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The Book

The Aura of the Digital

  Michael Betancourt

 

By dividing the interpretation of art work into several distinct “levels” it becomes possible to recognize a fundamental distinction between digital and non-digital art works, as well as realize the underlying ideology is based upon the illusion of infinite resources; as such it replicates the underlying ideology of capitalism itself—that there is an infinite amount of wealth that can be extracted from a finite resource. It is an illusion that emerges in fantasies that digital technology ends scarcity by aspiring to the condition of information. The digital presents the illusion of a self-productive domain, infinite, capable of creating value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, expense, etc. that otherwise govern all forms of value and production.
Digital forms also exhibit what could be called the “aura of information”—the separation of the meaning present in a work from the physical representation of that work. As digital works with the “aura of information” imply a transformation of objects to information, understanding the specific structure of digital art makes the form of the “digital aura” much more explicit. This clarity allows a consideration of the differences between the scarcity of material production in physical real-world fabrication versus the scarcity of capital in digital reproduction: the necessity for control over intellectual property in the virtuality of digital reproduction. Because capital is a finite resource itself subject to scarcity, yet also caught in the capitalist paradox of escalating value—in the dual forms of interest and profit on capital expenditures—there is the constant demand to create more commodity value in order to extract more wealth from society in order to maintain the equilibrium of the system.
Understanding this “aura of information” requires an acknowledgement about the nature of the digital object: it is composed from both the physical media that transmit, store and present the digital work to an audience, and the digital work itself is actually composed of both a machine-generated and a human-readable work created by the computer from a digital file (itself actually stored in some type of physical media). This “digital object” is the actual form of the digital work—a series of binary signals recorded by a machine and requiring a machine to render this unseen “code” readable by humans. The “digital object” becomes the human readable forms of image, movie, text, sound, etc. only through the conventionalized actions of a machine that interprets the binary signals of the digital object and following the interpretative paradigm built-in to that machine renders this binary code into human readable and superficially distinct works. All digital objects have this singular underlying form—binary code—a fact that makes the digital object fundamentally different from any type of physical object precisely because it lacks the unique characteristic of form that defines the differences between paintings, drawings, books, sounds, or any other physical object or phenomenon. Unlike physical objects, digital objects are all basically the same, whatever their apparent form once they are interpreted by a machine.

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