In the depths of my daily procrastination today, I stumbled upon this video. It made me think about how the new realm of media we inhabit is determined to create original pieces of media, this video particularly refers to the video medium. So when we stumble upon a piece of video media we see as “original”, is it really? Sure the content of the video may be original, or is it? You could use the second half of the linked video to argue that, all life on earth have a 1 in one trillionth connection to each other (life being water, rocks etc.) Therefore, you as a living person are not 100% original. Furthermore, whenever someone points a camera at anything, does this mean the footage they are obtain is un-original? As a result, can we ever obtain original footage to use to create an original video?
A topic also mentioned in this video is; where is the original of a video? With any psychical art such as drawing, painting, sculptures etc. They have an original, but when we talk about an original video, there doesn’t seem to be one. Videos are stored on hard drives, internet servers. But they are all instruction for a computer to playback the information in video form. A video, is “A digital simulacrum of something that has no original”. So are all videos ever made, un-original due to this?
So where is this post? Are all internet posts the same because there is no physical copy of them? Is this whole step into the digital world actually a backward step in terms of originality? Or, is it as scientific as nothing we ever see is purely original because we are all one trillionth cousins?