of all the perceptions it will now inexorably bring to both art and life, to that sacred line between ‘original’ and ‘fake’.

·      Walter Benjamin saw accurately the logical implications of Mechanical reproduction. He ignored antilogic. He erred in assuming That the world would bow to logic, that the endless reproduction of a painting or a photograph would diminish what he called the ‘aura’ of the original. As Sidney Tillim once pointed out in Artforum, nothing like this has happened.