To open… begin the lecture with a face melting mashup/remix. Imagine that!
Lecturer Dan shed some light on this week’s dense reading entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was active in the time of the Second World War and spent much of professional life escaping the Nazi’s. Walter was far from the office working academic archetype but rather a gentleman living the human history that he was writing about.
In this paper, Benjamin, of Goethe University Frankfurt, tries to describe the essence of an original piece of art as the aura. This can be applied to all forms of media provided they are able to be reproduced, which brings to light the question of how the aura is compromised upon an artefact’s reproduction.
In the lecture we drew parallels to films, like during the golden era of cinema in the 30’s where films were remade for sound. But bringing this questioning closer to the current day was the question of Instagram and, does the process of adding sexy filters heighten the aura of the original? My answer is yes… absolutely yes! Having worked with photography in a time when digital was still very much in the beta stage of its rollout… when only the super privileged had the opportunity to use digital photo formats, we would work our darnedest in the darkroom to produce an image that was not dissimilar to the effects that we use today on the #igers forum. The darkroom was a haloed place of quiet contemplation of your next move, next chemical and how you could improve on your previous effort. It resembled a confessional, a silent, calming space that smelt funny. This could be extended by Benjamin’s notion that art is based on ritual.
The darkroom