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Is this affection, which creates a relationship between sign (or rather: signal) and
object even in the non-semantic domain, also true for the impulse transmitted by an electronic
medium? It is true that principal binary encoding also applies to the registration of
images. Anything that can be scanned enters the neutralising code of the digital. But
since images cannot exist without the excitation spaces of their presence, the interface
of representation, staging and reception including the contingent area of perception
whose special emanation used to be known as the "aura", the criterion of computed pixels
is obviously not saying much. Though they can be computed, digital images should
not be mixed with information data or simply added to the internal ramification logic of
the technological archive. 63
The Materiality of Media Art
The auratic notion of the original constitutes a dilemma for the conservation of media art
in the museum: "Interference with technology frequently also means alteration of the authentic
character of a work", and it is necessary to "disclose which of the components
seem worth preserving in their original configuration in spite of their outdated technological
structure, and possibly because of their patina" - referred to by Benjamin - "or will
substantially benefit from the aura of their media history." 64
Is originality, in the case of media art, no longer inherent in the nature of the work
of art, but in the physics of the apparatus? In the spirit of the cultural studies, David Morley
insists on the "'physics' of television, focusing on the largely unexamined significance
of the television set itself (rather than the programmes it shows), both as a material and
as a symbolic, if not totemic, object" 65 . In contrast to research into television as a piece
of furniture, media archaeology employs the term 'physics of television' to describe its
technological conditions. In 1878, the Portuguese physicist Adriano de Paiva suggested
the use of selenium to transform the brightness values of an image into the corresponding
degrees of strength of the electric current. Video artists like Nam June Paik and Bill
Viola expressly emphasise the physics of their medium: "hearing sound and watching
movement and light is a very physical experience". 66
The media artist Achim Mohne reminds us of the materiality of the video with his
installation MediaRecyding (video sculpture, Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen
1999) where he put on show, as raw material, the tape that the recorder "spat out" during
the television recording instead of rewinding it, "as the original in an artistic process
that sees the tape as material, body, symbol carrier, and sculpture" 67 . But after an epoch
of technological modernity that was forever trying to hide its technological conditions in
a dissimulatio artis in order to allow the audio-visual illusion in the perception of the viewer
to function at all, the discovery of this materiality is already a sign of its demise.
The video recorder is dead, killed by TV on demand. There will be no more recorders,
there will be no more cassettes, no shelves with lovingly designed covers, no video
libraries, no tape spaghetti. 68
The Video-Scratching is a drastic reminder of the materiality of the medium; here
we find practised in the area of the visual what has long been familiar from the disk jockey
world of Vinyl. Feedback produces images that hurt the eye. In Berlin, the VJ Safy
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