Week 5 Task

Walter Benjamin believes that there is a certain "aura" about the original copies of a 'work of art'. The "aura" he describes relates to the sense of awe that surrounds the original copy. He believes that the history of the history behind it, its publicized authenticity and cultural value of the object are all apart of the "aura". He further goes on to state that he believes that by reproducing these original copies in different ways it takes the "aura" of the product away. In contemporary digital media the same questions are valid. With music the original copy of the music would be seeing the band, orchestra, artist, etc playing live in concert. This in itself would contain the "aura" of the object, however, once the music has been reproduced, for example, through recordings or a spread over the internet, the music looses its aura. There is something 'special' in seeing the performance live as to buying or downloading the video clip off the internet.

Nowadays anyone with a computer can create things digitally or reproduce other peoples work. So the question to be asked is "what does that mean for art and the aura of the object?' Benjamin believes that by simply reproducing an object any way would be taking the aura away from the original copy so it seems fair to say that reproducing the item digitally would have the same effect. When it comes to creating something digitally the creation would be the first seen of it so that copy would have its own aura, however, once the object had been posted around the internet or copied to some other place or area, it would lose that aura simply because it wouldn't be unique anymore.

With photoshopping there are two possible directions that this could go. Firstly the photoshoped image could create a new aura for itself separate from the original copy. In this case it would still be a copy of the original with the common factor being same basic outline of the art. An example of this is with the Monalisa. If someone visited the museum where this famous painting was being kept and took a picture of it, put it on their home computer and photoshoped a pair of sunglasses on it with a beard to make fun of it. It would be stealing part of the originals aura as it is a kind of copy of it while creating a new aura for itself as a unique picture. The other direction this could go, using the Monalisa example again, would be that the copy would insult the original at such a cheap technique being used to recreate it and the aura would be lost to it. I believe that Benjamin's ideas would suggest supporting the latter over the former.

Benjamin believed in art having its own aura before computers and the like (digital and electronic equipment). Something created digitally is the same as something created non-digitally. The object in question would have an aura of it's own as long as it was created from scratch and not a copy of something else.