Leave My Aura Alone!

The veritable wealth of information on which to write for this week's readings was overwhelming. The text I highlighted in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Bill Nichol's "The Work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems" more than doubled the allowable word count for our entries. With that in mind, I had real difficulty trying to decide what to focus on for this week's blog. I must admit that when Professor David Parry mentioned Benjamin's focus on aura in art work, I imagined Phoebe from Friends trying to cleanse Ross's aura. But that is not really the aura Benjamin is talking about.

Benjamin's concept of aura has to do with the authenticity of an item, namely a piece of art. Benjamin defines authenticity as, "the essence of all this is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to is testimony to the history which it has experienced (Benjamin 221)." Meaning that the aura of a piece of art is not only is presence, but its cultural significance and history.

An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, aura (Benjamin 223).

For Benjamin, the presence of the aura of an original piece of art was very important, and the prevalence of not only the reproduction of art, but art created to be reproduced, greatly concerned him. He was chiefly concerned with photographs and film, which were created to be reproduced. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense (Benjamin 224).

Film, which is created specifically in pieces, for the camera, to be edited together and projected for an audience later, especially concerned Benjamin. His greatest concern being for the film actor , because “the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance, to the audience in person. (Benjamin 228).” The actor, then is performing for the camera and not for any live audience, only for the idea of the audience who may one day view the edited and projected piece. Benjamin believed that since the actor got his aura from acting for the audience, then the film actors aura is depleted because not only is the audience not present for the original performance but there is no full performance of the original piece. Because of this, he believed that film as an art has a diminished aura. However, he contends that

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity (Benjamin 231).

People’s fascination with movie stars, Benjamin believes, is a reaction to the lack of a real aura surrounding the art. He does, however, concede (in a footnote) that film making “not only permits in the most direct way but virtually causes mass distribution. It enforces distribution because the production of a film is so expensive that an individual who for instance might afford to but a painting no longer can afford to buy a film (Benjamin 244).”

Benjamin, who died trying to escape the Nazis in World War II, did not live long enough to see the invention of the computer. If he had, his idea of aura would have been turned on its head. Bill Nichols attempted to build upon Benjamin’s ideas and expand them for the age of cybernetics.

Nichols contended that “If mechanical reproduction centers (sic) on the question of reproducibility and renders authenticity and the original problematic, cybernetic simulation renders experience, and the real itself, problematic (Nichols 30).” By the 1980s the computer has superseded film and television as the new, state of the art form of expression. Not only did it not have an aura in the way that Benjamin viewed it, but computers along with other scientific advances were pushing the boundaries between art and artificial intelligence.

At this point, for Nichols, “The question of whether film or photography is an art is here secondary to the question of whether art itself has not been radically transformed in form and function (Nichols 24).” The integration of function into art in our daily lives has become so prolific, that in many cases it is hard to tell the difference. Is my iPhone a piece of art? What about my GPS or my video editing system?

The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its meaning - without history, without depth, without aura, affect or feeling. The copy reproduces the world, the chip simulates it (Nichols 33).

The Bruce Willis movie, “Surrogates,” in which people can replace themselves with life-like remote-controlled robots, came out this weekend. In the movie, it was hard to know if you were interacting with the real person or the robot simulating and being controlled by that person. Although an AI movie itself is not news, the fact that CNN is reporting that this idea may not be so far-fetched after all is food for thought. If in the near future, life-like robots interact with humans on a daily basis, whose aura is Phoebe going to cleanse? Ross’s or Robot Ross’s? And would she be able to tell the difference?

How Google Books Nearly Saved my Life

Finding this week's book was slightly difficult for me. I made the mistake of not immediately going to the bookstore or Amazon to get my books at the beginning of the semester, so now I have the challenge of finding them the week they are due. This week was particularly challenging since the only copy at the UT Dallas Library was checked out, the local book stores were also sold out. I eventually found it at the Downtown Dallas Library (yes, I did grace the halls of a library after all) but not before, I found it on line! Almost the whole text of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe can be found on Google Books! Since I did in fact need at least the whole text of the first half, I did continue looking until I found a hard copy. But the point is, I found it and thousands of other books online, free to anyone who has access to the Internet. In fact, Google now lets you custom print millions of books at home for free, or for a small sum, you can have your very own copy of an out of print book printed and bound for you.

The magnitude of printing press's impact on dissemination of information, allowing many more people access to books and information than ever before, is only approached by the Internet. Before the invention of the printing press, books were written and copied, but just one book took lots of time and money to create. If someone wanted more than one copy, they either had to hire several scribes, or wait for the same scribe to copy the original (or the copy) again AND it was pretty much guaranteed that the two copies would not be identical. For example:

In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins for quinterno for setting up and printing Ficino's translation of Plato's Dialogues. A script might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one (16).

Each of those 1,025 copies were identical and could be sold for less, while still making a profit. This meant that more, many more people had access to books. This not only changed the possibilities of learning, learning by reading instead of only by a live instructor, but also the possibilities of writing, mass communication, organization, and record keeping. The Internet has taken these possibilities even further. Not only can people access and read books and other information on the web, but also take classes remotely, publish their own works on blogs and other websites, as well as organize and disseminate endless amount of information.

Books were not the only media that were revolutionized by the printing press. Although movable type and block letters had been around for centuries, the printing press made maps, icons, and charts easier to replicate and mass produce. The result being that more people had access, recognized inaccuracies and created new, better maps and charts. Although easily reusable wood blocks meant that the same picture could be used on one page to illustrate Verona and in another Mantua (59), they could also be used to recreate accurate, recognizable pictures of the kings. In the same way, the Internet has made it far easier to look up pictures of celebrities and get instant updates on statistics and information. The consequence being that with the Internet, as well as the early printing press, not everything is looked over and fact checked right away. However, also like the Internet, the freely offered collective knowledge of readers often led to quickly reprinted new "more accurate" editions of books.

Then, like now the question of intellectual property began to arise. Before the invention of the printing press, there were no authors or copyrights. Stories were written in books and then copied by a scribe then memorized by a wandering scholar or minstrel and credited to anonymous if credited at all.

The terms plagiarism and copyright did not exist for the minstrel. It was only after printing that they began to hold significance for the author (84).

Now, with the easy access to copying and publishing that the Internet provides, the issues of creative property have returned once again. The free books that can be accessed on Google Books are supposed to be out from under copyright rules and considered Public Domain, however, not all of the books that they have offered up that way have been so. Fan Fiction sites have also brought up the question of who owns the rights to made up worlds and characters. Or even, the simple act of reposting a story form a news site can be considered piracy if the original story is not properly credited or liked back to.

Comparing the printing press revolution and the Internet revolution could be a book (or website) of its own. The question is, is the Internet really as big, as life changing, no, world changing as the invention of the printing press? I'm sure we'll be able to print a copy of that book soon.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Reading this week's book, Remediation, was a little bit more difficult than the previous readings. It caused what I like to call "brain fuzz," where you get to the end of a paragraph and think, "wait, what did I just read?" I think this is partly because Bolter and Grusen have a nasty habit of making up words which they do not explain, and then proceed to use them juxtaposed against one another in sometimes ambiguous ways. At least the difficult words in the other readings could be looked up in the dictionary.

This being by far the most current of our readings, having been written not only in a time when I was alive, but also cognizant of and actually using the technology described in the book as it was being written, I was a little surprised to not know or understand a lot of the references. The movie Strange Days and the music video, Telecommunications Breakdown were used ad-nausium throughout the book, but I have never heard of either of them. And I'll be honest, I had NO idea what a MUD was, and the context clues were about as clear as mud. Multiuser Dungeon? Really? So, it's basically World of Warcraft meets chat room. (Do they even have chat rooms anymore?) Well, I guess as much as things change they stay the same. So, after discovering that this book was a weird kind of time capsule, I decided to look past the dated material and look at the content.

Bolter and Grusen argue that media continues to grow upon itself as it evolves from one medium to another. It takes part of that old medium and "remediates" it, or uses the old thing in a new way, to show how the new technology improved on the old. One way in which they contend media tries to improve on itself is the ever present, ever unattainable quest for immediacy, or reality to be captured and experienced through media. For example, a photograph is a more realistic version of a painting, and a movie (short for "moving picture") is a more realistic version of a picture, and a "talkie" is a more realistic version of a movie, and so on. Each medium builds upon the last to fulfill the previous medium's broken promises of realism. This is reminiscent of McLuhan's rear view mirror theory, in which we can only understand our current media in terms of past media. Bolter and Grusen take it one step further in contending that new media IS old media, with a face lift (which, by the way, they contend is a remediation of the self).

They also contend that media is both trying to be immediate (feel so real that it disappears) and hypermediate (to constantly remind the viewer or hearer of itself). One of my favorite types of media is the theme park, and not just any theme park, Walt Disney World! Walking down Main Street USA, one is submerged in the sights and sounds of Disney's "make believe" world. In this sense the theme park is very much immediate, it reaches every one of your senses and brings you in to its fantasy. Even the lines bring you into the story of a Mission to Mars or a journey back to time. However, a quick trip inside for some air will jolt the vacationer back to reality as he is bombarded with food and souvenirs for sale, at quite a hefty price tag. Or, when walking from one "land" to another, the park guest hears a change in music, costume, and architecture and is again reminded of the media surrounding him. The whole park is full of remediation everywhere one looks. At the end of every ride is a gift shop with souvenirs for that ride. Chances are that the ride was based on a Disney movie, which was probably based on a book. The park itself is a remeidation of Disneyland, which was remediation of the TV show Disneyland, which then again, was a remediation of the theme park Disneyland. Disney doesn't call it remediation though, they call it Synergy.

This back and forth remediation is also seen in television and the web, mostly by TV stations that now have websites. In a world where information is free and immediate, channels like CNN use their website to not only send viewers back to the TV station, but also use the TV station to send viewers back to the website. Both mediums are full of hypermediated material with multiple boxes of scrolling information and pictures, each is a veritable wealth of information and stimulation. I believe CNBC is the station responsible for the "octobox" and the "decabox" showing 8 or even 10 "live" people at once talking with each other about the day's news. Although it is in some ways immediate, because the people are "live" and talking to each other in real time, it is also extremely hypermediated with not only the sheer quantity of talking heads, but also the graphics and music along with them, one can not help but remember that she is watching TV.

Although technology (especially the web) has moved forward by leaps and bounds in the last ten years since Remediation was written, its examples can still be seen in the new (and let's face it, remediated) generations of technology available today.

Oral Culture and Your Local Library

I joined my local branch of the Dallas Library last November so I could get my hands on some information about my new dog. After two trips I called it quits. They did not have much useful information, the hours were inconvenient, and I could find everything I needed online. Without late fess. 24 hours a day. I am not the only one fed up with traditional libraries, most of the people I know have not stepped into a library in years. Why would they, when a world of information is right at their fingertips through the world wide web?

Is the library going to be another casualty of the digital age, falling to the way side like so many newspapers and record stores before it? The answer, of course, is yes. Or maybe no. According to John D. Sutter's CNN article, libraries may have a future, with or without books. Like any other piece of technology, the written word has to change with the times or it becomes obsolete. As a source for knowledge and free information, the Library as we know it is likely to soon become extinct. However, some are changing with the times.

Librarians realize that the "one way flow of information from book to patron isn't good enough anymore. (Sutter)." The same frustration with the unchanging nature of books is expressed in Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" when he says,

"a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get nothing back, except the same, often stupid words which called for your question in the first place (79)."

According to Sutter, many forward-thinking libraries are solving this problem by beginning to blog and tweet about what is going on in their neighborhoods as well as offer digital, non-book services like video, gaming, and music labs. This is just they type of change that Marshall McLuhan called for in his 1969 Playboy interview. Forty years ago, he saw the change coming when he said,

"Book learning is no longer sufficient in any subject; the children all say now, 'Let's talk Spanish,' or 'Let the Bard be heard,' reflecting their rejection of the old sterile system where education begins and ends in a book."

By meeting these needs though turning themselves into community gathering centers where people can debate ideas and making stories come alive by acting them out and recording them, modernized libraries are in some ways returning to oral culture roots.

But, are the values of oral or preliterate culture better than bookish, literate culture? In preliterate, oral culture, events were remembered and agreed upon through collective consciousness and "customary law, trimmed of material no longer in use, was automatically always up to date and thus youthful (Ong, 98)." They did not consult a written, unchanging book, they consulted each other. These days, some people would say that we remember too much through the printed word. With the removal of the physical book, a more interactive society can happen. Although the traditional function of a library may be challenged, the digital age may be able to use new media to "retribalize" society. Theorists like McLuhan believed that “Print centralizes socially and fragments physically, whereas electronic media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man (Playboy).” He believed that electronic media could bring the world together in a similar way that printed media had torn it apart. However, in some ways, printed media has brought the world together for thousands of years, allowing them to communicate with each other, even if they do not speak the same “mother tongue,” though Learned Latin.

According to Ong, “Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got underway with greater difficulty, if it had gotten under way at all. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Isaac Newton commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin (114).” So without Learned (written) Latin, the world might very well still be in the dark ages, scientifically, and much more segregated socially. The thinkers of the world were able to consult the same texts to convey and discover information in a way that was not possible though other spoken or written word. Through new media, this type of communication without boundaries is once again available, but on a much larger scale.

Although some level of affluency is needed to own new technology, access to it is free and becoming much more available through forward thinking libraries. So, if you walk into your local library branch in the next few years and see that although it lacks books, it’s got a great interactive media lab, and discussion forum, don’t be surprised. Just summon your inner tribes man and join in.

And tweet me. Maybe then I’ll give the library a chance again. If it’s open.