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But in the video image, infrastructure and representation coincide in the raster.
Technologically, this is due to the fact that what is to be reproduced can be stored on the
medium. But what happens when the reproduction technology itself is discontinued in
history or, rather, in media archaeology? For, according to a dictum of Marshall McLuhan,
the message of each new medium is the aura of its predecessor:
The invention of photography revealed that painting is so captivating because the
canvas does not show reality; the introduction of the motion picture revealed that the
photograph derives its beauty from the lack of movement; the sound film revealed that
the silent film is deeply moving because there is no noise. And colour film directors were
leaders in the aesthetics of the "film noir". Then, television made it clear that all those
film forms were borrowing their attractiveness from the black areas between the pictures.
And now, High Vision teaches us that the video offered something that is being lost at
the moment: the aesthetics of the raster line. In cyberspace, we will become aware that
the power of distant media was our abstinency on the screen. Then Simstim will show us
that cyberspace was so pleasant because it took place outside our nervous system. 80
Thus, even cyberspace turns from media-archaeological distance into a space for
the original.
The Need of Technological Images for Reproduction
Since every technological image represents a coding, it follows Roland Barthes's definition
of the real: to be captured, it always has to be "transformed into a painted (framed)
object" so that it can be depainted again:
Code upon code, says realism. Therefore, realism cannot be said to "copy" but to
"imitate" (it copies by a second mimesis what is already a copy). 81
Travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries saw the landscape "with the eyes of people
who used to draw" 82 ; Chris Marker says that much in his film essay Sans soleil:
I remember a January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed in January
in Tokyo. They have replaced my memories, they are memories. I wonder how people remember
who don't film, who don't photograph, who don't use tape-recorders. 83
Copy (reproducibility) and archive, then, are in league with each other. At this point
Benjamin, too, diagnoses a media-archaeological disjointedness: The technological media
are such - first with film (and before with photography) - that their reproducibility "is
directly founded on the technology of their production" 84 - medium and arche. "To an
ever increasing extent, the reproduced work of art is becoming the reproduction of a
work of art made with a view to reproduction", and - according to a theory of Samuel
Weber 85 - the linguistic suffix of the term reproducibility already contains the seed of the
virtual nature of the technological media. What is the truthfulness of technological reproductions
in comparison with the original?
Just as a computer giving inaccurate results does not falsify the physical laws of the
machine, semantic errors in the archaeological copy of an inscribed stone do not falsify
geometric statements (sc structural parity) about the comparison of original and copy. [...]
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