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In an age when the difference between original and copy becomes increasingly
meaningless, it seems appropriate to observe the cognitive process by which a phenomenon
is perceived as authentic. This would be the transition from an authenticity of the
work (substance-based logic) to an authenticity of observation (process-based logic). 11
And yet, authenticity is not just a category of observation, but also a function of
technological materials.
The Media Law of the Original
The other guarantor of the notion of the original is the law: the legal discourse is interested
in the direct links between originality and contractual rights. One answer of the art
market, which has an interest in the continuation of an economy based on the original,
is the hybrid of the original edition: one of its institutional guarantors is the museum as
a medium for the systematic limitation of works and their reproduction. The trace of the
aura is inscribed on the juridical notion of the original when - as in the discourse of mediaeval
reliquary cults - tactility becomes the authority of the reproduction - a criterion
that is itself technological: "Everything produced from the original plaster is a cast, an
edition; everything not produced from the original plaster is a reproduction."
But what makes a digital image an original, what a copy? Does the answer to this
question depend on the degree of digital resolution when scanning, comparable to the
television copyright category of transmittable material. Copiers, fax machines and scanners
were exempt from copyright fees when they managed less than two pages per minute,
with the effect that computer manufacturers kept the output of their machines artificially
low (so users went abroad to acquire faster drives). "Last week, these brakes to
digital progress have been removed." 12 Digital sampling - whether in the area of acoustics
or optics - makes the media-archaeologically radical difference between analogue
and digital obvious - with regard to quotation rights. We have to remember that it was
the magnetic tape (audio and video) which made it possible for radio and television, original
media of broadcasting and transmission, to find their way into the cultural memory,
because it allowed storage. And this includes individual artistic practice such as the
Loops of the video artist Klaus vom Bruch:
I stole images from television and, from them I created my personal archive with
which to work iconographically. The archive is my resource for a picture machine. The war
pictures, for instance, reached back to a time before my own. I reached into the archive
for pictures full of history. 13
Thus, what is at stake is the cognitive difference between original and fake. Hans
Ulrich Reck describes the television effects of an aesthetics of video clips, using the
example of a video of the shooting of the Rumanian dictator Ceaucescu at the end of
1989, which suggested a real-time broadcast although they were actually a media fake.
But it is the fake which represents the reality of these media. And this is why the
accusation of non-authenticity is no longer justified. Where the genuine is missing, it makes
no sense to speak of the false. 14 - 150 -