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is a natural rather than an arts view of that which remains, the relic, the remnant (Überrest)
in Johann Gustav Droysens's sense.
Technology and Original: From Reproduction to Raster
Notions like originality were formed only after the Enlightenment with the evolution of
the modern system of fine arts at the expense of a split with the mechanical arts - a split
between idealist, sublimated aesthetics and sensuous aisthesis - which can now be captured
with signal technology - that are rejoined only under the heading media art: "Areas
of perception of word, picture and sound, differentiated in their tendencies and screened
from one another, create new forms of multimedia reality" 72 - but actually converging in
a single medium, the space of computation. So the opposite of the original is no longer
the reproduction or the copy, but rastering, the digital breakdown of a document into the
smallest possible discrete binary-coded elements - a process that is no longer arbitrary
but governed by strict relationships between points on document and image, and whose
way was prepared by the copying machine in the 19th century. Rodin's reproducteur, for
instance, was concerned - according to his letterhead - with the reduction and enlargement
of "objects of art and industry" through a "process perfected mathematically" by
means of a "special machine" that produces "editions" of these "duplicates" 73 ; Rodin, for
his part, accepted only bronze casts as authentic that he himself had authorised. 74
Our concepts of originality and authenticity are confronted with media of reproduction
and simulation that challenge our conceptual sense of history. [...] The question
[...] therefore is to what extent traditional concepts are able to cope with today's problems.
75
Because technological reproduction breaks with the cultural technique of tradition
itself:
Reproduction technology [...] detaches from tradition what is reproduced. As it multiplies
reproduction, it puts mass incidence in the place of the unique specimen. 76 - and
thus the pattern/raster, in the sense of Rosalind Krauss, takes the place of historicity with
the result that artists "are condemned not to originality but to repetition". In painting,
the pattern of the canvas and the pattern painted on it diverge: "The pattern, then, does
not expose the area but hides it through a repetition" 77 - an anarchaeological act.
The Inscription of the Original
Every inscription is made on a surface that has a texture, not just any texture, but a binary
one (the cross-wise interweaving of strips of papyrus and of all textiles, canvases
produced on Jacquard looms). The archi(ve)texture of all history is its fabrication, the digitality
of endless variations. There never was a first text, for the preface to every text is
its carrier: "Not even a virgin surface for its inscription, and if the palimpsest requires a
bare, material support for an arche-writing, no palimpsest." 78 And Barbara Johnson adds:
"In order for something to function as an act, it must be inscribed somewhere, whether
it be on paper, in memory, on a tomb-stone, or on videotape, celluloid, or floppy discs." 79
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