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May 17, 2010
The introduction of digital and computer technologies has meant the emergence of a reproducibility that has brought about a diminishing aura, and a “shattering of tradition”. Photographs have morphed from ritual high art objects in an industrial culture into “fragments of information that circulate in the high-speed networks of a digital culture that now ring the globe.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Blyth Street, Adelaide, 2010
The digital image loses the aura that the art photograph had retained because the copy is finally independent of the original; in fact there is no sense of an original at all. What is lost is the concept of photography as a finished art object tied to an auteur vision and created to be seen in a certain ritual way –as an “original”. The 'unfinish’ defines the aesthetic of digital media.
The idea of the original is tightly linked to the concept of the artist as creator. Digital technologies serve to undermine the status and authenticity of the artist, or more specifically unhinge the ties between artist, negative and original.
Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author in his Image, Music, Text sees the death of the author as the birth of the reader. He writes of how a text’s unity no longer lies in its origin but in its destination, which is the reader, who can hold all the different parts, viewpoints of a text together.
In this way, photography follows in the footsteps of text to become intertextual and interactive, requiring user-participation and user-interpretation. While film remained ephemeral and inaccessible, subject to a one-time reel-time viewing, it could retain its aura and reduce the mass audience to a single spectator, but as the cinema becomes subject to remix and review and user engagement, it becomes increasingly heterogeneous and hypertext
Digital technology can greatly empower Barthes’s reader who now has authorial capacity and is capable not only of interpreting texts, but interacting with them and changing them. Readers are increasingly becoming photographers using photographs as the “raw material that can be appropriated, manipulated and reshaped into another work of art” They re-edit images ; they put themselves and their friends into images; put still photos to music. The remix is endless.
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There was a lot of ritual high art around here:
http://www.nyphotofestival.com/site/
I think you would have enjoyed this.