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etween contemplation and usage is obliterated; each comprises the other in its entirety
(Ulrich Look). The oscillation of such a view corresponds to the deconstruction of the representational
relationship through autorepresentation; here we find the representation
of representation, depiction without the depicted. In the picture, the monitor wall allows
a view of itself through itself. The result is a series of complex representations which, in
theory, continues as long as the video installation is switched on, but in practice soon
gets lost in the entropic density of image granularity. Such a representation decomposes
itself. Which is a radical reminder- entirely in line with the Institute for time-based Media
at the College of Arts in Berlin - that technological images are subject to the function of
time axis manipulation.
"Home video is overwhelmingly used as a 'time shift' phenomenon, moving a particular
broadcast programme to a point where it is convenient to watch it" 107 ; this time
shift (difference) "has to be seen in connection with the changes in the social organisation
of time". "Archiv(ideo)ing and time shifting enhance the availability of time because
with the storage media, data are available anytime"; Beck speaks of time buffers (Zeitpuffer).
108 Let us coin the key word "dynamic memory".
In the early stages of programmed television, the aesthetics of live broadcast as a
technological fact and as aesthetics marked "not only the media difference with film, it
also stood for a convergence with traditional theatre which had quickly been rehabilitated
as a medium of art after 1945". 109 Both media forms have the risk of (technological)
accidents or, rather, an "aesthetics of unpredictability". And at the same time, the whole
difference lies in the archival prescription as soon as TV switches to REC (when the memory
makes for the difference): For in contrast to the unrepeatability of a stage performance,
the recorded television broadcast of a theatre performance can be reproduced:
Every moment of the live broadcast is fixed on a magnetic tape (today digitally on a hard
disk). The seemingly unrepeatable of a purely theatrical presence is therefore, in technological
space, already prescribed in iteration; hence there is neither original nor source,
along the lines of Jacques Derrida's Grammatologie, but also of Freud and Marx. Rosalind
Krauss writes of Multiples without Originals, a principle based on originality conceived as
repetition, on the original reproduction. 110
The live broadcast of the coronation of Elizabeth II, the British Queen, on 2 June
1953 by means of telecine transmission was a relational combination of the difference in
time zone and cache. For the viewer, the qualitative authorisation is not in the technological
artefact: "From the pictures alone, he will be unable, at least after the introduction
of magnetic recording in 1958/59, to establish whether it isn't a recording after all" 111 ; this
information is given outside the picture, parergonally - a temporised (time-distorted) variant
of the concept of the original.
From the transitory character of the television programme resulted the "aura" of artistic
and journalistic products of this medium which is based on the "technological reproduction"
of original events and, according to Walter Benjamin's theory, should have
no aura at all. The transience of the broadcast as a live event seemed well-placed to save
the aura of the unique and unrepeatable for television and, above all, for its artistic
forms. This "aura" was lost with the "film character" of the programme and with the
change to electronic recording as the basis for a stock of programmes. 112
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