Walter Benjamin

As early as 1935, Walter Benjamin intuited much of the issues we are dealing with in today’s digital landscape. Just as the printing press allowed the unlimited reproduction of the written word, contemporary technology has provided for the endless recreation of all media forms.

The endless reproduction of print is similar to today’s digital landscape, but unlike the situation in the 1450s when someone needed the money to buy their own printing press and set their own type face/font and bind and distribute their product… today, anyone with literally the cheapest computer or at least access to a computer can reproduce virtually any visual representation, be it print, photo, sound, film, or computer animation.

The ease with which any digital artifact can be re-appropriated is obvious when you look at the re-release of Toy Story. What was originally a very popular film, has, with a minimal of effort, been remade as a digital 3D version. Doubtless, whatever aura Walter Benjamin was writing about is obscured by this recreation of a classic Pixar film. For example, which version is to be regarded as the original? Surely someone will argue that the digital 3D version best captures the film’s spirit. And, since both were rendered on computers and designed by a team rather than any one individual, any coherent concept becomes the purview of a committee rather than the vision of an artist. Surely even the original Toy Story would be something of a curiosity to Walter Benjamin initially because we as an audience are asked to take that film and reinterpret it with the addition of new 3D technology. Is one version more authentic than the other? Does someone have to see both the original and the 3D version to completely digest the Toy Story experience?

For all of his insight, Benjamin does not offer anything in the way of a solution to artistic production in modern-day society. It is one thing to recognize a system of control, in this case, the bourgeois appropriation of modes of production. But it is quite another to offer an alternative means of production. For example, it seems self-destructive to encourage the downloading of television shows, music, film, and all other digital media, outside of any model of compensation for the artist or production company. Whether or not someone steals or buys media from the internet; the question goes unanswered, where does the artwork’s aura lie?

It is interesting to consider how the proliferation of the Christian Bible would have been altered it any individual had been able to recreate, modify, and reproduce biblical text on their own printing press. Because that is precisely the situation we face today. Walter Benjamin conceived of a world where business interests appropriated artistic texts for their own ends. In evolving beyond that, what has occurred is a system of almost self-destructive egalitarianism. Today, there is no incentive for preserving the aura of an artwork and there no incentive for protecting the vision of an artist. Rather, everyone is encouraged to make new any digital artifact that they access.

The critical thinker of today needs to consider both the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction – the artwork that Benjamin was specifically concerned with—and contrast it with the free-for-all that has resulted from the proliferation of digital media. While Benjamin’s work is quite apt, it highlights how dramatically technology has altered our lives. The principles that Benjamin outlines are quite sound, but the specific seem outdated to the point of irrelevance.

What is certain, the hackneyed discussion of the Mona Lisa’s representation on t-shirts and coffee mugs, grossly oversimplifies Benjamin’s thesis. Benjamin did not simply state that an artwork loses its aura through mechanical reproduction, his interests lay in the much more complicated question of what elicits human emotion and what constitutes art when the world is more eager to replicate itself endlessly than it is to preserve any semblance of uniqueness.

Printing Revolution & Making Mistakes

It didn’t take reading Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe to recognize the outstanding historical impact resulting from the invention of the printing press. It revolutionized learning and how information was presented and consumed by people. “A serious student could now endeavor to cover a larger body of material by private reading than a student or even a mature scholar needed to master or could hope to master before printing made books cheap and plentiful” (47). What an interesting time it must have been when printing was becoming the next big thing, yet hand-copying was still being employed. The old was mixing with the new in Western Europe. Yet, it could not be denied that the new would soon overpower the old and extend it’s supreme hold on communication to the whole world. Dare I say, it’s not unlike our current shift from analog to digital? Yes, of course it is. We still use books and understand their inherent importance (like scriptoria in the 15^th century) but we are learning to communicate in a new way.

The part of Eisenstein’s book I’d like to focus on is the excerpt on standardization. Although this is a pretty obvious component to the advent of print, there are many aspects to this I would have not likely considered before reading this book.

When we think of printing today, we can rest assured that every copy of a certain edition of a certain book would look and read the same. When a manuscript is written, it is submitted to a publisher. That publisher then will edit & revise and then has the responsibility to print a standardized copy of the edited original.

However, during the early years (and centuries) of print, publishing was an unknown entity. Original manuscripts may arrive at the print shop to be printed with mistakes already in them. It is true that many originals would have been hand-copied and could have variants resulting from the individual scribe. Also, who was there to regulate what was sent to each shop? There could be 15 different print shops receiving 15 different versions of an “original” work to make prints of. Additionally, each print shop owner was left to determine what he wanted to print and how much of it he wanted to print. Generally, he had full discretion with regard to the finished products that he himself did not likely write. This means he could put the time and effort he felt like putting toward making a good (and correct) product. Eisenstein addresses this, yet she states there was largely enough consistency in print to be effective. And where there were inconsistencies, these could be addressed if necessary. “[The printings] were sufficiently uniform for scholars in different regions to correspond with each other about the same citation and for the same emendations and errors to be spotted by many eyes.”

Now, even today, we cannot rule out human error as part of everything we encounter. One of the more notable examples in the book is one on a mistake in a print of the Bible that was not caught in time. Printed by R. Barker in 1631, the “wicked” Bible featured a sixth commandment that commands one to commit adultery, instead of abstaining from it.

One interesting thing about mistakes in print at that point in time, however, is how the mistakes were dealt with. “Press variants multiplied rapidly and countless errata had to be issued” (56). A list of errors and their corrections would have to be distributied to right the wrongs of the printer. “The very act of publishing errata demonstrated a new capacity to locate textual errors with precision and to transmit this information simultaneously to scattered readers. It thus illustrates rather neatly some of the effects of standardization.”

Today, mistakes in print usually result in a recall and a reprinting of the erred book. Or if this is not a possibility, it is much easier today to inform the public, who have already purchased the book, of a mistake because of the ever-expanding reach of the media. Think James Fray’s A Million Little Pieces. (Oprah was pissed!)

But now, in an age that is moving away from print, it’s even easier to correct mistakes. Everything is digital and therefore incredibly easy to manipulate and improve. Hell, I usually go back to make edits and corrections several times after “publishing” my blog posts. The same is true of any news source today. Address it, fix it and move on.

But one significant similarity between the advent of print and the global presence of the Internet is the idea of “transmitting information simultaneously to scattered readers.” This raises the rate of mistake catching exponentially because of the sheer number of people that have access to a certain piece of writing (collective intelligence). But what is even greater now that it’s all digital? That person not only has the ability to call attention to that mistake, but to correct it himself.

Remediation: Fashion Ads

Now, I know covering the subject of fashion in terms of its use of contemporary media is far to broad to cover in a singular blogpost. So, I will focus on the advertising side of fashion, specifically, print ads.

In terms of media, print ads are not a new venue. Not even close. In today's world we see print ads everywhere (and they are usually starring a beautiful woman). However, when I was reading the excerpt from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s book Remediation on digital photography, I could not help but think about the use of “air-brushing” in my favorite magazines. On page 107, the authors are disguising the Mexican photographer Pedro Myer. He exhibited his photos on CD-ROM. “As their labels indicate, most of the photographs have been digitally altered,” and the result is a variety of different styles. Some of the photographs are explicit digital collage. Others are realistic except for the appearance of a fantastic, presumably digital, element, such as an angel.” This is when I really started thinking about fashion (in all media) and its special relationship to reality.

I would claim to be an avid reader of Vogue and W magazines. In my eyes, these publications are true works of art. Flipping through pages of glamorous photo shoots and breathtaking ads for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel give me so much pleasure; they have raw aesthetic appeal. Although reading these magazines is somewhat masochistic, for I could never afford to adorn myself in these designs (nor would it be realistic to dress in haute couture), I can not help but indulge myself in my fantasy world.

These magazine and their advertisers employ much more than air-brushing. For example, in Louis Vuitton’s recent campaign, featuring Madonna, one can see how parts of the photo are over-exposed and blended. The colors are muted in certain places and exaggerated in others. Without the help of digital photography and therefore digital manipulation, we would not have this beautiful photograph.

“Looking at some photographs, we cannot be sure what the computer has changed, for nothing in the picture is unambiguously impossible in the world of light” (107).

In this exquisite shot from Dolce & Gabbana the result of digital manipulation or is simply strategically placed tinted lights? We do not know; it could easily be both. What I find so intriguing about these particular examples are their ability to combine transparency and surrealism. “Digital photography appears to complicate and even mock the desire for immediacy that traditional photography promises” (111). There’s the immediacy that’s inherent to photography yet an other-worldliness to the message. As Bolter and Grusin noted, “digital technology may succeed in shaking our culture’s faith in the transparency of the photograph.” Also, their book was from 9 years ago; think how differently photographs are processed now in 2009. I would expect nearly all photos in magazines, newspapers, on television, and on websites to have been doctored in some way. Whether they’ve been cropped or the color has been enhanced, with our current media altering technologies, it’s almost to be expected that what we see on-air, in print or online, is not the true “original.” We can no longer expect a photograph to be an “immediate contact with reality.”

What is interesting, however, is the notion that just because we digitally alter photographs now, does not mean we didn’t alter them in analog form. “The process of digitizing the light that comes through the lens is no more or less artificial than the chemical process of traditional photography. It is a purely cultural decision to claim that darkening the color values of a digitized image by algorithm is an alteration of the truth of the image, whereas keeping an analog negative linger in the developing bath is not” (110).

Photography is an art form and as the technology progress, the media becomes a greater tool. Painting rolled in to analog photography, which has rolled in digital. The newer form is no lesser an art, it is an expansion of its former self.

Vogue cover from May 1939

McLuhan, Ong

This week’s readings were the introduction and fourth chapter from Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message as well as McLuhan’s 1969 interview with Playboy magazine. For the purpose of this week’s blog I would like to focus on McLuhan’s work.

Marshall McLuhan is a very intelligent individual and I struggled quite a bit understanding all of his intertwining thought processes in The Medium. . . Fortunately, his Playboy interview was a bit easier to understand than the work he himself authored. I think one of the primary reasons it was an easier read was that the Playboy interviewer was there to ask those “Can you explain what you mean by that?” kind of questions. I was left with the impression that had I been a student in a McLuhan class, I would probably have had hand up for the entire duration.

For example: McLuhan contends that watching television requires heavy usage of tactile sense. He postulates that sense of touch, rather than sense of sight, is the primary way one absorbs the medium of television. The reason, he argues, is the “low density or definition [of television] offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer.” I assume he means that the viewer must “fill in the blanks” and react to the vague sensibility of a television program rather than “to specific objects.” I would argue, however, that this is not necessarily the case. Although I have never had the experience of viewing television programming in the 1960s, I certainly know what it is like in the 1990 and now in the 2000s. Today, watching television requires little to no effort or participation on the part of its audience. Certainly, other critics (for example, Theodor Adorno in On Television) have argued that television is characterized by an audience’s lack of participation in the events on-screen.

With the benefit of several generations of evolution in the technology of TV, I would argue that big screens and high definition programming and equipment has hardly changed the viewing experience in regards to whether or not the experience is tactile rather than visual.

Today, most programming currently broadcast could be characterized by as mindless television (and a lot of it is just garbage). Unless I am just missing his point, I think McLuhan was wrong in postulating that television viewing at that time required “short, intense participation and (was characterized by) low definition.”

Another point he made that I found interesting was the contrast he made between television and radio. Clearly, these two mediums are extremely different but the reasons he found them to be different were unconventional. As I mentioned above, he said that television is requires intensive participation and is low definition and he called this a “cool” experience. To contrast, he said radio is “essentially ‘hot,’ or high definition-low participation.” I would argue, however, that is no longer true. I think of television as our primary “hot” medium and now the internet/digital communication is our primary “cool” medium. It certainly requires participation on the part of the user. The interactive element is part of the message of that medium. Again, I would not maintain he was wrong in saying these things at the time, only he would be wrong if he said them now.

One this same note, McLuhan himself stated that he has “no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory” and would likely have evolved his understanding of television as a medium as soon as that understanding was no longer relevant. In short, to argue that the point he made in 1969 is no longer a relevant argument is something he would surely have concluded himself. In fact, another point he made was that “today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country.” I would be interested to hear his thoughts on the internet because that is quite a pervasive medium now and certainly very different from the mediums he was acquainted with.