Douglas Davis the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
In his seminal 1991 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction," the video creative person Douglas Davis writes that digital bits "can be endlessly reproduced, without degradation, always the same, always perfect."
This is different, Davis argues, from counterpart data. In the past, copying an audio bespeak -- for example, dubbing a copy of a cassette tape -- ever involved an unpredictable loss of clarity, which Davis compares to waves washing on a beach, always breaking slightly differently. But "digital bits, compatible with the new generation of tools that see, hear, speak, and compute, march in precise, soldierly way, one figure after some other."
I made the above video in 2007 as a response to Douglas Davis' ideas on the iron-clad reproducibility of digital media. It'south an animation of the process of saving an paradigm file in incrementally lower file formats over hundreds of times. Aesthetically, the terminal effect approximates Davis' clarification of analogue data as a "wave breaking on a beach, breaking over and over merely never precisely in the same class." And nonetheless, of course, information technology is an entirely digital object.
It seems to me that despite our collective faith in the allegiance of digital media -- evidenced past our willingness to digitize our fabric, tangible valuables (coin, for example, or personal photographs) -- disuse remains an inherent property of our earth. All things decay, tend towards entropy: our current models of digital compression, which seem faultless now, volition "disuse" relatively equally more and more accurate modes of compression are invented, college qualities are reached. The MP3 files nosotros idea were the bee'south knees in the 90s haven't deteriorated physically, but they take become increasingly obsolete in the face of FLAC and MPEG-four files, which is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing. Stewart Brand, the writer and futurist, points out in his book Clock Of The Long At present
Nosotros understand our world through the lens of change and disuse; waves breaking on the beach while new ones class, robustly, out at body of water.
Incidentally, the title of Davis' essay is an homage to Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 article, "The Work of Fine art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which argues, among other things, that mass-media admission to art liberates it from its traditional "parasitic" dependence on ritual, ownership, and place. Benjamin believed that the "aura" of a work of fine art (that sense of awe and reverence we get from being in the presence of it) is not something inherent to art, but rather a cultural side-upshot of its exclusivity, restricted exhibition, authenticity, or perceived value. In the burgeoning age of "mechanical reproduction" (i.eastward. printed copies, films, and photographs), that aureola disappears, freeing fine art from its ties to the bourgeoisie and allowing mass audiences to, in a sense, "own" the work.
The age of digital reproduction undoubtedly redoubles this issue, democratizing media more rapidly and more thoroughly than Benjamin could ever have anticipated. I needn't always run across the Mona Lisa, for example, to empathise its value; the image has taken on a hyperreal quality that anyone with a cursor can tap into. We take moved beyond consuming media and into making it ourselves -- artists can download, remix, and redistribute work as they meet fit.
But do digital copies retain allegiance to their originals?
The below video is a similar experiment to the beginning: by filming an event (i.eastward. the "original"), and then projecting it on a wall (i.e. the "reproduction"), so re-filming, and re-projecting, the paradigm and experience of the original disappears.
Source: https://scienceblogs.com/universe/2010/03/13/in-his-seminal-1991