The Aura of Remembering
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Abstract “What served in place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done with reflection.” John Berger: About Looking, 1980. In my presentation, I follow ways of transposition and appropriation of Benjamin’s notions of reproduction and especially aura in a new media discourse. The ways in which Walter Benjamin’s concepts are transferred into the new media discourse will be illustrated by the question of translation understood as a result of relocation and by characteristics of the field of digital media memory, which is replacing historical knowledge and awareness. I claim that the aura of the artwork has not disappeared even as categories like original and copy have lost their relevance in the age of digital media, but it has transformed itself and has become part of new creative methods as are re-enactments. In the text On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939) Benjamin defines aura in close relation with memory functions, recollection, remembrance, and especially with “mémoire involontaire”. Thus I interpret aura not necessarily as a quality of certain media or artifacts, but as an ability, or disability to gain an auratic experience. The video made by Michael Bielicky, Crossings: The Last Passage of Walter Benjamin (2000) is a piece of media arts, which establishes its meaning by references to an auratic experience through re-enactment, to the cult of remembering in which the aura hides itself. |
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