Benjamin and New Media Reproduction

Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner ed.s, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 48-70.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001

Metadata. Webopedia. 2 March 2006. 26 August 2009. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/metadata.html

One of the many strands Walter Benjamin discusses in his influential 1935 essay concerns the effects of reproduction on the historical testimony and authenticity of the art work (51). Early 20th Century modes of production included print technologies, for example lithography, and also sound recording, photography and film. For Benjamin “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (50). The unique experience is determined by the objects historical testimony. An implication of this is that “traces of the [original] can be revealed only by chemical and physical analyses which are impossible to perform on a reproduction” (50).

Reading Benjamin’s essay in the context of a contemporary digital culture I find it interesting to compare this process of historical tracing to the properties of a new media artwork and the data it consists of. As digitally stored information an image, sound file, video, web page, application, or text contains embedded metadata which provides context for the data. It can describe “when and by whom a particular set of data was collected” (webopedia.com). This data can trace the history of a new media object and is easily accessed through the properties of the object.

For a new media artwork produced by computer technology its history is embedded by automated processes performed by the computer. Subsequently any direct copies made (not transcoded) will also contain this metadata and be indistinguishable from the original. The laboured process of physical and chemical analysis has been replaced by a few button clicks and the reading of file properties via a computer interface.

Lev Manovich makes a relevant point in relation to the use of computer technology and new media objects in contemporary society in that it is characterised by “loss of data, degradation and noise” (54). While in principle copies are indistinguishable in quality ease of distribution and access means lossy compression is a required technique in reducing the digital size of data (54). The compression of images, audio and video for distribution on the internet or feature length films compressed for DVD all involve a loss of quality from the original source files. In this respect the reproduction of new media has not differed greatly from how Benjamin saw reproduction in his time. It continues to be utilised for widespread distribution in culture which requires a practical loss of quality.