Digital Aura exhibition brochure

Digital Aura responds to philosopher Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). The exhibition presents
works by four artists who are re-inventing the meaning of Benjamin’s concept of
aura within the context of our contemporary digital age.
For Benjamin, an artwork’s aura exists as both a feeling of presence and an attitude
of artistic reverence—an “aesthetic experience” resulting from the work of art’s
unique existence. He argued that aura is lost when the singular authenticity of an
artwork can be multiplied through reproducible media—in his time, photography
and film. Over the last half century, technological developments have introduced
the possibility of infinite reproduction, raising new and urgent questions about
the state of the “original” artwork. Because digital media can be copied with no
generation loss, the so-called original becomes instantiated with each new version.
In other words, originality now exists in plurality, like views of the same world
through a series of windows.
At the same time, the ease of reproducibility opens up new opportunities for artworks
to be quickly disseminated and reach wider audiences, thereby increasing
the impact of revolutionary artistic content. Furthermore, the rise of networked
communication and internet culture have positioned these originals in a new kind
of public sphere—or public screen—where civil discourse occurs instantaneously
on a global scale, with the possibility for technologically-enabled progress (or
regress) exponentially increased.
Digital Aura presents works by Sanaz Mazinani, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Cassils, and
Adrián Regnier Chávez—contemporary artists whose innovations in digital media
challenge Benjamin’s assertion that auratic experience and political cinema are
mutually exclusive. By engaging with Benjamin’s notion of aura, these artists demonstrate
the capacity for digital works to evoke a sense of ritualistic awe. At the
same time, they defy the author’s proposed predicament by embracing the democratizing
and socially transformative potential of infinite reproduction. Through a
combination of sublime imagery, ambient sound, and existential thematic material,
each work embodies its own unique “digital aura,” while simultaneously engaging
in important dialogues of social concern.