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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Benjamin's Crisis of Aura and Digital Media
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2006-10-01
2023-10-10
2006-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Petra Schweitzer
2006/10/01
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
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Benjamin's Crisis of Aura and Digital Media
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/21401/19000
6
BENJAMIN'S CRISIS OF AURA AND DIGITAL MEDIA1
Jay David Bolter, Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, Petra Schweitzer
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta




   Aura is one of the most commonly invoked terms in media theory. Walter Benjamin's
argument that film and other "reproductive" media diminished or destroyed the aura
that had belonged to carlier art is regarded as one of the foundations of media theory.
Benjamin was writing, however, in the 19305, when film was the popular "new medi
um" that posed a challenge to the traditional plastic arts. What does the coming of dig.
ital media do to Benjamin's argument? Is his analysis of aura still valuable in a media
cconomy in which film and photography compete for cultural status with computer
games, various Web genres, and enhanced television? My colleagues and I (in a working
group at the Gorgia Institute of Technology) suggest that the question of the loss of
aura is relevant for new media and particularly relevant for a particular group of digital
media technologies called "mixed reality," which combine the physical and the virtual
and therefore cxist at the boundary between reproductive technologies and older
forms, to which Benjamin ascribed aura.


Aura

  It is worthwhile at the outset to review briefly the three essays, all written in the
1930s, in which Benjamin deals with aura expressly and at length.
  'The Short History of Photography (Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, 1931) is the
carliest of the three.? Here Benjamin is concerned with the early development of pho-
tography: in particular how daguerreotype portrait photography developed from por-
trait painting and how this early phase in photography later gave way to a new aes-
thetic. Early photographs possessed an aura that surrounded each image and was
expressed technically in the continuous tonal values of the early technologies. Aura
was a sentimental or romantic attitude, or perhaps even a mystical breath that encir-
cled the photograph. After the 188s, photographers such as Atget, whom Benjamin
sees as a forerunner of the surrealists, "sucked the aura out of reality."3
  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter
seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) offers Benjamin's most influential statement
on aura.* In the Kleine Geschichte, aura was characterized as an attitude of reverence
lowards art. In the Kunstwerk essay Benjamin develops his argument based on chang.
ing technologies of representation. Aura belongs to works of art that are unique, as art
in general was before technologies of mechanical reproduction. Aura is the sense of the
 "here and now that each such work possesses because of its history of production and
transmission. This uniqueness lends to each painting or sculpture a special quality.

CINEMA & Cie, no. 8, Fall 2006                                                       135
JAY DAVID BOLTER, BLAIR MACINTYRE, MARIBETH CANDY, PETRA SCHWEITZER


which can in tum evoke an attitude of reverence on the part of the viewer. In a difficult
passage, Benjamin compares the viewer's experience of a work of art with the experi
ence of nature.


 We define the aura (of natural objects) as the unique phenomenon of a distance,
 however close it may be /einmalige Erscheinung ciner Ferne, so nah sic sein mag!.
 If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your cycs a mountain
 range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience
 (breathe, atmen| the aura of those mountains, of that branch.


  This quality of distance-no-matter-how-near is a key to Benjamins thinking. Ic olfers
his example of aura in nature specifically in order to illustrate aura in art: the analogy
suggests that the closer we come to a work of art, the better we appreciate the distanc
between ourselves and that work. The physical presence and uniqueness of a painting
or sculpture generate (ironically) a sense of distance and therefore aura. Although we
might be close enough to touch or even deface the painting, we cannot touch or affect
its unique history.
  Unlike painting, photography and film do not inspire such feelings of reverence and
remoteness, because they are technologies that reproduce their objects of representa
tion "automatically*. Photographs and films are artifacts that can themselves be repro
duced automatically in an arbitrary number of (nearly) identical copies, and each copy
can have the same status as every other. A visitor to the Louvre comes to see the origi
nal Venus di Milo, with its complex history of transmission from the island of Melos in
the and century B.C. to the Louvre in the present. For the viewer of a Chaplin film, on
the other hand, the experience is the same no matter which of the thousands of copies
he happens to be viewing. In the age of film and other reproductive technologies, aura
undergoes a decline, which Benjamin believes makes possible a new political cinema
  Benjamin distinguishes stage acting from film acting on the basis of aura. In a dra
matic performance, the physical presence of the stage actor preserves aura. In film,
however, artistic expression is no longer centered in the actor, but rather in the camera,
which treats the actor as it docs all other elements of the filmic world. Benjamin regards
film as a reflexive medium, because the mobile point of view of the camera an
techniques of editing lead the viewer to explore and reflect on the world seen through
the lens. In fact, mechanical technologies of reproduction do not simply affect the
viewer's response to art. Benjamin makes the larger claim that these technologies have
changed our collective sense of perception. Auratic perception is one way of seeing the
world; photography and especially film offer another. The film camera, which pene
trates the space of the scene and even, metaphorically, the film actor him- or herself,
conditions us to view the world as evacuated of aura.
  Benjamin's last extended discussion of aura appears in the essay On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire.? The main concern here is lyric poetry, verbal expression (and memory).
rather than photography or other visual technologies per se. Benjamin defines aura in
this context as the "associations, which, at home in the memoire involuntaire, tend to
cluster around an object of perception..." 8 Photographic and film cameras, we learn
here, extend the range of voluntary memory (memoire voluntaire), because they pro-
vide a permanent, visible record of the sound and the sight of an event. Benjamin takes

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note of Baudelaire's claim that photography is suitable to record ephemeral events and
objects, but is not compatible with the realm of imagination. And what Baudelaire
regards as the realm of imagination is for Benjamin the realm of aura. Although
Benjamin does not make the point explicit, we could say that from a modernist per-
spective the connection between involuntary memory and aura is that both are nos-
talgic. An involuntary memory concerns an event that is now recoverable only
through association: it carries with it a sense of remoteness, of distance-no-matter-
how-ncar. It was the element of nostalgia in aura, to which Benjamin himself was
attracted in his earlier writings and which he apparently later hoped to banish from
artistic representation.
  In the 19305, then, Benjamin offered a series of characterizations of aura and applied
the term to a range of human experience. Aura can belong to works of art, natural phe-
nomena, and even human faces or figures. Benjamin thought he was demystifying the
concept of aura, which he derived from the theosophical and Jewish mystical traditions
of the 19th century. He saw film technology in particular as rescuing art from its sen-
timental (auratic) condition and making a more advanced political expression possible.
Yet Benjamin's own characterization of aura is ambiguous and perhaps ambivalent.
Aura can usually be understood as a psychological state, an attitude or feeling that the
viewer experiences when contemplating a work of art or a mountain or other manifes-
tation of nature. But Benjamin sometimes writes as if aura were a quality (almost an
emanation) of an object, such as a painting. The ambiguity of Benjamin's concept of
aura is apparent in the key phrase: aura is the "unique phenomenon of a distance, no
matter how near." This tension between far and near - between the unapproachable
and the approachable both at the psychological level and at the cultural and economic
level - seems to be a defining feature of Benjamin's aura. 10


Did Cinema Lose Aura?

  One question that arises is whether Benjamin is in fact right that film precludes aura
as an aesthetic response. We could argue that there have been auratic and non-auratic
styles or genres throughout the history of film. The popular style of filmic narrative
that was defined in the igIos and continues to characterize the Hollywood film seeks
to maintain aura in two ways. First, the representational practice of the Hollywood
style aims to evoke in the viewer a sense of immediacy, not the reflective attitude that
Benjamin ascribes to film. Once a viewer becomes accustomed to continuity editing,
the edits disappear from his/her conscious perception of a film. As the name ("continu-
ity editing") suggests, the visual presentation, which is in fact discrete, comes to be felt
as continuous, and the viewer experiences the shifting point of view as "natural." The
mobile camera could be said to bring the depicted world near to the viewer, which
Benjamin claims diminishes aura. But the ambiguity of the far-near distinction also
admits the opposite interpretation: that the transparent style creates a sense of distance
where distance does not really exist. The viewer is actually watching images play across
a flat screen, but is fooled into seeing a world beyond the screen. The Hollywood style
encourages the viewer not to think of the process of representation or the screen (how-
ever near it may be), but to look through the screen to an imaginary world.11
  In addition, we can point to the cultural practices that grew up around film - the
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JAY DAVIO BOLTER, BLAIR MACINTYRE, MARIBETH GANDY, PETRA SCHWEITZER


Hollywood star system, which even today makes the stars themselves into auratic
objects, who are remote no matter how near. The popular audience participates eagerly
in the process, not only by attending the films, but also by buying magazines (and now
visiting Web sites) to lear more about its favorite celebrities. The aura of the stars con.
sists in conflating their presentation on the screen with their lives off screen. They
appear on the screen in giant close-ups, while their celebrity makes them distant
almost ritual figures, larger than life and different from the rest of us. From the 1910s 10
the present, the public has expected that the stars will live out storics in the physical
world that reflect the characters they portray. The transparent mode of representation
applies to the stars themselves, as is illustrated by the fact that fans often stubbornly
confuse actors with the characters they play. The Academy Awards (where actors
parade before attentive fans in person and on (clevision) and the whole publicity
machine of celebrity affirm the auratic power of film stars.
   Benjamin took note of the process of celebrity in the Work of Art essay, but dismissed
it as a characteristic of Western capitalist film industry:

  The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the
  "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money
  of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of
  personality", the phony spell of a commodity: So long as the movie-makers' capital
  sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's
  film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art 12

  Benjamin's ambivalence emerges here: he is implying that the aura of earlier art
forms was authentic, but that in the world of film, only a contrived sense of aura
remains.
    A politically revolutionary film style was no more popular in Benjamin's day than it
is in ours, and we have to doubt whether popular film ever constituted the aesthetic
 revolution that Benjamin claimed for it. The Hollywood style and its European coun
 terparts have dominated film from his day to the present. The reflective film style, in
 which Benjamin placed his aesthetic and political hopes, did characterize avant-garde
 film of the 1920s. Benjamin regarded film as the popular expression of the reflective
 practices that the elite art world knew as dada and surrealism. But in fact, the reflective
 films of his period were also "high art*- the work of dadaists and surrealists such as
 Leger, Man Ray, and Bunuel, none of whom could be considered popular filmmakers.



 Digital Media and Aura

   Like film, digital media forms are understood as reproductive technologies. Because
 the computer is capable of perfect reproduction of information, the same media expe
 rience can be offered repeatedly to a series of users. However, the relationship between
 the viewer/user and the experience can vary depending on the technology chosen. Like
 Hollywood cinema, virtual reality (VR) and some genres of computer games present the
 users with a world in which they can immerse themselves. The goal of a VR application
 is to immerse the user in a world of computer-generated images and (often) computer-
 controlled sound. As the images (Fig. 1, Fig. ) indicate, the user experiences this world

138
                                                     BENJAMIN'S CRISIS OF AURA AND DIGITAL MEDIA




                 CAL
                   Fig. 1 - The user wearing a VR headset sees a "virtual
                   world" of texture-mapped polygons (Larry Hodges,
                   Georgia Institute of Technology)




                  Fig. 2 - While experiencing the virtual world, the user is
                  actually located in the very different physical world of the
                  computer science laboratory (Larry Hodges, Georgia
                  Institute of Technology)


through more-or-less realistic computer graphics, while the user herself is standing in
a laboratory facility surrounded by tracking equipment and computers. As the second
image (Fig. 2) reminds us, virtual reality is performative, in the sense that the user must
 "put on" the virtual world (by donning the headset) and act in it (turning his/her head,

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 JAY DAVID BOLTER, BLAIR MACINTURE, MARIBETH GASOY. FETRA SCHMETZER



 walking around, using the data glove). Screen-based computer games oft
 VR paradigm, as they seek to draw the player into a 3D. computer graphic world beyond
 the screen. Like VR, such games strive to be purely virtual; they strive for seamless rep
 resentation (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).
   The goal of a VR application is to immerse the user in a world of computer-generated
 images and (often) computer controlled sound. Although practical applications for VR
 are relatively limited, this technology still represents the next logical step in the quest
 for pure virtuality. Computer games (at least action adventure games) often follow the
 VR paradigm: locating the user in a computer graphic world. Although screen hased
 games cannot offer full visual immersion, nesertheless, the goal is to make the world
seamless.
   In mixed-reality (MR) applications, the computer provides digital information that is
 integrated into the user's view of the physical environment. This integration can be
accomplished with a variety of configurations of hardware and softwars, and the dif
ferent strategies have been given a varicty of names, including "ubiquitous comput
ing." " augmented reality" (AR), "wearable computing" and "tangible computing." All of
these approaches combine physical and virtual clements into a single experience for
the user. Because they are not purely virtual, however. MR and AR experiences are not
perfect reproductive technologies. Instead, they draw on the physical and cultural
uniqueness, the "here and now," of particular places. In that sense they can be said to
exploit the aura of the place. In an augmented reality experience called "The Voices of
Oakland," we were seeking to exploit the unique character, the aura, of an historic
cemetery in Atlanta. The visitors to the cemetery wore a computer that delivered audio,
the voices of those buried in the cemelery but the visitors' view of the cemetery was not
obscured (Fig. 3).
  Different digital forms seem to differ in their capacity to evoke aura. In an MR appli
cation, the experience is a hybrid, in which the physical and the virtual are necessarily
intertwined. Hybridity works against aura; nevertheless, the physical place, which is
unique, lends uniqueness to the experience and may revive the possibility of evoking
aura. In a VR application, the physical location of the user is irrelevant. Ideally, the user
neither sees nor hears the laboratory where her body is situated, but experiences
instead a wholly virtual world. As in computer games, the goal is immersion. The VR
community has even adopted the term "presence" to describe the psychological state
that they seck to induce in the user. There is a journal called Presence to publish
rescarch in describing and measuring user reactions within VR environments. 13
  At first Benjamin's aura might be regarded as contrary to the VR concept of presence.
To take what is remote and unapproachable (and therefore auratic) and to bring it near
to the subject - this is precisely Benjamin's recipe for destroying aura. Popular film
would seem to be like VR in this sense. Like VR today. film for Benjamin seems to be a
purely virtual technology, one that severs the subject's connection to the physical
world, as film theorists of the 19ros emphasized. The viewer enters the enclosed and
darkened space of the theatre, and it is the task of the film to construct an alternative
virtual world on the screen. If aura depends on the subject's physical connection to a
place or object that has aura, then film - like VR or any other self-contained technology
of representation - destroys aura by breaking that connection.
  The ambiguity of Benjamin's definition, however, suggests another interpr
which aura and VR presence are compatible. We can see their comnatibility if we return
940
                                                BENJAMIN'S CRISIS OF AURA AND DIGITAL MEDIA




Fig, 3 - Visitors to the Oakland cemetery listen to the "Voices of Oakland® using a portable comp
and headphones.


to the Benjamin's nature analogy, in which the subject experiences (breathes in) the
aura of a mountain or branch on a summer afternoon. Here Benjamin appeals to nature
as an immediate presence, yet this very presence reveals the distance between the sub-
ject and nature, in the sense that the felt immediacy and transparency of nature compel
the human subject to appreciate its remoteness. If transparency in nature can evoke
aura, then transparency in art should do the same. Since certain styles in film and pho-
tography (and computer games and VR) have all aimed for this feeling of transparency.
we are left to wonder why Benjamin does not acknowledge that mechanical technolo
gies can evoke legitimate aura.
  What about the hybrid forms of MR, in which the computer-generated virtual images
and sounds are situated in a physical environment? Here the experience is both imme-
diate and mediated. In the Oakland Cemetery, for example, a physical, human-guided
tour of the cemetery should be high in aura, and a tour supported by augmented reali
ty perhaps equally high. Because both the human-guided tour and the augmented tour
maintain the user's physical connection to the site, the experience will be felt as unique
and historically significant. Physical presence should enhance the aura by heightening
the ironic sense of distance however near. In this respect, MR experiences should be
more effective at conveying aura than other media forms. As with presence itself, how-
                                                                                       141
JAY DAVID BOLTER, ELAIRMACINTRE,
                             MARIBETH GANDY, PETRA SCHWEITZER



ever, any media technology could enhance aura by
through proximity In the case of historical or cultural sites, this enhance
achieved by providing information about the place or object that establishes connet.
tons with the viewer's previous knowledge. For example, if the user knows noth
about the significance of the Oakland cemetery for American history, then she c
understand her visit as a visit to the generic place, "cemetery" (even a gen
will have some associations). As the visitor learns more about the people buried at
Oakland and the art and architecture of the monuments, her associations become more
varied, and she comes to appreciate the uniqueness of this cemetery. Any media tech
nology - a web site, a film, or even a prose description - could build such associations.
(Benjamin even suggests that lyric poctry prior to Baudclaire had aura.)


Aura and Remediation


   It is worth noting that Benjamin's three main discussions of aura cach concentratc on
different media or media forms: on photography, on film, and on lyric poctry respec.
lively. Each discussion treats a moment of transition from one set of representational
practices to another, and each involves the lension between older and newer tcchnolo
gies. The Kleine Geschichte examines the transition from portrait painting to the
daguerreotype and then to non-auratic photography. The Kunstwerk essay contrasts
stage drama and film. And the last essay focuses on the changing nature of lyric poetry
after Baudelaire, who was reacting against claims for the new technology of photogra
phy and industrialization in general.
  In previous work in media theory, we hare introduced the concept of "remediation"
to describe the interaction between older and newer media forms in a given cultura
moment. 14 In their efforts to reach audiences with a new media form, designers or cre.
ators refashion the representational practices already understood and appreciated by
those audiences. Designers in any media form, old or new, are making a claim that their
particular representational practices can provide an experience that is authentic or
 "real." New media designers remediate earlier media in the sense that they borrow
both representational practices from carlier media and claim to be improving on them.
For example (to take the case that Benjamin examines in the Kleine Geschichte), ana-
logic photography remediated portrait painting in the sense that it borrowed the eco-
nomic and social functions as well as some compositional techniques. But photography
also claimed to surpass portrait painting in the fidelity with which it could represent
the subject - at least according to a definition of visual fidelity that photographers
themselves promoted. (Those who continued to favor painting over photography
argued just the opposite: that, unlike the camera, the artist could bring out the inner
character of the subject.)is Similarly, to take the case that Benjamin concentrated on in
the Kunstwerk essay, film remediated stage drama, borrowing from the practices of the
slage in order to present a story through action and dialog. Film's claim to surpass
drama was rooted in the techniques of editing, as Benjamin noted in his essay. In con-
structing a sequence of edited shots, the filmmaker frees the viewer's point of view
from the fixed position that it occupies in the theatre.
  We become aware of aura in art through a rivalry or interplay of new and traditional
media forms. What Benjamin characterizes as the decay of aura in photography and
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                                                  BENJAMINS CRISIS OF AURA AND DIGITAL MEDIA


film is an expression of this interplay in the late igth and first half of the 2oth centuries.
For Benjamin, film's task was to denigrate the aura of drama by providing the repro-
ducible experience and mobile point of view that drama could not, just as photogra-
phy's task had been to denigrate the aura of painting. Marleen Stoessel points out that
Benjamin first defined the idea of aura at the moment of its supposed decay.I This is
not surprising. Benjamin's descriptions of aura suggest an unacknowledged nostalgia, a
desire for something lost and now unrecoverable. In a culture characterized by repro-
ductive media technologies, the authentic, the unmediated, becomes unrecoverable.
   We have also argued that there are two opposing strategies of representation that
designers and artists employ in the remediation of media forms: transparency and
hypermediacy." Either of these strategies can be used in any media form, although
artists and designers in certain media and at certain times may favor one or the other.
The strategy of transparency asks the viewer to forget the process of mediation and con-
centrate on the mediated content. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, emphasizes the
mediated character of the experience. For example, a painting by the 18th century
Italian Canaletto strives to be transparent, while most contemporary music videos are
hypermediated. As we noted above, since its development in the 191o, the Hollywood
film has generally pursued the goal of transparency. The intended audience is not
expected to be conscious of the moving camera and the edits; it is supposed to experi-
ence this way of viewing the action as "natural" and to focus instead on the drama itself.
On the other hand, the surrealist films of the 1920s were hypermediated and required
the viewer to reflect on the process of their own making.
  The interplay of these two strategies helps us understand the decay - as well as the
constant revival - of aura within 20th century media forms. The strategy of trans-
parency aims to evoke aura in the viewer, while hypermediacy denies aura. This
dichotomy holds even in film. The transparent style from Griffith's day to Benjamin's
(and to ours) is auratic. The assumption behind the transparent style is that film can
deliver an authentic experience to the viewer by capturing the aura (the reality, the
 "here and now*) of the characters, places, and situations. In his nature analogy, when
Benjamin describes the aura of a natural location, he posits an unmediated relationship
with nature. The transparent style in film or other media seeks to emulate that sup-
posed immediacy - to bring viewers closer to the real by effacing the medium that inter-
poses itself between them and the object of representation. Benjamin's nature analogy
is heavy with nostalgia. Benjamin, an urban scholar of the oth century, chooses to
describe aura as a moment of communing with nature in the absence of any media tech-
nologies. When Benjamin calls aura a feeling of distance however near, he is not only
describing a desire for immediacy; he is also acknowledging that that desire cannot be
fulfilled in an age of mechanical reproduction. Furthermore because Benjamin's notion
of aura already implies its own degeneration, it is classic nostalgia. Even when in the
19305 Benjamin had decided that film could be a new politically progressive art form,
he could not dispense entirely with a romantic yearning for an immediacy that was
supposed to exist prior to reproductive technologies. That same yearning is still
expressed (in what Benjamin regarded as a debased form) in the transparent style of
Hollywood film. By contrast, hypermediated representation in avant-garde film or
other media, which have no pretense of immediacy, is not nostalgic; it shows no regret
in making the viewer conscious of the process of representation and therefore the decay
of aura.18

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 JAY DAVID BOLTER, BLAIR MACINTYRE, MARIBETH GANDY, PETRA SCHWEITZER



  Two representational strategies existed in film in Benjamin's day and continu
 Various forms and styles of film, like other media forms, can be auratic or non auratic
 Although Benjamin argues that film is by nature reflective, we have already noted that
 he made an exception for the capitalist film industry - a very large exception, because
 in Benjamin's day the film industry (in Hollywood or Europc) accounted for most pog
 ular film, as it still does. Avant-garde film of the 19zos offered a critique of aura, and
 what it critiqued was the strategy of transparency of popular film forms.
   There are degrees and kinds of critique that filmmakers can offer. There is the oftca
playful critique of representational practice in Chaplin films: Benjamin argues that
Chaplin's fragmented body motions interpret "allegorically" the fragmentation that the
camera itself makes possible.19 Benjamin claims that dada is the high art (anti and
movement that anticipated the popular film of Chaplin, but dada's critique of the aura
of high art is far more radical than Chaplin's critique of the transparency of film
Although Chaplin's style may have hypermediated clements, at the core of his films
there remains an auratic sentimentality. Throughout its history film has offered a cri
tique of the decay of aura in other media while asserting its own ability to capture the
authentic. For cxample, the common practice of making film versions of "great litera
 ture" was an expression of both homage and critique. While acknowledging that these
 literary texts provided great stories, filmmakers were also suggesting that their films
 could retell these narratives in ways that made them more authentic, more accessible
 to a vast popular audience. For that audience, they were in effect reasserting, not
destroying, the aura of these works.
  The classic Hollywood film style was (and largely remains) a representational system
that diligently pursued the auratic, even if for Benjamin the result was a sham aura in
comparison with the aura of oil painting or sculpture of earlier centuries. Perhaps the first
major challenge to the aura of film came with television in the 195os. This new medium
implied that film could not achieve immediacy, because it lacked the key quality that tel
evision (of course) could provide: liveness. Although the two industries battled for their
share of audiences and cultural status in the 1950s, their relationship stabilized relatively
quickly, with each content to claim its own definition of immediacy (and aura).
  In recent decades, however, both popular film and especially television have been
increasingly willing to pursue strategies of hypermediacy as well as transparency. Mi
music videos are hypermediated. Romantic comedies and blockbuster fantasies (such as
Lordof the Rings) are largely transparent, but popular films can also incorporate the styles
oí music videos or games (Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and so
on) or can be intentionally self referential (The Matrix series). The recent genre of com
puter graphic animated films (such as the Toy Story and Shrek films) combines generally
realistic, three dimensional graphics and continuity editing with quotations and parodies
of various live action films (and earlier animated films in their own series). This comb
nation playfully calls into question the aura of live-action filmmaking. So called reality
TV° also manages to be transparent and hypermediated, self referential
at the same time. In so doing it remediates and diminishes the aura of both the television
soan opera and the film documentary. Contemporary popular media see no contradiction
in pursuing the auratic and the non auratic almost simultaneously; this eclectic a
ja perhaps a kor sharateristic of popular art and representation since Benjamin.
  Thus, aura has not definitively decayed in the age of mechanical an
                                                        BENJANINS CRISIS OF AUSA ASD DIGITAL NEDIA


 acy and therefore for auratic art remains strong. However, we can say that media forms
  throughout the 2oth century seem to be predicated on the possibility (the opportunity
 and the danger) of the decay of aura. Media forms oscillate between offering a non-
 auratic, reflective experience and reasserting the importance of immediacy and aura.
 The moment of decay never ends because each media form is constantly comparing
 itsclf with other older and newer forms. Media forms are constantly calling into ques-
 tion cach other's ability to represent the authentic, and these remediations raise the
 possibility of the decay of aura, the loss of authenticity of experience.
    Aura has been in a permanent crisis since the introduction of mechanical technolo
 gics. When Benjamin drew attention to this crisis, he seems to have assumed that it
 would be resolved in favor of a non-auratic, politically aware cinema of the future.
 Instead, the desire for immediacy and for auratic experience has paradoxically survived
 in the face of increasing levels of mediation that digital technology make possible. But
 this desire is now combined with a fascination with the processes of mediation that call
 immediacy into question. The permanence of the crisis has helped to determine the
 ways in which media experiences are now received and interpreted by viewers. In digi.
 tal media, and now in more traditional forms as well, aura has become a design paramo
 eter. Designers can decide whether to cast a certain experience as auratic or not. In films
 and television the choice of genre usually determines whether to aim for aura. In dig.
 tal media, because the genres are not as firmly established, cach design requires a sepa-
 rate decision. The presence or decay of aura is not, as Benjamin suggested, predeter.
 mined by the choice of media technology or by the dominant technologies of the time.


 1 A version of this essay been published as "New Medla and the l'ermanent Crisis of Aura,"
     Convergence, I, no. 12 (2000), pp. a -39. This current version was also dellvered at the confer.
     ence entitled "Medien-Begegnungen, Media Encounters, Rencontres des Médlas™, Bayreuth
    Universität, Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Languages and Literature (April 7.9).
    2005) and will be published in the proceedings of that conference.
2 The essay was originally published in 1931 as "Kleine Geschichte der Photographle:" For the
     German, see W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann, I.
     Schweppenhäuser, Vol. 11, 1 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1972-), pp. 368-385. For a summary and
     important analysis of this and the other key aura passages, see M. Stoessel, Aura. Das
      vergessene Menschliche: Zur Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (München Wien:
     Carl Hanser, 1983).
 3   W. Benjamin, "Kleine Geschichte der Photographic," in Gesammelte Schriften, up, cil., p. 39%.
 4   The Work of Art was first published in a French edition in 1935. then posthumously in two
     versions in German. For the German versions, see Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit.. Vol. 1, 2, pp.
     431-508. The English translation referred to here is W. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age
     of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), Pp. 287 251.
 5   Ivi, pp. 222-223.
 6   Ivi, pp. 232-237.
 7 W. Benjamin, "On Some Motives in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, op. cit. pp. 155-200. T
   essay was originally published in 1939 as "Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire". See
     Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., Vol. 1, 2, pp. 605-653.
 8   Ivi, p. 186.
 9   For the relationship to Jewish thought, see M. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience:

                                                                                                 168
   JAY CATS EOLTER, ELAUR MACINIVAL MARIEETH CANDY, FETRA SCH

        The Bice Flower in the Land of Technology." New German Critique, n
        ya See also M. Stocssel, op. cit.
   to The phrase (in both the kleine Geschichte and the Kunstwerk essay)
        Erscheinung einer Feme, so nah sic sein mag." The German word Erscheinung like is
        Erglish appearance." could refer to a psychological state (how something appca
        ject) or to an objective condition (how something "naturally" appcars). That ambiguity seems
        to reflect Benjamin's ambivalence toward the status of aura (in the mind or in the word
  1r For substantially different interpretations of Benjamin's concept of aura, see R. Kaulma
        "Aura Still, " October, no. 99 (Minter 2002). pp. 45 So and M. Hansen, op. cil
        Both seem to interpret aura as a kind of critical distance and would likely disagree with the
        close relationship that we draw betwcen aura and the desire for immediacy and autherting
        in art and popular entertainment. Both think that aura could sunrise in twchticth century
       film and poetry but for reasons very different from those that we suggest Kaufman argue
       for a kind of "critical aura," which Adorno and peshaps cien Benjamin Aelicred to he poss
       ble in modern art. Neither Kaufman nor Hansen discusses the aura of digital media.
  12 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." op. cit, p. a 31.
  13 Sec for example: T.B. Sheridan, "Musings on Telcpresence and Virtual Presencc," Presence, I
       no. a (1992), pp. 120-126; M. Lombard, T. Ditton. "Al the licart of 11 All: The Concept o
       Presence," Joural of Computer Mediated Communication, I, no. 3 (September 1995): B.
       Wilmer, M. Singer, "Measuring Presence in lirtual Envionments: A Presence
       Questionnaire." Presence, Ill, no. 7 (1998). rp. 225-24o. A comparative media approach to
       presence is provided by T. Marsh, Presence as Expericnce: Film Informing Ways of Staying
       There," Presence. V', no. 12 (October 2003). Up. 538:549.
 14 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remcdiation: (nderstanding New Media (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press,
    1999). Sec also J.D. Bolter, "Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy," Convergence. 1, no. k
       (Spring 2000).
 Is For essays that exemplify these debates, see A. Trachtenberg (ed.). Classic Essays in
       Photography (New Haven: Leete's Islands Books. 19So).
 16 M. Stoessel, op. cit, pp. is and 36. A similar point was made by B. Groys. "Die Geburt der Aura
       l'ariationen über ein Thema Walter Benjamins," Neue Zürcher Zeitung (November 11-14,
       2000).

 17 J:D. Bolter, R. Grusin, op. cit, pp. 21-44.
 18 Hansen takes a different view in explaining this passage and Benjamin's notion of how aura
    relates to experience on the one hand and film technology on the other. For her, a key aspect
       of aura is how it invests objects with their capacity to return our gaze. See M1. Hansen, op. cil.
    rp. 187 18S (and throughout the rest of her essay).
 19 Isi p. 203.




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