Distance and Aura

I liked the idea of use this title for my blog, about the idea of virtual, the lost of the object. Like Lev Manovich used for his text title. It seems to me a subject with much controversy that the art has found some time before and if we want to speak on digital art is essential.

We could start asking ourselves as Manoovich does, what is the human nature and what it is the technology? How can be delineated in the heat of the limit between both in century twenty? He explain analyzing Benjamin and Virilio, that they solve this problem in the same way. Both consider related nature and distance in space between the observer and the observed one; and they see the technologies like destroyers of the distance. As we see these two suppositions take to them to very interpret the new excellent technologies of their times of a similar way.

Benjamin begins now with that famous concept of aura: the unique presence of a work of art, an historical or natural object. We could think that an object must be near if we want to experience its aura but, paradoxically, Benjamin defines - in the work already mentioned aura "like the only phenomenon of a distance": "if while you rest in late of summer you follow with the glance the extension of mountains in the horizon or a branch that project their shade on you, experience the aura of those mountains and that branch". Similar, Benjamin writes, "the painter maintains in its work a natural distance of the reality". That respect by the distance common in both, perception of the nature and painting, is upset by the new technologies of reproduction of masses, specially the photography and the cinema. The camera, to Benjamin compares with a surgeon, "deeply penetrates in its weave [ of reality ]"; its camera focuses for "evoking to an object by its shell"

Virilio introduces the term "Small Optics" and "Big Optics", to emphasize the dramatic nature of this change. The Small Optics is based on the geometric perspective and shared by the human vision, the painting and the cinema. This implies to the distinctions between close and far, an object and a horizon on which the objects excel. The Big Optics occurs in the real time of electronic transmission of information, is "the active optics of time happening to the speed of light".

If the information from any place can be transmitted with the same rapidity, the fence concepts and far, horizon, distance and space will not return to have meaning (Therefore, if for Benjamin the industrial era moved to all the objects of its original place, for Virilio the postindustrial era eliminates the dimension of space completely). At least in principle, each Earth point is now instantaneously accessible from any other point of the planet. As a result of this, the Big Optics locks up in a claustrophobic world without no depth or horizon to us; the Earth becomes ours prison.

In the occidental thought the vision always has been understood and discussed in opposition to the tact; reason why, inevitably, the degradation of the vision (to use the term of Martin Jay) leads to the elevation of the tact .For example, we can be attempted to read the lack of distance characteristic of the tactile act like concession for a different relation between the subject and the object. Benjamin and Virilio block this line of apparently logical discussion when they express the potentially present aggression in this act. More than the tact of the understanding like a respectful and careful contact or a caress, they present/display like a breakage of arguments informal and aggressive.

This way about the connotations standard of vision and tact happen opposite for Benjamin and Virilio the distance guaranteed by the vision preserves the dawn of an object, its position in the world, whereas desire "to approach the things destroys the relations between the objects, finally eliminating the material order the complete one and leaving without meaning the slight knowledge of distance and space. Therefore, and if we are in discord with its reflections on the new technologies and even questioned its positioning in favor of the conservation of the natural order and the distance, the critic on the vision-tact is something that we would have to retain.

The bibliography of this text are mostly based in the Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Benjamin in 1936 and Big Optics, by Paul Virilio.