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y analogy, it does not follow from a geometrically accurate description of original and
copy that the copy is semantically error-free. 86
According to Benjamin, one characteristic of the original is its translatability; there
exists a relational connection (intimate) between original and translation as though the
need for translation were intrinsic to the original: "Translatability is an inherent property
of certain works." 87 And for Benjamin, this relational concept does not refer to an interpretative,
but to a relational-formal connection between translation and original - a relationship
that could therefore also be formalised in the sense of technological transfer (on
the lines of Shannon / Weaver's Mathematical Information Theory 88 ). Whereby video encodes
this real relationship technologically, not symbolically, and the difference between
original and (technological signal) translation / transfer ceases to exist altogether. For
Benjamin, truth is a given - in technology, these givens are data. At any rate, time-based
processes: "legibility, like translatability, occurs only with time". 89 Could one say, analogously,
that video is the memory-based reproduction of a picture whose nature it is to be
recorded?
In principle, the technological function of the video recorder is to store television
signals by converting their frequencies into electromagnetic impulses, writing these onto
a magnetic tape by means of one or more magnetic heads, reading them off for reproduction,
and transmitting them to the receiver, again in the form of frequencies. 90
For television as a live medium in particular, this was not true for a long time, since
it was its nature to give out signals.
The Return of the Aura (Behind the Back of Technology)
Although Walter Benjamin denied that the reproducible medium of photography had the
aura of the original, the photo artist Hiroshi Sugimoto manages in his cycle Portraits revisit
the function of the effigies against the backdrop of the legal fiction of the two bodies
of the King in the English Renaissance, described by Ernst Η Kantorowicz. In Madame
Tussaud's London waxworks, he photographed the figures of the British royal families
in such a way that they are posthumously "charged with reality" rather than frozen
into media of transience. 91 It is precisely at the threshold of the digital that the analogue
arts (painting) and media (photography) find their restitution:
In 1999, the video artist Yorck der Knöfel exhibited his Hommage to Painting at the
Berlin Gallery Wohnmaschine, consisting of six monitors arranged in a semicircle that repeated
over and over, in staggered time, a scene of blown-up and bursting balloons. The
difference to painting thus becomes particularly clear in the hommage: "The digitally manipulated
video image can scarcely be traced back to an unmistakable author" 92 - or perhaps
this is a question of the media-competent, critical view, which tries to discriminate
against authors in the new media as well?
This enhancement of the analogue as a criterion of artistic authenticity surely is not
least due to a shift of the stigma of the "reproduction medium" onto digital image processing.
Furthermore, the appreciation of photography is testimony to the fact that the
old media are not, in Hegel's sense, simply "merging" into the new, but that it is preci-
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