The Mystery of ‘Aura’

On the issue of aura, in some ways I disagree that mechanical reproduction removes the aura away from a piece of art. Prof. Parry shared with us the story about the print of Guernica hanging in the UN’s Security Council room in New York City. The UN version is a tapestry copy, a replication “less monochromatic” than the original, with shades of brown. Being covered up during a speech for war increases the credibility of the meaning of the painting. It’s supposed to show the horrors of war and thus it has become a symbol of peace. The incident speaks to the power of art, and the abstraction of reality as an artform and a political message.

And that wasn’t the original. That was a mechanical reproduction, yet still as powerful as the original, at least in that context. I think a well-placed copy, in the right context, and for the right reasons can still maintain an aura about the art. That’s not to say that I think that there should be mass-copies of every important artwork out there (oh wait there is a lot already). Greeting card- and magnet-reproductions of a famous painting do little to further the aura of that work.

Benjamin’s use of aura refers to the awe someone feels towards an art, and to the authenticity of an art -- since film and photography manipulate their subjects, film especially through cutting and montage, the aura of seeing the image-event is lost. I feel like he argues that the aura is lost in reproduction, whereas I see it as reproduction creates a different kind of aura. I think the aura of actually being at an event versus seeing a photo of the event are very different in the feelings and amount of awe that you feel when seeing them.

There still exists an aura when seeing the image-reproduction of an event, however the aura of an image is limited in it’s ability to show the big picture or context of an event. As with Eddie Adams’ famous photo (I again use an example that Parry referenced mainly because it illustrates my point so precisely) of General Leon executing a Viet Cong prisoner. After the aftershock of his most famous photo, Adams felt that the photo was an incomplete story and didn’t explain that the General was shooting out of revenge:

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'" (see article here)

The ability of film to stretch the truth and take events out of context could arguably be greater than that of the photo. In some ways, it is better than the photo because it can show the before and after, as with the Adams’ photo. In other ways however, through cutting and editing, a film can create a montage of images that tell a different story than perhaps what was real. A good example being by the brilliant director Alfred Hitchcock. In his 1960 film, Psycho, he uses the technology of montage to create his famous shower-murder scene. At the time, production codes limited director’s use of “violence” and “gore” (can you imagine what that scene would look like if made in 2009 by a director like, say, Quentin Tarantino?). Yet there is still a violent nature to that scene as Janet Leigh’s character is stabbed a dozen times in the shower. If you were to break down the scene into each cut however, each short cut by itself would not look very violent. (I unfortunately could not find a good set of screenshots from that scene online to show you) It’s only when the cuts are placed in a certain order, in a montage, that the violence is created, thus exemplifying the ability of film to create an aura out of a series of images. It's a horrific scene; even by our standards of violence I think that scene still frightens the viewer.

The aura of the event and the aura of the image, or series of images like in a montage, are very different. I see the reproduction of an event as creating a different aura than the event by removing it from its context and manipulating the viewer’s perspective. Film and photography illustrate this well, but mechanized copies of a painting, like Guernica, can show that in certain cases an aura can be maintained.

You say you want a revolution...well, you know...

Reading Eisenstein reminded me of what I think we’re largely trying to do in this class. She acknowledges that scholars and theorists have noted that the invention of Printing was vital in spreading literacy. However, she also thinks that scholars have left our any discussion about how printing really changed the cultural environment of the day, including the already literate. So she dives in. She looks at the specifics of how printing was a revolution in all aspects. Print standardized knowledge in ways that writing never could, and it also allowed knowledge to be preserved. It’s no coincidence that the Renaissance and Reformation, as well as the growth in Scientific thought occurred post-printing press.

A lot of the concepts in Printing Revolution, are familiar to us with the other ideas we’ve discussed in class. Eisenstein talks about the onset of printing as being evolutionary and revolutionary. On the one hand it begun, kind of like in Remediation, as “woodblock printing only better” or “writing only better.” And then as it became an agent of change, as Eisenstein says, she talks about printing as a revolution. The internet, as have other new medias in their time, in some ways evolve and in other ways revolutionize (revolve).

Another part I liked, was how the writer Montaigne took into account that his audience would be widely diverse and wrote in an informal tone to meet the needs of such readers. We recognize that as an important step in writing: knowing your audience. Plato and the Sophists also knew that was important in speech-making. I could see how if books were handwritten and expensive then few would own more than a small splattering of books. And if that was all the reading you had to digest, the kind of writing you would produce would be thus limited. They say that is you want to learn new “better” words, it’s better to read more than to just try to memorize from a dictionary. Almost arguing that being exposed to different writings can make you a better writer. Of course the flip side of that could be that reading other’s writings could limit your ability to create original work. Then you have to discuss what is original? Is being evolutionary or revolutionary more original? Can you have one and not the other? Which I don’t believe you can. Kind of like immediacy and hypermediacy, both always exist.

I think the best part of Eisenstein’s critique is the idea that the printing press was an agent of change. I think we can take that idea and spread it to new media, and social media, and how those are also agents of change. They’ve changed the way we meet and talk to one another. We’re moving from analog to digital. Google, for instance, is working diligently to have all books published online. In some sense there is a feeling of accomplishment for some writers knowing that their book is on Google Books. An old professor of mine for instance recently found that her yet to be published book was on Google. In some ways we’re already at the stage that there are writings available only in digital and no paper copy exists. I’m sure that will become more frequent.

On a side note, I wonder what people would think if I said I was a published writer...I do after all, have to click “publish” when I finish a blog... But I guess the publishing revolution hasn’t quite occurred yet.

Remediation in Film (and Digital Photography)

I thought Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter & Grusin), laid a good foundation for talking about new media, being that this was the first reading for class that really could address more modern forms of media. Of course, it’s easy to see that media at it’s very core is basically the same through history, whether it is the technology of writing or the world wide web. I chose to focus on read about two of my interests: digital photography and film. I will focus on the film chapter, as I felt that my concluding thoughts on film were similar to digital photography.

Bolter & Grusin cite film theorist Gunning who explained an audience view with a sense of immediacy and being aware of it at the same time. They call it the “duality of looking at and looking through.” Another duality they explain, is that there exists a cinema of attractions and a cinema of narratives. They say the cinema of attractions was what existed at first in the movies and the cinema of narrative was what came about second with the development of Hollywood-cinema. The cinema of attractions did show things in real time and the audience enjoyed them for the reason that they were amazed at the dual hypermediacy and immediacy they experienced when watching real events on the screen. I would extend that this is the same idea that news programs use and how television primarily started out as. That same fascination with watching real world events yet being aware of the medium of the screen is presenting the event to you in the safety of your living room has now developed into the other mediums we get news form like the internet.

There is also a duality in watching narrative film, since the audience understands that they are not watching real people and that it is “just a movie.” I think this book was written a little before “reality television” really took off. But the same thing applies to reality TV -- the programs are set-up to be real people, behaving and talking without scripts and without interference, or so they say. But let’s give the producers the benefit of the doubt and say that these programs are unscripted, does that mean there aren’t other ways the show is mediated? Well the people on the show, the “real people” were chosen for certain reasons (that they were good looking or really types of personalities that would cause drama) and they are put into situations that are set up to have certain outcomes. So the shows blatantly claiming to be reality are very much hypermediated. And I think most people watching recognize this so again there is that duality of immediacy and hypermediacy. The same argument is made for digital photography, as the viewer experiences a sense of immediacy at the same time as recognizing the influence of the medium. That duality exists in both mediums.

So will movies (or digital photography) become more hypermediate or immediate? Can film ever reach full realism/immediacy? I don’t think so, because of many issues with the medium itself. In a broad sense, if we’re talking about narrative film (which for this reading I think so) then film tells a story, either set in the past or the future. FIlm can try to set its story in the “present-day” but because of the medium itself, there can be no accurate way to present “real-time” stories. Otherwise it would just be a play again, and not film, and the good thing about film (as opposed to plays and the theater) and the authors touched on this, is that film can cut and not show everything that happens in real time. Audiences have been trained through watching hours and hours of movies and they don’t want to see things in real time for very long. The average shot-length of a movie is mere seconds for a reason. As for the past and future, a there are so many details that can be overlooked (purposely or not) when making films about the past, it’s impossible to not have some historical inaccuracies. And who’s to say what the future will be exactly? So there is no immediacy there. The same goes with digital photography as a photo can only capture something of the past, something that has already occurred, so really there is no potential for total immediacy in a photo, only a perception of realism.

As B&G showed, there is a duality in remediation between hypermediacy and immediacy. I like their dichotomy explanation, that immediacy can only exist because hypermediacy exists, and vice versa. This argument could be remediated about any subject. We define things by their opposite. I am a redhead because I am not a brunette. I am tall because I am not short. If everyone was the same height, there would be no “short” and “tall.” You have to look at the context of something to understand what it is, basically. This is true for movies as well as other mediums of media.

One thing I think the authors could have also addressed, is the cultural attitude and bias of the public towards certain kinds of remediations. For example, in literature remediation is commonly accepted and often praised. Shakespeare wrote very little “original” work; in fact I believe he only wrote 2 plays that did not come from an older source in literature or storytelling. Yet Shakespeare unquestionably contributed to literature and language in ways that was profound. For the average person, questions of his originality are just mostly looked over.

Then again with cinema, because it is a widely seen medium and popular with the masses, public opinion is very common. FIlm is constantly remediating literature, video games, previously made films, radio programs, etc etc. When a film is based on a book - I’ll stick with fiction lit for right now - it is understandable, based on the way the medium of film works, that it will inevitably leave something out from the novel, much like a film about the past will always have some historical inaccuracies. To me, each step that a medium takes in remediating a given subject is a step towards increased hypermediacy, as much as the medium wants to show immediacy, yet there can never be just one or the other. To reiterate B&G, neither can exist without the other.

Whoa...harry potter?

McLuhan and Twitterisms

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time with McLuhan’s theories on media. With just two of his readings, I put him on level with Chomsky or Foucault. I only get about half of what they say, but damn I feel smarter for reading them.

Part of McLuhan’s argument is that technology is an extension of ourselves. He’s famous for saying “the medium is the message,” that is to say, that a medium (a technology) is the part that affects the world, not the content that the medium is communicating. This I understood (I think). Culture is built upon technology. Each new technology is built upon a previous technology. (Of course I then wonder wouldn’t there be an “original technology”? Something that started off everything that exists now? But that’s another blog...) For McLuhan, the invention of the phonetic alphabet, an arbitrary system as we know from Saussure, was the catalyst that took the ancient cultures from multi-sensory to visually focused, and set off a series of technological innovations leading us to the present and the internet. McLuhan though, believes that there are these technologies/mediums that communicate their own content, but the message isn’t in the content. It is in the medium itself. The medium is what influences us.

So, I tried to apply this to the media/technology that I use and know and what the mediums themselves teach me, and not their content. I only recently began tweeting, although I’ve known of it for a long time and had done some browsing to see what it was about. At first glance it seemed frivolous to me. People were having incomplete conversations, making observations and sending them out in to the internet void to be commented on not. (Enter made-up example tweets off the top of my head: “Going to the movies later with Jordan!,” “Saw a Sarah Palin look alike today and really wanted to break her glasses in two” etc. etc.)

Ok so while that was what I thought was the content of the majority of tweets out there, and the reason I avoided tweeting until it was asked of me for class, I have to admit, since I have begun using twitter I’ve become fascinated with the process of it.

Most of the tweets out there are conversational. A large number are self-promotional. A good amount is the sharing of information such as youtube, news stories, blogs. Then there’s this guy. Some *twitteres are actually trying to produce literature in 140 characters? That’s interesting since many fear the internet for making us illiterate.

What I find intriguing is how many different ways there are to fill 140 characters with. This to me is the epitome of the “medium is message” argument. I would say that the medium of twitter is the 140 character limit, the content varies from person to person. What then can we make of such short snippets of story? Stories have a long history in the world. Stories existed long before written language, in the oral traditions of ancient civilizations. In fact, the way I see it, most of the mediums that McLuhan discusses (newspapers, movies, television in particular) are story-telling mediums. Human communication, and maybe this is my Western-based perspective, is about story-telling.

So, if the medium limits our story-telling ability, what does that do to our culture? Do we adapt and learn to bottom-line stories? Does it limit our thoughts or teach us to think quicker on our feet? Do debates get shortened to one-line blurbs? I think these things already happen in many instances and the danger I see is that the world is not so black-and-white. And while 140 characters is a nice bit to start off a conversation or a debate, I ask is it enough to fully explain the world? One of the things that McLuhan also contends is that we are largely unaware of the affect that media has on us. Luckily though, as a student in this program, we are learning to explore the mediums of new media and analyze them and pick them apart. And that’s largely what McLuhan was also getting at in his writings. He said that there are a few who don’t just sit as on the sidelines as media changes our minds and culture and that the only trick with “new media” is the speed of it. We have to think quicker because the medium changes so quickly. Maybe that’s something that the twitter-medium is preparing us for. To think quicker and more concisely, in fewer characters.

My opinion of the affects of shortened messages is not complete and I would love to hear some others thoughts on the matter.



*Side note: What is the noun of a person who tweets? Tweeterer?