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.
|