The work of art in the age of digital mediation
During an experiment in artistic mediation integrating digital techniques, it became clear to me that the typologies of status and function of artistic works that Walter Benjamin defined in 1935 are now being modified by digital practices of creation and reception. I propose an update of these concepts.
A new definition of aura
Walter Benjamin defines the aura of a work as the power that the original work exerts over its viewers
on its spectators, an aura that is lost through technical reproducibility (which allows greater appropriation of works by individuals). Aura gave works a cult function as religious objects, putting people in a position of domination, whereas reproducibility enabled them to appropriate works more autonomously. But reproducibility also inscribes art in its capitalist dimension of consumption, entertainment and mass manipulation.
I proposed to people for three weeks in the summer of 2024 to create photographic works of collage and decoupage, then to digitize these works in very good quality, to put them on line in an accessible and perennial internet site, then to project them in large scale, immediately afterwards, much larger than the size of the original work.
The initial aim of this proposal was to gather around the work to collectively create soundscapes with musical instruments that would illustrate these graphic works. For me, the original work had its own unique aura, and the reproduction had less aura, since it was only a reproduction. But in this situation, I noticed the opposite: the original work, this collage, was very fragile and once reproduced, having paid attention to the quality of the reproduction with the author, then projected very large in the collective space, I was surprised to notice that for the person, it was at this moment that his work became charged with an aura, a cultic power that the original didn’t have, so small, fragile and destructible. From this symbolic value that the work took on thanks to its digital reproduction, it became possible to legitimize it, and thus to create music from it, and to want even more to exhibit it, to take care of it, to build oneself through it.
Digital as a new paradigm of existence and creation
Here’s how I explain this new place in the aura: digital is as much a tool for creation as for mediation. In Walter Benjamin’s time, the work had an original medium and was reproduced by techniques. Yet he was already describing a mutation when he spoke of cinema, for example, which no longer really had an original medium, and that the original work was intrinsically already a reproduction, with no further distinction possible with an “original”. But digital technology goes even further, because everyone creates digitally, and preserves and distributes digitally. So there is no longer any distinction between a work that would be original and its reproduction; the work itself is not reproduced, it is the reproduction. It is therefore both unique and multiple in digital space.
Moreover, the digital world is one of the environments in which we exist as human beings. Our identity, for example, is largely defined by our mediations, exchanges and digital traces. The need to be able to intervene in these traces, to reappropriate them, to remove them if they harm us, is linked to identity. So, when we create a work using digital means, it is linked to our identity. It has its own aura in the digital space, which is one of our increasingly important spaces of existence.
This is why these collages, made in the material space of our existence, had less aura than their digital reproduction, because the operation of reproduction that we carried out with a camera or a light is no longer an operation of reproduction, it has become the operation of fabrication of the real work. The technical digital reproduction of an original material object is therefore no longer a reproduction at all, but the passage to existence for the work. The ability of the digital object to be shared on a very large scale, with excellent technical quality, and to be stored on a website that can be accessed at any time, does not degrade it, but inscribes it in this fluid reality in which we live, and in which the accessibility of the work is perhaps today its main criterion of existence and aura.
For an art policy in the digital age
Art has multiple functions, multiple roles, multiple capacities for instrumentalization, in particular the political instrumentalization or manipulation of the masses that Walter Benjamin talks about in his book. Personally, in the context of artistic mediation projects, I use art more for its symbolization function in the psychoanalytical sense, i.e. for its capacity to receive the traces of our expression outside ourselves, which in turn enables us to construct ourselves, and helps us to move towards our own existence, the recognition of ourselves.
So, for me, if we want art to have a psycho-political impact, i.e. to help us exist better, both individually and collectively, we need to reclaim the sovereignty of digital tools and technologies for creation and transmission. To my mind, this can be achieved in three ways:
- Technical mastery: We owe it to ourselves to use sustainable tools that we can master independently of capitalist multinationals. But it allows us to politically build autonomy with digital tools, and to share this autonomy and its tools with the people taking part.
- Patrimonial construction: we must take full and full responsibility for the technical hosting of our digital productions, and for their durability over time. Where are these data hosted? How are they duplicated for backup? And how do we share our asset strategies with the people involved?
- For a psycho-politics of the digital: mastery and control over our processes for producing, storing, safeguarding and making available our digital data has a psychic and political significance. Psychic, because it’s our very existence for which we become responsible, through our methods and the locations of our data, through our choices, through our awareness that our data is located in specific places. Political, because we’re becoming independent, we’re leaving behind our dependence on capitalist multinationals, and we’re once again free of their control, and therefore sovereign in our expression.
By taking care of our creative practices in these three axes, we can then fully enjoy and share the rich and powerful new aura that digital technology can offer to our human expression.
Art as presence and transformation
The work of art does not reside in the created object but in the relationship woven between creation and reception, in this multiple temporality where artist, work and spectator meet and mutually transform each other. The time of creation reveals that art is less technical mastery than presence open to the creative accident, less production of objects than setting the world in motion. The concept of “nefaire” describes this capacity to transform in depth, to create movement that goes beyond simple instrumental doing. In the epoch of its digital mediation, the work of art sees its aura reconfigured: it is no longer in the uniqueness of the original but in the singularity of each experience of reception. The image, oscillating between resemblance and dissemblance, between representation and new reality, shapes our being in the world more profoundly than we imagine. Theater teaches us that the distinction between real life and fiction is itself an illusion: culture is not separate from life but constitutes a refined means of understanding and exercising it. From this perspective, the artist becomes a “writing being” whose words transform reality, and innovation emerges not from technical virtuosity but from the singular presence that invents new uses, new ways of inhabiting the world.
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