Walter Benjamin
Aura: the sense of awe and reverence felt in the presence of a unique work of art. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” (Section II)
For Benjamin, the aura lies not in an object itself, but rather in the object’s external attributes and surroundings; who owns it (or has owned it in the past); where is it being exhibited or shown (the private home, the museum); how does it claim authenticity (is it an “original” work of art); what is its cultural value (does society consider it “high” or “low” art). Aura is tied to cult value and ritual, and therefore to primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and the rituals of those power structures.
When an image can be reproduced, art is brought to the masses and therefore freed from the bindings of the aura and its ties to the structures of power and ritual. This occurs to an ever greater degree with the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no “actual” original and in which images can be both fabricated and, in theory, infinitely reproduced. The camera and mechanical reproduction have the potential to democratize art and to provide cultural access to the masses, but at the same time the politicization of art has the potential for fascist corruption.
In the epilogue, Benjamin cautions us to consider the ways in which reproducibility of the image can lend itself to the use of the image as a political weapon. Benjamin wrote during a time in which film and photography were weapons of the Nazi party; Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” was released in 1935, one year prior to Benjamin’s writing this essay.
Espen Aarseth
At the core of Aarseth’s article lies a fundamental struggle to define and perhaps to overcome outmoded and less useful definitions as they relate to the central practice and application of “new” media. Aarseth argues that some of the standard terms associated with the phenomena - hypertext, interactivity, and virtuality - are problematic as currently defined in the “partial, inconsisent, and ideological” answers they offer. Of the three, Aarseth gives “virtuatlity” the most potential for generating a mode that is truly “new.” As a parallel to the traditional mode of liner storytelling, Aarseth suggests that virtuality may be an “innvoation not only of technology but of how we interpret and represent the world (435).”
By suggesting the application of the hermeneutics model (a term often associated with the study and interpretation of theological concepts and ideals) to the discovery and exploration of new modes of media virtuality, Aarseth suggests that we may come to a gradual understanding by engaging with process as new methods are defined, rather than expecting a closed interpretation or a final definition of a medium that is constantly evolving. Further, Aarseth encourages us to remember that play has been a vital and traditionally important component in the collective effort to invent new technologies - a particularly encouraging thought, given the collaborative possibilities inherent in the evolution of new mediums.
Related works: Margaret Morse’s “Virtualities” and “The Poetics of Interactivity” ; Lev Manovich’s “Post-Media Aesthetics”
Steve Dietz
“…the history of the intersection of art and technology is one of the prognostications of an irrefutable, inevitable, and even immanent future that never comes to pass - at least not exactly as we thought it might.”
or, in other words, we are promised that in the future, everything will hover… :-)
The Ten Dreams:
Symbiosis can be thought of as a partnership between human mind and cybernetic machine. kybernetics = steersman. Emergence = order out of seeming chaos -- 
WNYC’s RadioLab has a great piece about emergence here. Immersion is related to VR, submersion into an alternate sensory state. The idea that technology can bring about world peace, of technology as uniting force, communications as interrupt for destruction, lies in the potential inherent in multi-modal tools for collaborative artmaking in the name of togetherness and recognition (strides can be made here, but we’re still far from being in a place where technology for good overcompensates for techno- destructive capabilities).
Transparency is a corallary to world peace… the dream of open source, of technology “returned to the community of users for further iteration (511).” Flows rely on“unfixedness”, “mutiplicty”, “hybridity” - the “dynamic nature of the universe” (whoa!) and computational media’s ability to model it. Open work - “Every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it.” — Umberto Eco. The Dream of the Other is “to somehow inhabit the psyche of an other - to not merely deduce their feelings but to experience them” (512). This made me think of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Facade. Hacking the Dream conjures the artist as activist, turning e-commerce and universal surveillance back on itself. Example - NYC Surveillance Camera Project.
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