Ernst the Concept of the Original

8/9/2019 Ernst the Concept of the Original

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VIDEO IM MUSEUM

RESTAURIERUNG UND ERHALTUNG

NEUE METHODEN DER PRSENTATION

DER 0R1GINAIBE6R1FF

VIDEO ARTS SN MUSEUMS

RESTORATION AND PRESERVATION

NEW METHODS OF PRESENTATION

THE IDEA OF THE ORIGINAL

INTERNATIONALES SYMPOSIUM/INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

MUSEUM LUDWIG KLN/MUSEUM LUDWIG COLOGNE

9. SEPTEMBER 2000/SEPTEMBER 9, 2000

Impressum/lmprint

Symposium

Idee, Planung und DurchfhrungIdea, Planing and Execution

Assistenz/Assistants

Sekretariat/Secretary

Publikation/Publication

Herausgeber/Editor

Katalogredaktion/Editing

Assistenz/Assistant

Sekretariat/Secretarybersetzung/Translation

Druck/Printed by

Reinhold Mielbeck/Martin Turck

Christina Nadlacen/Karsten Arnold

Margit d'Errico-Reks/Yasmin Limbach


Martin Turck

Jrgen Neumann

Margit d'Errico-Reks/Yasmin LimbachGertraud Trivedi

Druckerei Locher

Texte bei den Autoren/Texts with the authorsPhotographien bei den Autoren/Photographs with the authors

ISBN: 3-9807903-2-0

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Vorwort 4

Einfhrung 5

George Legrady 6

Die Taschen voller Erinnerungen

Christine van Assche n

Konservierung von Neuen Medien: ein Paradox

Rudolf Frieling 16

Speicher - Platz

Anmerkungen zum Thema Sammeln, Archivieren, Prsentieren

Diskussion - Neue Methoden der Prsentation 22

Jochen Gerz 28

,Spurlose Kunst?'

Georges Heck 31

Jochen Gerz - Die einzigen greifbaren Spuren der Performances

Diskussion - Restaurierung und Erhaltung 34

Michael Wenzke 44

Original und Reproduktion aus der Sicht der Kunstversicherung

Wolfgang Ernst 51

Der Originalbegriff im Zeitalter virtueller Welten

Diskussion - Der .Originalbegriff' im Zeitalter virtueller Welten 80

Abbildungen 91

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Contents

Illustrations 91

Preface 103

Introduction 104

George Legrady 105

Pockets full of Memories

Christine van Assche 109

New Media Conservation: A Paradox

Rudolf Frieling 114

Storage - Space

Notes on the Subject of Collecting, Storing, and Presentation

Discussion - New Methods of Presentation 120

Jochen Gerz 126

'Art Without Trace?

Georges Heck 129

Jochen Gerz - The only tangible Traces of the Performances

Discussion - Restoration and Conservation 132

Michael Wenzke 141

Original and Reproduction from the Point of View of Art Insurers

Wolfgang Ernst 148

The Concept of the Original in the Age of the Virtual World

Discussion - 'The Notion of the Original' 176

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Vorwort

Ein Jahr nach der Durchfhrung des Symposiums zum Thema Video im Museum - Res

taurierung, Prsentation und Originalbegriff" liegt nun die Publikation der Vortrge undDiskussionsveranstaltungen vor. Die Lektre macht einmal mehr deutlich, wie wichtig solche Treffen von Fachleuten sind, wie sehr sich auch die diskutierten Begriffe angesichtsder raschen technologischen Entwicklung in der Schwebe befinden. Der gegen Ende desSymposiums vorgetragene Ruf nach einer Fortsetzung des Gesprchs belegt, dass keinabschlieender Bericht mglich ist, dass ein kontinuierlicher Dialog gefragt ist. Mglicherweise entwickelt sich ja die Runde der an der Enzyklopdie fr Neue Medien" beteiligten Institutionen zu diesem stndigen Gesprchsforum.

Wir denken, dass bezglich aller Themen interessante Fragestellungen formuliertwurden: beispielsweise, ob das Museum berhaupt der richtige Ort sei, Medienkunst aufzubewahren, ob es nicht besser ein internationales zentrales Institut gbe, ob nicht dasInternet die geeignete ffentlichkeit liefern knne. Bezglich der Restaurierung liefertedie Prsentation von Jochen Gerz das geeignete Anschauungsmaterial, die Restaurierungvon Videokunst berhaupt in Frage zu stellen, Restaurierung klar von Kopieren zu differenzieren, aber auch Rckschlsse fr den Originalbegriff zu ziehen und den Gedanken

eines sich wandelnden Originals, aber auch der Idee der Existenz mehrerer Originale bishin zur Zuspitzung der Festlegung des Originals auf den Lichtpunkt, in Erwgung zu ziehen. So knnen wir selbstverstndlich als Ergebnis des Symposiums keine einhellige Meinung festhalten, jedoch bieten sich uns mehrere gangbare Modelle, die man sich zu eigen machen kann, die vertretbar sind. Welchen man sich annhert, hngt sicherlich vonder Art der Institution ab, der man angehrt, auch, ob man die Seite des Knstlers, desKonservators oder der Ausstellungsinstitution vertritt.

Nun, da das Ergebnis schriftlich vorliegt verbleibt uns die Aufgabe, allen Mitwirkenden Dank zu sagen: Gemeinsam haben wir die Konzeptidee erarbeitet und weiterentwickelt. Die Durchfhrung wurde schlielich mglich gemacht mit Hilfe der Sal. Oppenheim-Stiftung und der Axa Nordstern Art Versicherung AG. Den Verantwortlichen der Stiftung Oppenheim mchten wir auch an dieser Stelle fr ihre Grozgigkeit unseren Dankaussprechen. Besonderer Dank geht an Margit d'Errico-Reks und an Yasmin Limbach, diebei der Planung und Organisation des Symposiums und bei der Redaktion der Publikation mitwirkten. Dank geht an alle Teilnehmer am Symposium, George Legrady, Christine

van Assche, Rudolf Frieling, Pascale Cassagnau, Perttu Rastas, Heiner Holtappeis, LysianeLechot-Hirt, Ulrike Lehmann, Marcel Schwierin, Rene Pulfer, Miklos Peternk, Yvonne Garborini, Brbel Otterbeck, Jochen Gerz, Axel Wirths, Oliver Albiez, Wolfgang Ernst, MichaelWenzke und Siegfried Zielinski. Sie alle haben aus ihrer Position und Erfahrung wichtigeBeitrge und Anregungen zur Thematik und den damit verbundenen Problemen geliefertund die Diskussion darber einen Schritt weitergebracht. Wollen wir hoffen, dass die Publikation dazu beitrgt diesen Diskussionsstand einem breiteren Publikum zu vermitteln.

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Wolfgang Ernst

THE CONCEPT OF THE ORIGINAL IN THE AGE OFTHE W1RIAL WORLD

Aura and Original (with, and beyond of, Walter Benjamin)

According to Walter Benjamin, objects with a magnetic aura are precisely those that, incontrast to the ephemerality and repeatability of reproducible art, convey an aestheticsof singularity and permanency: as a unique "appearance of the distant, however near itmay be."1 Can Benjamin's aura, then, not be linked with the technologically repeatable video image? Let us consider an icon of video art, Nam June Paik's video installation

Buddha (circa 1989. ZKM/Museum fr Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe). Indeed, the video Buddhareminds us that from a cultural-aesthetical point of view, aura experiences can be incomparably authentic and irrefutable for the individual - "which brings them close to themystic experiences of Christianity or Zen Buddhism."2 Jochen Hrisch is also speaking ofan aura literally coming forth ex negative referring to Walter Benjamin's work Kleine Geschichte der Photographie where he describes early portrait photographs: "There was anaura about them, a medium that, penetrating it, gave their gaze fullness and surety."3

Here, aura still describes the substance itself (in the medical and religious sense).In antiquity, medicine viewed the aura as indicating an imminent epileptic or hysteric attack: in the 19th century, the psychiatrist Hippolyte Baraduc tried, "through photographs,to objectify the aura of individuals which is invisible to the naked eye" - something of ascientific-positivist opposite to Benjamin's meaning regarding the loss of the aesthetic-mystic aura in the medium of photography, which he proclaims as a chance for the development of an antifascist aesthetics in film.4

Benjamin's theories have been refuted by the reality of Pop-Art (Andy Warhol's serial sculptures) and in particular by media art itself, where technology did not signal theexorcism of the aura, but an added dimension. The art critic Michael Glasmeier calls fora renewed study of Benjamin, "in which aura and reproduction will at last become secondary issues"5. The digital media are indeed diminishing the value of classic reproduction. The era when technological reproducibility was the foundation of the cultural economy is drawing to a close. An economy of mindfulness that values immediate perception rather than storage media will affect culture as a whole and hence the arts - and for

the culture of the Occident this means a shift in emphasis from storage to transfer, fromthe savings account to the volatile share portfolio. It has been suggested that worldwide, fees for publications on the internet should no longer be based on the (actual) publication or programme (the original in television terms) but on the fact of its transmission, which need not be part of a framework.6 The internet is not interested in archives(the build-up of storage as build-up of capital, the cultural prerequisite for claims of copyright), but in distribution.

From the media change regarding the criteria material, space and time, Paul Valery- to whom Benjamin is referring7 - has drawn his conclusions for "the whole of artistic

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techniques" and has thus given a precise description of the television and video screen,the principle of transmission, transfer and storage of technological images, the work ofart in the era of tele-presence:

Reproduction and communication of the works will undoubtedly be the first [...] tobe affected. [...] The works will achieve some kind of omnipresence. At our command,they will obediently be present anytime, anywhere, or recreate themselves anew. No longer will they simply exist in themselves - they will all be wherever there is an individual.8

- "and the appropriate equipment", he adds. Contemporaneous with Benjamin, theGerman Dadaists declared: "Art is dead / Long live the new machine art of TATLIN"; andindeed, media art now is no more than art by the grace of technological grammar, in contrast to the concept of an also literally autonomous art (that is, art that is not defined bythe dash).

Aura and Authenticity

The authorisation of the original is considered both the genitivussubjectivusand the ge-nitivusobjectivus: It is the discourse that styles the object an original (since, viewed discretely, every reproduction is a unique object). Underlying it is not a metaphysical aesthetics, no pure love for the object, but a discourse on power: the will for a right, theproof of a right, just as for a long time, archives were not built up primarily for historical

research (indeed, that would be a misuse of the archive), but to prove the legality of astate's claims. In this sense, the term Urkunde (title deed) corresponds with that of thearchaeological original (and after all, the German "Urkunde" is pretty much a literal translation of "archaeoilogy"). But it is not just in the sense of the discourse that the originalhas a special quality: with technological media, the equipment helps define the originalif the term is understood as a piece of information. "The proliferation and prospects ofdigital media have drawn our attention to the question of how the authority of informa-

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tion can and cannot be established in a new medium."

And thus it is no longer simply the physical reality that authenticates the representation, where signs of age and disintegration induce historicity - analogous to thechanges in a work of art "that it has suffered over time in its physical structure". So, whatdoes authorise theoriginal as opposed to the reproduction? According to Benjamin, it istradition and the notion of authenticity, physically endorsed in the form of a chemical patina or - analogous - through the archival proof of provenance:

The authenticity of an object is the sum and substance of all that can be traced

back to its origin, from its material duration to its historical testimony. [...] and thus thehistorical testimony of the object begins to falter [...] in the reproduction. [...] but it is the

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authority of the object, its traditional importance that is thus faltering.

Benjamin sees authenticity as a characteristic of the object, yet it is impossible to"determine an essenceof that which isauthentic." Like Benjamin's concept of the aura,the aesthetic category of authenticity is, in fact, oriented on both subjective experienceand the ontic nature of the (art) work. Let us shift the question from that of authenticity

to that of discourse strategies that define what is to be considered genuine. By analogy,we can say:

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In an age when the difference between original and copy becomes increasinglymeaningless, 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 thework (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 oftechnological 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 artmarket, 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 theaura 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 criterionthat is itself technological: "Everything produced from the original plaster is a cast, anedition; 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 thisquestion 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 todigital progress have been removed."12 Digital sampling - whether in the area of acoustics or optics - makes the media-archaeologically radical difference between analogueand digital obvious - with regard to quotation rights. We have to remember that it wasthe magnetic tape (audio and video) which made it possible for radio and television, ori

ginal 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 theLoops of the video artist Klaus vom Bruch:

I stole images from television and, from them I created my personal archive withwhich to work iconographically. The archive is my resource for a picture machine. The warpictures, for instance, reached back to a time before my own. I reached into the archivefor pictures full of history. 13

Thus, what is at stake is the cognitive difference between original and fake. HansUlrich Reck describes the television effects of an aesthetics of video clips, using theexample of a video of the shooting of the Rumanian dictator Ceaucescu at the end of1989, 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 theaccusation of non-authenticity is no longer justified. Where the genuine is missing, it makes no sense to speak of the false.14

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In the age of industrial technology products, there was no need to record the copyright since in all probability, the consumer was not in a position to construct copies ofartefacts with his own means (at best, reverse engineering was being undertaken by opponents in espionage - e.g. the copy of a computer in the USSR). In contrast to digitalspace where - for instance for music files - the user is able to download not only thetitle, but the entire decoder, and hence the virtual machine for reproduction.15

Thus arises the question, what actually remains of the concept of the original workin the light of the new media. What, for instance, is the smallest protectable unit in digital sound? At which degree of fractal compression is the present formula still an original? Is the law still able to guarantee data security or is this now the problem of information scientists? Does a link on the internet represent a quotation, a reference, or theappropriation of another's intellectual property?

The possibility of linking and combining data from different sources [...] in an in

stant that comes with the new information technology is an aliud compared to the collation of the same data by hand in a searching and editing process that would takeweeks and months.16

In digital space, the notion of the original is no longer in league with the law. Whenall theories and aesthetics are at an end, it is no longer the legal profession that is mostlikely to determine the characteristics a picture must have for its creator to claim ownership: henceforth, technology will play a part. For the first photographers, the question

was whether the photograph of a picture appropriated the originality of the latter. Are thenew media expropriating the arts of old-world Europe? In Germany, the copyright arosefrom the notion of genius in the era of Goethe, in England from the interests of publishers. The author is a figure of accountability (Foucault). When this law is applied to computer programs, to machines capable of imitating all other machines, they become absurd.

The digital media take on the notion of the original. Just as the administrative history of data protection is no older than microprocessor-based information technology;

and this contemporaneity will result in "no less than the reform of our legal system under the conditions of the information age". Part of it will be a shift in space and time, i.e.the core criteria of Benjamin's notion of the aura of the original work of art. The dispositive of passing down a culture's memory, i.e. of memetics, does not lie in the archive oforiginals, but in the nature of reproduction:

The preservation of the Platonic Meme by means of a series of copies is a particularly obvious example. Although a number of papyri have been found recently that may

well have existed in Plato's lifetime, the survival of the Meme itself is virtually independent of these. Today's libraries contain thousands, if not millions of physical copies (andtranslations) of Plato's (Dialogue) Meno whilst their actual forbear - the original text -has turned to dust centuries ago.17

The virtualisation of the original reveals the two bodies of a work of art in the media age. Who has the copyright of Europe's culture in digital space? The Association ofComputer Manufacturing (ACM) proposes to receive all date on the Net free of charge, but

to impose a fee for the physical printout.

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Bill Gates acquires the digital pictorial rights of the European museum culture: thereal museum keeps the right of ownership, but not the copyright. In Germany, the notionof the art original is based on the privileged position of intellectual ownership above allother fundamental rights and is therefore conservative. In continental Europe, the personal copyright remains intact and irrevocable: the curse of the archive (since it expires onlyafter 50 years, or goes to the heirs). "Authorship is the foundation of culture", so com

poser Wolfgang Rihm at the 41st CISAC World Congress in Berlin;18

This foundation is notyet seen in the context of media archaeology, but of the arts. In the USA, however, theauthor's copyright terminates at the moment of publication; whilst the Anglo-Saxon copyright (since 1710: introduced to the USA in 1790) is oriented on the exploitation interests of the holder (transmitter) of intellectual property:

I hereby assign [...] with full title guarantee copyright in the Contribution and in anyabstract prepared by me to accompany the Contribution for the full legal term of copyright and any renewals, extensions and revivals thereof [...] in all formats and throughany media of communication.19

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has decided to apply the copyright of literary works to software and mathematical formulae as well20 - a victory forold-world European morals over calculation? The copyright makes no difference betweenanalogue and digital, and remains wedded to the occidental concept of the work of art;so the media culture is lacking in this respect, the awareness of the difference made bythe computer, e.g. for the notion of a picture: The fractal picture compression produces

again and again a new original or, rather: a digital? Beyond the legal definition, the copyright thus turns into a function of the law of hardware. There remains the question ofinterim storage: is it ruled by a latent copyright, or a virtual copyright?

Rosalind Krauss has described registration, cataloguing and the depot as the basicparameters of 20th century art. At the end of this century, however, the trend is from storage (back?) to transmission: instead of depot and storage there is the (seemingly) immediate availability of music, text and image on demand. The standards MP3 for the frac

tal compression of images, and MPG for audio data mean that the problem is no longerwith storage capacity but with transmission: what gets lost are nuances in colour andsound that are outside the human perceptive faculty and can therefore be dispensedwith, but it is precisely these nuances that represent the signature, the mark of the original.

Who has the power to define the original in digital space: aesthetic, legal or technological agencies? And can the musical product of random-generating programs - as inthe case of the Decca record Music from Mathematics - still be regarded as intellectualproperty? "To the art enthusiast who is not conversant with the matter, it appears impossible to express poetry, music and painting in figures."21; once expressed in numbers,however, the original turns into algorithms and becomes measurable in telecommunications terms - for example in Max Bense's attempt at a cybernetic "aesthetics and programming" in the IBM-Nachrichten.

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The Currency of the Original

The economics of e-commerce sets it down: The real reserve in precious metals to coverand authorise a currency is replaced by its virtual equivalent.

Up to now, there used to be a fundamental link between original and archive: forinstance the museum depot as currency (warrant) of the original which authorises the va

rious reproductions. This is true particularly for the classical museum as the currency ofaesthetics: a function authorised through real purchasing decisions and depot values.

The Greeks knew [...] two methods of technological reproduction of works of art:casting and striking. Bronze and terracotta artefacts and coins were the only works of artthey could produce in large quantities22.

That way, the originals may remain inaccessible, but like the gold reserves of a national bank, they are the stable reference in the circulation of their digital alter ego. Thus

the German Library (Deutsche Bcherei - the recipient of deposit copies), aims to keeptwo copies, an archive and a user copy; the archive copy is the complete monument ofcontinuity against digital manipulability.23 As long as the data contain redundancies, thesystem is able to correct itself and to compensate for losses within limits, namely: tointerpolate via the figures. It is a different matter for the "sacred texts or data that aretruly relevant culturally, where one is aware that a lot would get lest if one were to throwout the objects according to the model recommended by Oliver Wendell Holmes [...], andwere to keep only the digitalised data as a memento of the objects."24 As soon as the

photographic record of objects appeared to make their materiality redundant, Holmesannounced Postmodernism in 1859:

In future, form will be separate from material. Indeed, the material is no longer ofmuch use in visible objects except where it serves as a model after which the form is created. Give us a few negatives of an object worth seeing [...], that's all we need. The ob

ject may then be demolished or set alight, if you like [...]. This development will result insuch a huge collection of forms that they will have to be sorted by categories and put on

display in large libraries.25

Thus, the data technology of electronic libraries does not do away with the physical book; indeed, each information still requires authorisation by reference to the real.

The reader or viewer looking for information easily forgets the materiality of thetext or image carrier. The photographic transfer of the object into the space of the pictorial archive seems to make the original redundant; take, for example, the early Roman inscription of Satricum near Rome which was discovered by Dutch archaeologists:

Once the position of the block with the inscription had been photographically documented and sketched [...] this and the two others displaying the same characteristicswere transported to the Dutch Institute at Rome for preparation of the publication and toawait placement in a museum.26

In fact, there has been a UNESCO convention for the Protection of the Natural andCultural World Heritage since 1972, which requires of all its member states to photographically document special edifices. Form the archive photographs, it should be possible

to interpret or, more precisely, compute the building plan in case of its "destruction which

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is already taken into account by the protective measures".27 But with the material original, the simulacrum "analogue or digital" loses its foundation in physical reality, andtherefore its authority. "I would not recommend this to anybody who has an archive."

Framework and Original (Martin Heidegger)

The first draft of Walter Benjamin's work Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischenReproduzierbarkeit dates from the autumn of 1935. The near literal analogies to Heidegger's work Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, which was written at almost the same time, arestriking when Benjamin mentions the example of antique sculptures. The essentially distant is - entirely in the spirit of Heidegger, the unapproachable:

The original way of integrating a work of art into the traditional context found itsexpression in the cult [...]. It is crucial that this auratic existence of the work of art is ne

ver completely divorced from its ritual function.28

The English translation of Martin Heidegger's work Der Ursprung des Kunstwerksinto [The] Origin [of Art] demonstrates: arche, archive and the concept of the original areonomastically connected. "All these terms - singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality, original - depend on the moment of origin."29 By contrast, "the modern framework[...] appears, from a logical point of view, as something multiple: a system of reproductions without an original."

Is the Gestell (framework) - of the museum or of technology - the dispositive ofthe concept of the original?

In ordinary use, Gestell refers to some kind of framework or apparatus. [...] According to Heidegger, Gestell is deeply connected to the modern concept of representation(Vorstellen) [...]. Heidegger comments that the essence of technology, Enframing, is 'in alofty sense ambiguous', [...] we are always already 'in the picture'. [...] Thus the issue isnot [...] whether what is on view is authentic or a reproduction. Nor is the issue whether

the work is actually framed, as is Van Gogh's painting of the peasant shoes, or free-standing, as is the temple at Paestum. Finally the issue is not whether the work of art is oris not on its 'own site'. For the temple at Paestum is just as much displaced as the temple of Pergamon.30

However, Heidegger did not see with his own eyes the Bassae temple scenery thathe describes (his visit to Greece took place only after the Second World War). What wesee here is a rhetoric of dissimulation, because Heidegger's insights into the nature ofthe antique Greek temple were based on photographic evidence, and thus on discreteunits of media in-formation whose technological reproduction dislocates them permanently.31 Heidegger may well have been using Walter Hege's photographs of antique temples. Hege insisted that photographs of works of art must not replace the "real encounter with the original", "and that is the way it should be, there has to remain a distancebetween original and reproduction", an irreducible difference.32

On the other hand, it is the reproduction - entirely in the spirit of Derrida's Gram-matology - that imbues the archetype with the aura of the original33; seen in conjunction

with the original, the duplicate practically generates "the pure uniqueness of the pri-

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mary"34. With the camera obscura, the visual media had already made an attack on theoriginal; J Baltrusaitis reminds us that in the 18th century, Claude's Mirror, as it wasknown, reflected nature as if painted by the landscape painter Claude Lorrain. "The mirror image of nature was preferred to the original by far"35, just as for a long time, peoplefavoured the literary description over the photo-realistic image. A good example is a commentary on Stackelberg's archaeological publication, Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Ar

kadien (1826). Here, the term 'description' keeps oscillating between image and literature:

Since he knew how to render the charms of the vivid marble figures in his sketchbook with so much artistic sense and confidence, he went with equal artistic sense aboutthe description of the magnificent impression he had taken away from the solemn placeand from the halls of this sacred space. He [...] reproduces, as it were, the lost work ofart before our very eyes from the few bits and ruins that remain36

- and thus an imagecreating approach of an archaeological imagination that is linked to drawing techniques.

The Museum as a Place for the Original

Immanuel Kant's concept of the setting of the image, the parergon (which was taken upby Derrida), points to the framework of the museum and the picture plane as vehicles for

the event called the original. "Whether public museum, official salon, world exhibition orprivate collection: what partly constitutes the exhibition space has always been the continuous area on the wall - a wall that was more and more exclusively oriented towardsthe presentation of art"37 and identifies the function of the museum: "to exclude everything else and to constitute through this exclusion what we mean by the term art."38 It isprecisely this area that is now being dislocated onto the site of the video monitor whichno longer appears on the walls of the museum, but itself forms a museum space - different "frames of inscription"39 And indeed the electronic monitor continues what Benjamin

diagnosed for photography: that both in the technological and the museum sense of theexhibition, the exhibition value will push back the cult value in the reproduction medium.Perhaps originality is not situated in the original but in its museum context. Does the museum generate the original?

The subject of originality which includes the notions of authenticity, original andorigin, is the common discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the producer of art. And throughout the entire 19th century, all these institutions were united in

their aim to find the mark, the guarantee, the authentication of the original.

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The museum and media condition for the original, then, is precisely the fact thatthe artefact cannot be touched by writing as a meta- and control datum: With video, is itauratic images that become storable, or just emanations of the memoire volontaire Withthe pictorial media, a third entity comes between conscious and unconscious memory,the technological in-between, literally a medium.

The ideal of modernist and functionalist museums was the ahistoric space, the neu

tral dispositive, the white cube41

, a sublime place where time is no more, that enshrinedan exhibition aesthetics beyond the urban context. But, a museum is no mythic place, no

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space of unending eternity: The aura of the museum behaves in keeping with a museum.It is no longer possible to separate the framework from the contents, the exhibition: Themuseum is no longer able to exhibit without putting itself (self-consciously) on show. Inthe exhibition Les Immateriaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, its subject, theincreasing tuming-into-light (Verlichtung) in contemporary arts, questioned the materiality of the gallery and the museum itself. The museum of the future - which has dawned

already - will no longer be the solid mausoleum of art and history, but a spatial abysspunctuated by electronic screens. Sure, it still is a very material effort which results in animmaterial materiality: Les Immateriaux was staged at substantial material expense, anda reminder of this is the technological wear and tear of, say, a recorder in video installations; but here, the effect sublimely blanks out the technology. The museum will continue to deceive the senses. But where once it installed objects, there now immaterialismis on the agenda, the relation without substance. There is an alternative in the radical abstinence from narrative arrangement, the withdrawal to the concept of traces. In the Mu

nich Kunstverein, Gerhard Merz put on show - apart from a painting of Saint Sebastianbeing killed by arrows of looks - the questioning of the (art) history of the museum itself in the shape of the letters: DOVE STA MEMORIA?, flanked by mirrors that reflected agallery space structured by the play of light from the windows. Where is the place of memory? In spite of an identifiable museum history, the isolated letters of this question formed an answer: the surrender of memory to its significants, the immemorial.

Walter Benjamin's theory of the age of the technological reproducibility of art is no

longer able to cope with today's electronic data flow. Whilst the photographic reproduction of objects still conveyed the illusion of an object, its electronic recording meant itschange into simulacra of the real itself. Not only is electronics recording the objects, italso declares the age of the concrete, history: The era of material production is drawingto an end and will disappear entirely42. Even historical documents amount to deceptionsince holograms of objects in museums still perfectly simulate the aura of the original.Such holograms could be transmitted anytime via telephone lines: available anytime,they undermine the hallowed status of the museum as a privileged place (store) of great

masterpieces, just as Andre Malraux's photo-based Imaginary Museum no longer exhibitsthe individual work of art like the classical museum, but- in the spirit of Wlfflin - bringsout the style by facilitating comparative reading. This, then, does not require the singular work in the museum, but a repertoire of pictures, an archive. And that means: lessmuseum, more storage."3 Hal Foster takes this idea further and asks

whether-because in the age of electronic data processing, a system based on images and texts equalises all the in-put data into digital units - Malraux's Museum without

Walls [...] will be replaced by an archive without museum [...], a system of images andtext, a database of digital terms44

- where aesthetic differences are simply functions of storage technology.

The Monitor Scene

Pictorial media art can be transmitted - indistinguishable in its appearance from the ori

ginal - to every household. As a retro-effect, this circumstance is making inroads intocontemporary museum planning itself: A proposal of the Stuttgart Laboratory for Archi-

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tecture regarding the German Museum of History in Berlin (DHM) involved a buildingwhere real time of other museums or historically significant sites would be received,made visible, or stored. The net of Eurovision, news services, airlines, cable connections,telephone and telefax have long provided a different kind of cartography of the real,drawn up a different kind of museography. And so this museum proposal for the DHM includes a terminal, an electronic ramp, an ISDN connection, the DATA BANK telecommuni

cation beyond the black box of the classical part of the exhibition, and the "remote transmission of holograms"45. Looking into the distance, once idealistically called "imagination", is now literally called: television. The museum no longer is the place of destination, the parcel office for historical or aesthetic objects, but becomes the relay of immaterial impulses which have long determined the perception of our present. And thus themonitor takes the place of the museum exhibition.

"What is fundamentally new is that only the information is travelling; it needs tobe prepared for dispatch. The images need a place to arrive in after transmission, wherethey can light up and be seen and (perhaps) understood. So it is about networks inwhich to circulate the information: that part of the building, the station, the museum, thewarehouse, etc, where the connection to the 'intelligent net' is made, the ISDN socket."46

In the electronic musee imaginaire, the monitor surface takes the place of the museumspace (with the loss of three-dimensionality, until Cyberspace functions in a truly immersive way): "The Interface, the 'transmitting' agent consisting of luminous dots on a thinskin, is today's monumental medium, and perhaps also that of the museum - in an agewhich perceives [...] movement at speed as an overriding value."47

Speed and disappearance: So far, it had been the function of the museum to establish the significance of historical objects by placing them on pedestals and investingthem with significance. This monumental way of giving meaning has long been undermined by the fleetingness of the images where history, once again in keeping with WalterBenjamin's dictum, now quite literally flits past: "The past can only be captured in pictures that flash up for an instant at the moment of recognition, never to be seen again."48

As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pointed out in Anti-dipus, the stability of traditional writing disappears in the electronic process, the transformation into luminousdots on the monitor. Thus, chronography is turned into light. What happens in this lighting (Lichtung) - to speak with Heidegger - demonstrandum est. Even where a photograph guarantees reality, its inventor Henry Fox Talbot saw a "word of light" - light effects that enter the image carrier as graphemes and are developed later. Which bears outforcefully what was manifest in the dispute about the authenticity of Auguste Rodin'scasts of negatives for The Gates of Hell: multiple copies without an original. Benjamin's

essay on art reminds us that authenticity becomes an empty phrase where duplication isinherent in a technological medium: "for instance, it is possible to produce a wealth ofcopies from a photographic plate, so the question of the true print is meaningless."49 Thecurrent culture about the photographic vintage print, by contrast, is seeking the re-entryof the concept of the original by defining it as the print that is "almost concurrent withthe aesthetic moment" - which would make authenticity "a function of the history oftechnology" the past future of the original (and its apparent re-entry in digital space)5o.

Today, the time difference between recording, latent storage and development is reduced to the speed of light, to luciferic (or better: luci- rather than metaphoric) real time.

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And this brings us to the latent representation of the document on the photoconductivedrum in the photocopying process:

The exposure lamp switches on [...] The lamp/ mirror unit scans the original [...] Thedocument is exposed to the light and the bright areas of the document reflect the lightvia the mirror lens system onto the photoconductive drum so that in the exposed areas,the negative charge is conducted via mass by the photoconductor. By the image areas of

the document, little or no light is transmitted to the photoconductor depending on thecolour intensity, so that the charge in these areas remains and a latent image of the document is produced on the drum.51

This gives the document that is defined as the original a virtual alter ego, in shadow script. On the other hand, the electronic luminous dots on the screen, radically based on time. The transience of these images deregulates the stability of any interpretation which used to be guaranteed by the museum in its monuments: "museums have [...]

capitulated in the face of the archival problems connected with these new ephemeral types of art by completely ignoring the visual possibilities of electronic images"52. Instead,the museum depot is increasingly reflecting the control mechanism of its successor medium. Like the warehouse of the Benneton clothing company is organised and operatedon the random access principle, the museum depot is also adapting more and more tothe random access memory of the computer.

To the extent that time-based media have replaced immobile museum pictures and

objects, the organisation of the museum gets recoded. If the temporal order in the classical museum was outward, inscribed on the object by relationships ("the artwork is embedded in a chronologically or thematically structured narrative mediating a specific version of art history", it is now the time-discrete event character of media art that dominates. And thus a conference on museum collections of video art in January 1999 at thePaula Cooper Gallery, New York, was entitled Buying Time53; though Benjamin had alreadyattributed to the collector who charges his objects with the quality of the fetish, an ersatz function for the once cultic power of the original.

Since electronic, time-based art is technologically founded on feedback operations,social interaction takes the place of the one-too-many aesthetics of the classical exhibit.With the options of zapping and recording, television and the video monitor have alreadysupplied the basics: for art on the internet, the "validity of a claim of originality is increasingly losing out in favour of the new ideology of interaction".54

Since the dispositive of the exhibits, the exhibition space, is asymmetric to the exhibition space, the exhibits escape being clothed with the aura of the museum. The mu

seum framework is thus itself put on show.55 The aim is no longer - as in Italian Futurism- to storm and demolish museums, to destroy. Instead, the museum space is subtly questioning itself. Not the exhibited objects constitute the essence of the museum, but thenetwork of their connections and relationships (the subject of discourse analyses), thespace in-between. Herein lies the immateriality of the museum, in something that is generally overlooked by a view fixated on the object. The museum space is an in-between.The artist Frangois Morellet installs neon lines in gallery rooms in a way that the edgesof the room become part of his object structures - a transformation of museum architec

ture into that of a screen, the screen of a monitor: "early metaphors for television as 'ma-

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gic mirror' and 'window on the world' refer to the transparency of the glass surface of thereceiver"56. "Actually, the whole edifice is just a display cabinet", it says in an architectural critique of the glass-dominated Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. It is notablewhat happened within this space: One part of the building (the Kaisersaal) of the formerHotel Esplanade, which was situated on the company's property and a listed building,was moved by 70 meters at great expense in order to make room for a road, and inte

grated into one of the new wings. Still original, this artefact has now turned into a quotation, into a copy of itself: and consequently, the wording for this hybrid in the spacebetween original and copy is Architekturmuseum.57

Indices of the Real

For the first time, optical media since photography make it possible to record the real of

light. In analogue photography, it is the index, i.e. the unique pointer to something real,that authorises the medium. "In contrast to symbols, indices produce their significanceon the basis of a physical relationship with their referents."58 In that sense, the videomagnetic tape is equally indexical (if not iconic, since it entertains no visual similarity toits model), the store of a real impulse track or "marking". In turn, the electronic videoimage on the monitor is - like the television image - in the tradition of Kepler's eyeimage theory, since it is not an image-producing process, but scans real impulses:

The pictura produced by light in the eye entirely according to geometrical laws [...]

is on the one hand, via the incoming rays [...] clearly related to the pictured subject in theexterior world, its object of reference, on the other hand it acquires at the same time anindependent existence of its own.59

With the video disk, it is crucial for digitally encoded image and sound informationis scanned by the laser beam without loss, also with regard to time; "a linear time structure no longer exists"60. On this level, therefore, applies - in variation - Roland Barthes'notion of the uncoded message of the photographic image: "that the relationship of sig

nificant and significate is, as it were, a tautology: [...] not a transformation (which an encoding could be); [...] one is faced with the paradox ... of a message without a code."61

While the physical nature of the natural world is still expressed in the photochemicalemulsion, giving the photographic imprint its documentary, indexical status, this mark isephemeral in technological images. Because "photographs are produced under conditions that force them physically to correspond point by point to the original," - as stressed by Flusser's photo theory - they belong to the sign class of indices "which are signson the basis of their physical connection" 62 - and hence are not identical with the icon

whose effect derives from the similarity of the picture, not necessarily from its materialconnection.

An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object. It cannot, therefore, be a Quality, because qualities are whatever they are independently of anything else. In so far as the Index is affected by theObject, it necessarily has some Qualities in common with the Object, and it is in respectto these that it refers to the Object.

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Is this affection, which creates a relationship between sign (or rather: signal) andobject even in the non-semantic domain, also true for the impulse transmitted by an electronic medium? It is true that principal binary encoding also applies to the registration ofimages. Anything that can be scanned enters the neutralising code of the digital. Butsince images cannot exist without the excitation spaces of their presence, the interfaceof representation, staging and reception including the contingent area of perception

whose special emanation used to be known as the "aura", the criterion of computed pixels is obviously not saying much. Though they can be computed, digital images shouldnot be mixed with information data or simply added to the internal ramification logic ofthe technological archive.63

The Materiality of Media Art

The auratic notion of the original constitutes a dilemma for the conservation of media artin the museum: "Interference with technology frequently also means alteration of the authentic character of a work", and it is necessary to "disclose which of the componentsseem worth preserving in their original configuration in spite of their outdated technological structure, and possibly because of their patina" - referred to by Benjamin - "or willsubstantially benefit from the aura of their media history."64

Is originality, in the case of media art, no longer inherent in the nature of the workof art, but in the physics of the apparatus? In the spirit of the cultural studies, David Mor-

ley insists on the "'physics' of television, focusing on the largely unexamined significanceof the television set itself (rather than the programmes it shows), both as a material andas a symbolic, if not totemic, object"65. In contrast to research into television as a pieceof furniture, media archaeology employs the term 'physics of television' to describe itstechnological conditions. In 1878, the Portuguese physicist Adriano de Paiva suggestedthe use of selenium to transform the brightness values of an image into the corresponding degrees of strength of the electric current. Video artists like Nam June Paik and BillViola expressly emphasise the physics of their medium: "hearing sound and watchingmovement and light is a very physical experience".66

The media artist Achim Mohne reminds us of the materiality of the video with hisinstallation MediaRecyding (video sculpture, Gesellschaft fr aktuelle Kunst, Bremen1999) where he put on show, as raw material, the tape that the recorder "spat out" during the television recording instead of rewinding it, "as the original in an artistic processthat sees the tape as material, body, symbol carrier, and sculpture"67. But after an epochof technological modernity that was forever trying to hide its technological conditions in

a dissimulatio artis in order to allow the audio-visual illusion in the perception of the viewer to function at all, the discovery of this materiality is already a sign of its demise.

The video recorder is dead, killed by TV on demand. There will be no more recorders, there will be no more cassettes, no shelves with lovingly designed covers, no videolibraries, no tape spaghetti.68

The Video-Scratching is a drastic reminder of the materiality of the medium; herewe find practised in the area of the visual what has long been familiar from the disk jo

ckey world of Vinyl. Feedback produces images that hurt the eye. In Berlin, the VJ Safy

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(Assaf Etiel, Israel) regularly shows Live Scratchworks with a number of damaged laserplayers (picture and sound) that get stuck. This cancels the relationship between significant and significate (video clips) - desemantisation work; here, meaning itself turns (media-archaeological) material: working with that which is found (namely the data manipulation by the memory).

Archaeology in Cyberspace: Image Generation Instead of Reproduction of the Given

The place of reproduction is taken by the generation of virtual image, so in the electronic reconstruction of the oldest neolithic city, Catalhyk: There is no memory in thesense that "memory" itself is now no more than a metaphor for synchronous processes,a kind of translation of electronic conditions back into the tradition of our conceptualworld. The past is back via the video matrix, concretely visible, no longer tied to time andspace, to history. That is the true attack of a computer-generated presence on all other

time.69

But time is hitting back:

The virtual construction of Cluny Cathedral particularly demonstrates the problemsof the long term availability of digitally stored data. Already lost, they could be savedfrom digital memory loss (for the moment) by means of expensive updating methods.70

In cyberspace, real and virtual space form hybrid alliances. The presentation of the

virtual reconstruction of the antique roman military colony Colonia Ulpia Trajana, whichwill be exhibited at the Archaeological Park in Xanten, confronts us with a paradox: towalk through the virtual reconstruction at the original site. There is an opportunity inbeing able to bring out the difference between actual archaeological place and hypothetical reconstruction. But this is not possible at a site that is itself a model.

Is there no further use for the original as an archaeological artefact in the age ofdigital exhibitions? Archaeology has been virtual for a long time. It is not only now, in the

epoch of the digital media, that virtual archaeology has taken the place of immediate viewing. Once - under the primacy of antique texts - archaeology worked more in the virtual than in the original sphere; to a high degree, the medium-based, because text-communicated reception in antiquity operated as a virtual world, largely independent of thesubject. It is only with J J Winckelmann that seeing the original with one's own eyes replaced the study of reproductions in earnest. G Lessing, for instance, was still able tostudy the antique sculptural group of Laocoon in his 1766 polemic of the same title ex

clusively from a copperplate reproduction of the subject. Not only did he believe thereby

to have at his disposal a more detached way of looking at it, but years later, when hewent to Rome in person, he made no mention in his notebook of a visit to the original

in the Vatican. "The original (the excavation, the find) serves as an aid for research which

does not have a quality of its own and can only be kept at the ready for those interes

ted in the source" (Circular, Rieche, 26 May 2000). It is precisely the "right of veto of the

sources" that is being maintained (Reinhart Koselleck) as an authority analogous to the

original, and not on the basis of the artefact itself, but of its integration in a guaranteeing

infrastructure - such as the verifying archive.71 Free material objects from the discourse of

the original which, after all, has figured in this form for only 200 years, and what is left

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is a natural rather than an arts view of that which remains, the relic, the remnant (berrest) in Johann Gustav Droysens's sense.

Technology and Original: From Reproduction to Raster

Notions like originality were formed only after the Enlightenment with the evolution of

the modern system of fine arts at the expense of a split with the mechanical arts - a splitbetween idealist, sublimated aesthetics and sensuous aisthesis - which can now be captured with signal technology - that are rejoined only under the heading media art: "Areasof perception of word, picture and sound, differentiated in their tendencies and screenedfrom one another, create new forms of multimedia reality"72 - but actually converging ina single medium, the space of computation. So the opposite of the original is no longerthe reproduction or the copy, but rastering, the digital breakdown of a document into thesmallest possible discrete binary-coded elements - a process that is no longer arbitrary

but governed by strict relationships between points on document and image, and whoseway was prepared by the copying machine in the 19th century. Rodin's reproducteur, forinstance, was concerned - according to his letterhead - with the reduction and enlargement of "objects of art and industry" through a "process perfected mathematically" bymeans of a "special machine" that produces "editions" of these "duplicates"73; Rodin, forhis part, accepted only bronze casts as authentic that he himself had authorised.74

Our concepts of originality and authenticity are confronted with media of repro

duction and simulation that challenge our conceptual sense of history. [...] The question[...] therefore is to what extent traditional concepts are able to cope with today's problems.75

Because technological reproduction breaks with the cultural technique of traditionitself:

Reproduction technology [...] detaches from tradition what is reproduced. As it multiplies reproduction, it puts mass incidence in the place of the unique specimen.76 - and

thus the pattern/raster, in the sense of Rosalind Krauss, takes the place of historicity withthe result that artists "are condemned not to originality but to repetition". In painting,the pattern of the canvas and the pattern painted on it diverge: "The pattern, then, doesnot expose the area but hides it through a repetition"77 - an anarchaeological act.

The Inscription of the Original

Every inscription is made on a surface that has a texture, not just any texture, but a binary one (the cross-wise interweaving of strips of papyrus and of all textiles, canvasesproduced on Jacquard looms). The archi(ve)texture of all history is its fabrication, the di-gitality of endless variations. There never was a first text, for the preface to every text isits carrier: "Not even a virgin surface for its inscription, and if the palimpsest requires abare, material support for an arche-writing, no palimpsest."78 And Barbara Johnson adds:"In order for something to function as an act, it must be inscribed somewhere, whetherit be on paper, in memory, on a tomb-stone, or on videotape, celluloid, or floppy discs."79

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But in the video image, infrastructure and representation coincide in the raster.Technologically, this is due to the fact that what is to be reproduced can be stored on themedium. But what happens when the reproduction technology itself is discontinued inhistory or, rather, in media archaeology? For, according to a dictum of Marshall McLuhan,the message of each new medium is the aura of its predecessor:

The invention of photography revealed that painting is so captivating because thecanvas does not show reality; the introduction of the motion picture revealed that thephotograph derives its beauty from the lack of movement; the sound film revealed thatthe silent film is deeply moving because there is no noise. And colour film directors wereleaders in the aesthetics of the "film noir". Then, television made it clear that all thosefilm forms were borrowing their attractiveness from the black areas between the pictures.And now, High Vision teaches us that the video offered something that is being lost atthe moment: the aesthetics of the raster line. In cyberspace, we will become aware thatthe power of distant media was our abstinency on the screen. Then Simstim will show usthat cyberspace was so pleasant because it took place outside our nervous system.80

Thus, even cyberspace turns from media-archaeological distance into a space forthe original.

The Need of Technological Images for Reproduction

Since every technological image represents a coding, it follows Roland Barthes's definition of the real: to be captured, it always has to be "transformed into a painted (framed)object" so that it can be depainted again:

Code upon code, says realism. Therefore, realism cannot be said to "copy" but to"imitate" (it copies by a second mimesis what is already a copy).81

Travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries saw the landscape "with the eyes of people who used to draw"82; Chris Marker says that much in his film essay Sans soleil:

I remember a January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed in Januaryin Tokyo. They have replaced my memories, they are memories. I wonder how people remember who don't film, who don't photograph, who don't use tape-recorders.83

Copy (reproducibility) and archive, then, are in league with each other. At this pointBenjamin, too, diagnoses a media-archaeological disjointedness: The technological media are such - first with film (and before with photography) - that their reproducibility "isdirectly founded on the technology of their production"84 - medium and arche. "To an

ever increasing extent, the reproduced work of art is becoming the reproduction of awork of art made with a view to reproduction", and - according to a theory of SamuelWeber85 - the linguistic suffix of the term reproducibility already contains the seed of thevirtual nature of the technological media. What is the truthfulness of technological reproductions in comparison with the original?

Just as a computer giving inaccurate results does not falsify the physical laws of themachine, semantic errors in the archaeological copy of an inscribed stone do not falsifygeometric statements (sc structural parity) about the comparison of original and copy. [...]

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by analogy, it does not follow from a geometrically accurate description of original and

copy that the copy is semantically error-free.86

According to Benjamin, one characteristic of the original is its translatability; there

exists a relational connection (intimate) between original and translation as though the

need for translation were intrinsic to the original: "Translatability is an inherent property

of certain works."87 And for Benjamin, this relational concept does not refer to an inter

pretative, but to a relational-formal connection between translation and original - a rela

tionship that could therefore also be formalised in the sense of technological transfer (on

the lines of Shannon / Weaver's Mathematical Information Theory88). Whereby video en

codes this real relationship technologically, not symbolically, and the difference between

original and (technological signal) translation / transfer ceases to exist altogether. For

Benjamin, truth is a given - in technology, these givens are data. At any rate, time-based

processes: "legibility, like translatability, occurs only with time".89 Could one say, analo

gously, that video is the memory-based reproduction of a picture whose nature it is to be

recorded?

In principle, the technological function of the video recorder is to store television

signals by converting their frequencies into electromagnetic impulses, writing these onto

a magnetic tape by means of one or more magnetic heads, reading them off for repro

duction, and transmitting them to the receiver, again in the form of frequencies.90

For television as a live medium in particular, this was not true for a long time, since

it was its nature to give out signals.

The Return of the Aura (Behind the Back of Technology)

Although Walter Benjamin denied that the reproducible medium of photography had the

aura of the original, the photo artist Hiroshi Sugimoto manages in his cycle Portraits re

visit the function of the effigies against the backdrop of the legal fiction of the two bo

dies of the King in the English Renaissance, described by Ernst Kantorowicz. In Ma

dame Tussaud's London waxworks, he photographed the figures of the British royal fa

milies in such a way that they are posthumously "charged with reality" rather than frozen

into media of transience.91 It is precisely at the threshold of the digital that the analogue

arts (painting) and media (photography) find their restitution:

In 1999, the video artist Yorck der Knfel exhibited his Hommage to Painting at theBerlin Gallery Wohnmaschine, consisting of six monitors arranged in a semicircle that repeated over and over, in staggered time, a scene of blown-up and bursting balloons. The

difference to painting thus becomes particularly clear in the hommage: "The digitally manipulated video image can scarcely be traced back to an unmistakable author"92 - or perhaps this is a question of the media-competent, critical view, which tries to discriminateagainst authors in the new media as well?

This enhancement of the analogue as a criterion of artistic authenticity surely is notleast due to a shift of the stigma of the "reproduction medium" onto digital image processing. Furthermore, the appreciation of photography is testimony to the fact that the

old media are not, in Hegel's sense, simply "merging" into the new, but that it is preci-

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sely the obstacles, anachronisms and reflections in the interaction between different media that fascinate contemporary artists.93

The genealogy of the media, therefore, should not be described as history but aschanging configurations, with new media simply allotting a different place to the old(Friedrich Kittler), shifting their value, but not evolutionary.

Is there a Specific Videocy?

If video is merely used as a transmission device for electronically generated images, thevideo is not the artistic original. This is precisely the dilemma of video (art) aesthetics,as the jury of the 10th International Video Festival in Bochum experienced recently, inA/lay 2000. From the jury's introduction to prize-giving in the competition:

With a number of works, we found a clear tendency towards film. This caused theproblem whether we should judge video [simply] as a medium for recording, productionand projection or [more strictly] the specific aesthetics and media quality of video.

Would the aesthetic delimitation of video against other optical media on the basisof its formal-technological qualities be justified?94 Is there a specific videocy95? Is it thetechno-aesthetic pictorial untruthfulness of video compared with the apparent veracity oftelevision images whose constant broadcast criterion is that they must not be blurred?96

The initial fascination with the techno-properties of video - the "skandalon of the me

dium" (Irmeta Schneider) - increasingly lost its importance compared to the (mostly narrative) contents; once again proof of the rule that media archaeology ends where contents - as a diversion from the medium in the sense of Boris Groys (the "submedial") -begins. Where does that leave videomathesis, the specific knowledge and memory of video images, the specific options for time-axis-manipulation in video editing, being andtime in time-based technological images?

The Analogue Document of the Original and its Differences to Digital Space

Instead of reproducing originals, originals are now sampled - a molecularisation, evenatomisation of the original. Digitally, there is no original at all: not even an "image". Letus assume the difference of digital - basically photographic (Flusser's hypothesis) -, iediscrete quantities of pixels to the physically analogue picture.

Somewhere between scanning a document that can be experienced haptically, forexample an oil painting, und the representation of the readings on a storage medium,

the original materiality of the picture or (simpler:) object seems to get lost. This is also[already] true for analogue, electronic recording processes.97

In the medium of video, the coupling of original and archive is a given: in the storage medium video, although its stored images - in contrast to an oil painting on canvas- can be detached from its concrete carrier (the magnetic tape). "The photographic canonly be determined from the reflection of the image carrier and the production procedures that generate it."98; by contrast, the point with digital videocy is (and this is the me-dia-archaeologically crucial difference between analogue and digital video) that it can betransferred onto other memories without loss, and therefore extends, with Derrida (Dem

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Archiv verschrieben), into virtual space. Does the seemingly identical media reproductionof an original in analogue space, in fact, not mean its dislocation and deformation?

Reproductions [...] have to be counted amongst the misrepresentations of monuments. [...] photographs [...] exaggerate their fusion with light and air, and in every casedistort the harmony, alter the colours, blur the proportions, and introduce visual-pictorialelements. [...] even casts from antique moulds or prints from original wood blocks or metal plates. Whichever reproduction one is using: each demands that one remains awareof the type and degree of the distortion."

By contrast, digital space promises an undistorted, unfaded identical duplication ofthe document. Benjamin exemplified this by means of the photographic plate; this technological model can be applied to the video tape copy: Where it is possible to producea large number of copies, "the question of the true copy [makes] no sense" (Benjamin1978: 482) - unless with regard to the loss of data. The epoch of art in the age of its

technological reproducibility analysed by Benjamin is drawing to an end. Benjamin playsthe model of a memoire involontaire developed in Marcel Proust's novel A la recherchedu temps perdu off against media technologies "which he describes as a non-auratic memory dispositive"100, and inasmuch as art is no longer drawing beauty "from the depthsof time" - hence archaeo-aesthetological - but simply reproduces it technologically101, discrete situations affect the semantics of the original. The place of memory (in the senseof Hegel) is taken by digital space where art is no longer reproduced but sampled, andat any rate generated (imaging sciences) rather than reproduced. There is a marked dif

ference between digital images and photography, unlike Flusser's hypothesis that theyhave the same discrete pixels. What looks like a picture on the computer screen is in facta specific actualisation of data as data visualisation (imaging). The computer providesdata for viewing, on a temporary basis. And this turns the static - Benjamin diagnoses atheoretical equivalent of static as having a "feel for the cognate in the world" - into a dynamic pictorial concept - something that results only when the equilibrium is reached inelectronic refresh circles.

This variability marks a fundamental change of pictures. In contrast to classical pictorial media such as photography and film, with a computer-generated picture, the datais no longer immutably attached to a carrier, the negative, but always "flowing". Alterations can be made to the digitally stored "picture" not just at the second step, startingfrom the fixed negative, but at any point, and it is therefore impossible to determine an"original" state. The state at the point of recording and subsequent changes which canbe distinguished in the photographic process, coincide in the digitally stored "picture".102

- and it is indeed no more than permanent cache storage. The absence of the physical original is the beginning of the virtual picture - if virtual refers to conditions thatdon't exist anywhere but in electronic space; a difference, then, to the video or televisionpicture that may flicker just as electronically, but because of its referential nature depends on light sources exterior to itself - except for noise. Digital images, then, are nolonger read as analogous to photographic documents, but as pictorial illustrations, visualisations of a mathematical structure, of algorithms. They are indeed their image -photographs of the inner state of machines, as it were, of the second order. The loss of

the original takes place as early as the process of electronic (tran-)scription, when everything between 0 to 1 is eliminated (Gotthard Gnther sought to counter this with a mul-

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tivalue logic) here, the technological difference between raster and vector graphics screen

comes into play.

In the digital process, [...] the components of a database are discrete states. For di

gital images, this means: There is nothing between a pixel and its neighbouring pixels.

However, discrete states cannot be experienced by the senses, since the nature of the hu

man perception mechanism and of the body itself is characterised by the analogue, and

by continual change. The digital, therefore, comes hand in hand with the disappearance

of the physical.103

Particularly at the (other) end of its expulsion, however, the physical re-enters: "Since

it is my intention to get to the bottom of the materiality of the pixel", continues Andreas

Menn in good media-archaeological fashion, each pixel has consequently to be produced

with my own hands - that is, with my body. I therefore work with my body in front of a

digital camera; my appearance in the picture corresponds to "one", my disappearance to

"zero". I am being scanned by the camera. And therefore, clocked. And thus the writingcreated from the images of his body as a cluster of pixels reads, from a distance: "I want

to work only digitally" (that is, I would add, to live in discrete states) (ill. 15).

In view of the virtual - ie of something taking place in electronic space - the clas

sical distinction between original and copy becomes obsolete. "Virtual means: visible,

but non-existent."104 And what does this mean for the archiving of video art? For Dan Gra

ham's video installation whose hardware has been lost, it means that the computer is

now able to emulate it, the early reel-to-reel video-decks. The storage of media works ofart is one thing, to work with them again, another. Working and exhibition versions of the

museum as digital emulations are now conceivable105; the video original remains stored

as its authorisation. What will be done with artistically designed web pages in an age be

yond the internet?

Time Shift

The delay between recording and transmission corresponds, for the recipient, to the time

shift in the transfer from television to video, of the (technological) broadcast. The media

artist Dan Graham used this technological difference for a perceptual aesthetics in the se

ven variations of his 1974 Video Delay Rooms (initially at the exhibition Projekt 74 in Co

logne):

On Monitor 1 a spectator from audience A can see himself only after an 8 second

delay. While he views audience (in the other room) on Monitor 2, this audience sees

him live on the Monitor whose image can also be seen by audience A. [...] As 8 secondshave passed, the composition of the continuum which makes up audience B, has shifted

as a function of time.106

What gets lost in the analogue video image leads to an entropic dissolution of the

original or, better: to a time shift original, that is to the dissolution of the concept of the

original in video time, the specific videocity. With his video installation Present continu

ous past of 1974, Graham demonstrated: The viewer sees himself on the video monitor

with a time-lag (closed circuit). In a host of vanishing points, the representation spacedecentralises the view and distributes it in an ambiguous spatial field. The differentiation

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between contemplation and usage is obliterated; each comprises the other in its entirety(Ulrich Look). The oscillation of such a view corresponds to the deconstruction of the representational relationship through autorepresentation; here we find the representationof representation, depiction without the depicted. In the picture, the monitor wall allowsa view of itself through itself. The result is a series of complex representations which, intheory, continues as long as the video installation is switched on, but in practice soon

gets lost in the entropic density of image granularity. Such a representation decomposesitself. Which is a radical reminder- entirely in line with the Institute for time-based Mediaat the College of Arts in Berlin - that technological images are subject to the function oftime axis manipulation.

"Home video is overwhelmingly used as a 'time shift' phenomenon, moving a particular broadcast programme to a point where it is convenient to watch it"107; this timeshift (difference) "has to be seen in connection with the changes in the social organisa

tion of time". "Archiv(ideo)ing and time shifting enhance the availability of time becausewith the storage media, data are available anytime"; Beck speaks of time buffers (Zeit-puffer).108 Let us coin the key word "dynamic memory".

In the early stages of programmed television, the aesthetics of live broadcast as atechnological fact and as aesthetics marked "not only the media difference with film, italso stood for a convergence with traditional theatre which had quickly been rehabilitated as a medium of art after 1945".109 Both media forms have the risk of (technological)accidents or, rather, an "aesthetics of unpredictability". And at the same time, the wholedifference lies in the archival prescription as soon as TV switches to REC (when the memory makes for the difference): For in contrast to the unrepeatability of a stage performance, the recorded television broadcast of a theatre performance can be reproduced:Every moment of the live broadcast is fixed on a magnetic tape (today digitally on a harddisk). The seemingly unrepeatable of a purely theatrical presence is therefore, in technological space, already prescribed in iteration; hence there is neither original nor source,along the lines of Jacques Derrida's Grammatologie, but also of Freud and Marx. RosalindKrauss writes of Multiples without Originals, a principle based on originality conceived asrepetition, on the original reproduction.110

The live broadcast of the coronation of Elizabeth II, the British Queen, on 2 June1953 by means of telecine transmission was a relational combination of the difference intime zone and cache. For the viewer, the qualitative authorisation is not in the technological artefact: "From the pictures alone, he will be unable, at least after the introductionof magnetic recording in 1958/59, to establish whether it isn't a recording after all"111; thisinformation is given outside the picture, parergonally - a temporised (time-distorted) va

riant of the concept of the original.

From the transitory character of the television programme resulted the "aura" of artistic and journalistic products of this medium which is based on the "technological reproduction" of original events and, according to Walter Benjamin's theory, should haveno aura at all. The transience of the broadcast as a live event seemed well-placed to savethe aura of the unique and unrepeatable for television and, above all, for its artisticforms. This "aura" was lost with the "film character" of the programme and with the

change to electronic recording as the basis for a stock of programmes.112

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Photographic reproductions of works of art accentuate their ubiquitous exhibition

value; "free and easy contemplation is no longer appropriate to them" (485). Reprodu

ced in magazines, they need signposts, that is, indices:

Now captions became obligatory for the first time. And of course they were of a

very different character from the titles of paintings. Soon the directives [...] would be even

more precise and demanding in cinema, where the interpretation of each individual

image seems determined by the sequence of all preceding ones."3

Here rules the archival regime of registration, though it is not reducible to a logis

tic operation, as Benjamin explains in Konvolut of his Passagen-Werk. The "historical

index" of a picture does not simply refer to its date, but implies that it is only readable

at a specific moment - the Now of its visibility."4

Benjamin is describing in cultural, but technologically non-specific terms what con

stitutes, in precise technical terms, the twin temporal operation of the video recorder: on

the one hand the ability to record processes in time, which on the other hand are them

selves time-based technological processes. In digital space, this situation is radicalised

because discrete entities can easily be stored and are thus available to time axis mani

pulation."5

The temporality (as essence) of the original is replaced - particularly in the era of

digital text, sound and image storage - the synchrony of media-archival access. Benja

min describes this "dialectics at a standstill" in electronic terms that should not be un

derstood metaphorically but as a reference to their technological dispositives: in analogy,a video image is the place where "what was" and "what is" come together in a flash in

one constellation. This flash is called electricity, and in it, the former original melts away.

Originals Based on Time

What is the significance of the alliance between photography and the concept of the ori

ginal as opposed to the time-based technological picture? The archive is the dispositiveof photography, in contrast to the technological picture which is not created with a view

to storage, but to transfer / broadcast: "In contrast to film, there is no relationship at all

between photograph and television image." Between (legal-historical) document and

(media-archaeological) monument:

Due to its optical/chemical genesis, the photograph is able to testify to the "past

presence" of a pictured object, but even the most recent photograph never reaches the

present: The time of the photograph is always the time of exposure, already past, which

furthermore only isolates and captures a distinct moment (however long or short) - and

thereby inevitably elevates it to the decisive, significant moment. "6

In the case of the photograph, the auratic hie et nunc in Benjamin's sense is repla

ced by "a new category of space-time: immediate place, preceding time; [...] So that's how

it was: It allows us to possess a reality from which we are protected" - as by the moni

tor."7 By contrast, the live broadcast on television has temporal immediacy and local

otherness (an alibi). Looking more closely, and at the live effect beyond the level of hu

man, ie sluggish, inert perception, the "specimen" of the television image is successively

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scanned and is therefore not based on an instantaneous moment (still in photo and film),but on a time-based process, and hence "transitory by definition" and indeterminable: "itis in constant withdrawal like the present itself"118 - a perception phenomenon that is familiar from perception in film (24 images per second) and even from reading - discretecharacters that form into words as they are read.

This is the other side of the coin that came into play with the genre of art performance and the so-called "Gesamtkunstwerk" (total work of art): "at best, they can be documented in video recordings which are, however, only capable of capturing this one, singular event while the next performance probably looks different already.

Since with the technological media, what is stored can also be transmitted, theconcept of the original becomes radically temporal, discrete - temporary originals. Thisis also true for the time machine video recorder, particularly at the lowest level of mediaarchaeology, because it stores the flow of television signals and thus discrete moments

in time, unique, dot-shaped moments of time; reproduction of (and in) time. In the technologically induced cultural shift of emphasis from storage to transmission, communication, once expressed, is always lost in the broadcast:

Where things are still put in writing, this is now seldom done in uninterruptedways; instead, the original is transformed, crosses space as an electronic signal and isonly reconstituted when it has been received. The result is something like a remote copywhich lacks essential qualities of the original document.119

How can the recording and replay medium of video be coupled with the discourseof the original if its essence - contrary to the (seemingly) pure broadcasting medium oftelevision - consists in the interim storage of images, withholding them? After all, the storage, or interrupting, medium of the video recorder breaks precisely the flow of programmes that represents - according to Raymond Williams - "important elements of theaura of the traditional communicative process of television". Or is this second componentof the aura of television, the live broadcast, a retroeffect of video recordability?

Particularly in the era of canned cinematic and electromagnetic television, live broadcasts have great significance for the aura of the medium as a community-building communicative organiser. The time-shifted repetition of a programme that is broadcast livecancels the temporal synchrony of the event and its transmission by television.120

With this radical individualisation of time, there also returns the discrete momentin time whose loss Benjamin had lamented in his observations on the aura of the workof art: "There is no more individual 'Now' that unequivocally refers to a 'Before' and 'After'. The subject is no longer located in a point in time but knows only duration."121 Only,the manner of sensory perception in human collectives is not so much a function of historical change in the social conditions, but rather in the media - which is why there is noneed for historical, but for media-archaeological analysis. The originality of video - andthe storage medium film - lies in the fact that it is able to depict time, and that is, processes (unlike painting, which can only condense them in symbols or allegories).

Nam June Paik's video art installations can be traced back to, among others, Les-sing's Laocoon hypotheses: "Video art imitates nature, not its appearance or material,

but its inward time structure [...], the process of ageing (a particular type of irreversibi-

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lity).122 Thus it shares a characteristic with music, but not with painting, that was noted

by Benjamin. He quotes Leonardo:

Painting is superior to music because it does not have to die as soon as it is

brought to life, as is the case with unfortunate music ... Music, which disappears as soon

as it is created, comes second to painting which, with the introduction of varnish, has be

come everlasting.123

The video work possesses a uniqueness which - in contrast to Benjamin's criterion

for the auratic uniqueness of the original work of art - does not reside in the Here and

Now, but precisely in its temporal duration.

And the "time-structure" is not just a necessary "starting point" as in the organi

sation of any cinematic movement. It can definitely be seen as the externalised essence

of video works of art.124

So much for the analogue video, in digital, virtual space, however, every single pixel is a discrete event in time, and therefore an original. So, in response to the title I was

given for my talk "The Concept of the Original in the Age of Virtual Media", I would like

to

Ernst the Concept of the Original

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Transcript of Ernst the Concept of the Original