Thoughts/Responses to Benjamin/Bush

So, bling-bling blogging, eh? First, I would like to explain a basic equation with regard to my comprehension of dense, philosophic and theoretical texts. Upon first reading, I, on average, understand about 50% of said texts. This comprehension decreases exponentially with each concurrent reading. Therefore, first reading is 50%, second is 75%, third is 87.5%, and so on. Such an equation is convenient because it never assumes total comprehension. Rather, it is impossible. That said, I’ll be talking about Benjamin and Bush.

Two sections were of immediate interest to me with regard to this course. The first section pertains to Benjamin’s concept of the aura:

The cult of rememberance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the expression of a fleeting face.

If I understand this passage correctly, Benjamin seems to assert that, when photography was in its infancy and being used for only such stated things, it was still capable of maintaining an aura. As if somehow perverted by its move from individual, cult-like (by which he means attached to ritual and animalistic values) use, photography became incapable of maintaining an aura the moment it became [re]appropriated for showing objects in things like picture magazines.

Interesting, here, is what to make of such an assumption. Having little background in photography, I can only assume that those people invested in photography would find such a treatment as overly harsh. After all, I do believe we’re interpreting the aura as a “good” concept (i.e. artists would like for their works to have an aura). It would seem to me that Baudrillard would be a likely next-step in trying to reconcile the aura and works of art that are technically reproduced.

The second passage that I would like to address involves Benjamin’s treatment of the way in which Séverin-Mars describes the state of film and its artistic possibilities. On this, Benjamin says:

It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it—with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep[…]Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico.

This passage is especially poignant for me, as I have little background to digital art. The passage, then, instructs me to be especially cognizant of the language and approaches that I will take when trying to describe and talk about digital art. In other words, do we talk about digital art as though it were a mere website, an image on a screen, long-winding strings of code—or, further, ones and zeroes? Or, perhaps, am I losing the aura—if it can, in fact, exist in digital art—for the medium?

On the Bush article (which is remarkably prophetic), there were again two passages that I found of particular interest. The first begins:

Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.

While rather obvious, I find this of importance because it shows the way in which Bush sees information going beyond the written word. Later on, he implies a synthesis between all media that seems to assume the advent of the internet. In relation to digital art, I see Bush’s prediction of “modification and extension” as an anticipation of digital art that instructs through its indexed nature.

The other passage of particular interest to me came toward the end of Bush’s article. It goes:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass.

While my original response to this idea was, “yes, with the internet, we index things arbitrarily,” only to be disproven by Bush’s concept of a more semantically-mapped, semantically-dependent index. After all, the algorithms that Google uses (as I understand them) are dependent upon the users search data and website-accessing patterns. That Bush would have guessed the framework of the most popular search engine is incredible. Furthering this is the idea of the browser, wherein the user can chronologically map their relationship to data and websites over the time that they’ve used that browser.

Certainly over the word-limit, I’ll conclude this broadcast day here.