The Aura of Digital Visual Art

The continual crossover and intertwining of art and information technologies is altering aesthetics and culture. Mechanical reproduction as a mass culture replacement for original art still exists, but it is being replaced, rapidly, by the new media. Digital production of art, with the inherent ability for infinite reproduction, is a means to construct a new type of reality that goes beyond the distinctions of what is real and what is representational. There is no longer a distinction between original and copy. There are works of art that are ever evolving, programmed to change themselves or changed by observation or by the intervention of the observer.

Walter Benjamin's concept of the "aura" may be applicable to an understanding of this evolving context. A new type of aura may be evolving. Instead of standing back in awe of great works of art that emit some kind of aura or hold on us, we are drawn into the illusions of accessibility and interactivity, into a new aura of the illusion being the reality. The lines between reality and illusion become increasing blurred as the same technologies that are used to create new forms of illusion are also used to create new forms of physical space, altering architecture and design of physical forms.

Visual art has always been a mental construct of cues and symbols. The progression from the screen of a stretched canvas to huge canvas of the cinema screen to the glass screen of the television and the plastic screen of the computer monitor has been a natural progression for visual art. The materials used for the construction vary but the symbols and cues of the illusion remain similar.

Art produced by computer programs is distinct from art produced in other media, such as traditional forms of painting and then transferred to digital format by means of an electronic scanner. Art that is produced by computers for display on the Internet has aura, even though it is reproduced infinitely. Art that exists in a gallery somewhere, that has aura there, loses that quality when it is reproduced on the Internet. On the other hand, art that is produced for the purpose of being displayed on the Internet has aura on the Internet but loses its aura when it is reproduced on paper.

Any experience of art is ultimately subjective and there is really no other way to prove that one work of art has "aura" and another does not. But my conclusion is that new media have as much ability to create aura as original works of art created by more traditional means, and that this aura is not lost through reproduction, but rather, recreated over and over again as they bounce around cyberspace from one computer to another.

Ron Strand teaches communications and continuing education at Mount Royal University and is working on a doctorate degree in distance education. He has a blog with some ideas about online learning, elearning and continuing education Ron Elearning.

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