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Archiv verschrieben), into virtual space. Does the seemingly identical media reproduction
of an original in analogue space, in fact, not mean its dislocation and deformation?
Reproductions [...] have to be counted amongst the misrepresentations of monuments.
[...] photographs [...] exaggerate their fusion with light and air, and in every case
distort the harmony, alter the colours, blur the proportions, and introduce visual-pictorial
elements. [...] even casts from antique moulds or prints from original wood blocks or metal
plates. Whichever reproduction one is using: each demands that one remains aware
of the type and degree of the distortion."
By contrast, digital space promises an undistorted, unfaded identical duplication of
the document. Benjamin exemplified this by means of the photographic plate; this technological
model can be applied to the video tape copy: Where it is possible to produce
a large number of copies, "the question of the true copy [makes] no sense" (Benjamin
1978: 482) - unless with regard to the loss of data. The epoch of art in the age of its
technological reproducibility analysed by Benjamin is drawing to an end. Benjamin plays
the model of a memoire involontaire developed in Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche
du temps perdu off against media technologies "which he describes as a non-auratic memory
dispositive" 100 , and inasmuch as art is no longer drawing beauty "from the depths
of time" - hence archaeo-aesthetological - but simply reproduces it technologically 101 , discrete
situations affect the semantics of the original. The place of memory (in the sense
of Hegel) is taken by digital space where art is no longer reproduced but sampled, and
at any rate generated (imaging sciences) rather than reproduced. There is a marked difference
between digital images and photography, unlike Flusser's hypothesis that they
have the same discrete pixels. What looks like a picture on the computer screen is in fact
a specific actualisation of data as data visualisation (imaging). The computer provides
data for viewing, on a temporary basis. And this turns the static - Benjamin diagnoses a
theoretical equivalent of static as having a "feel for the cognate in the world" - into a dynamic
pictorial concept - something that results only when the equilibrium is reached in
electronic refresh circles.
This variability marks a fundamental change of pictures. In contrast to classical pictorial
media such as photography and film, with a computer-generated picture, the data
is no longer immutably attached to a carrier, the negative, but always "flowing". Alterations
can be made to the digitally stored "picture" not just at the second step, starting
from the fixed negative, but at any point, and it is therefore impossible to determine an
"original" state. The state at the point of recording and subsequent changes which can
be distinguished in the photographic process, coincide in the digitally stored "picture". 102
- and it is indeed no more than permanent cache storage. The absence of the physical
original is the beginning of the virtual picture - if virtual refers to conditions that
don't exist anywhere but in electronic space; a difference, then, to the video or television
picture that may flicker just as electronically, but because of its referential nature depends
on light sources exterior to itself - except for noise. Digital images, then, are no
longer read as analogous to photographic documents, but as pictorial illustrations, visualisations
of a mathematical structure, of algorithms. They are indeed their image -
photographs of the inner state of machines, as it were, of the second order. The loss of
the original takes place as early as the process of electronic (tran-)scription, when everything
between 0 to 1 is eliminated (Gotthard Günther sought to counter this with a mul-
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