The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Whitney Davis and Linda Fitzgerald
The Digital and the Duplicate in Art History
The presenters are a professional art historian and a university administrator supervising a visual resources collection, both working in an academic department of art history that is confronting typical questions of crossing the "digital divide." If digital images are available in online databases, should slides of them be scanned? If picture books in an art history library have been fully scanned, can the books be removed from the library, even deaccessioned or sold? What about the reproduction and presentation of digital images themselves? Questions like these tend to be addressed primarily by considering digital images as reproductions of original artifacts, adequate or not as the case might be relatie to other technologies of reproduction (e.g., prints, photographs, or slides). But the presentation emphasizes that we must also consider their status as duplicates of themselves. A photograph, slide, or scan reproduces the original artwork more or less adequately, but it also reproduces itself more or less adequately—and can be manipulated to do so.
In the past, this was a pressing question. If a book in the art library containing essential illustrations went missing, it had to be replaced (a "duplicate" had to be found); if slides began to fall apart, they had to be rebound (or duplicated from the original). Oddly, however, many approaches to digital images of artworks assume that the problem of duplication has been mitigated, even that it has disappeared-- that one of the advantages of digital images is that they can be infinitely (re)iterated at relatively negligible cost and remain perfectly alike, whatever the quality of their reproduction of the prototype. If the quality is poor, in fact, the digital mediation allows them to be "fixed" (e.g., color correction used to enhance scans) and even "improved" (e.g., "photoshopping" in order to remove distractions present in the original). At least notionally, digital mediation enables perfect reproduction in infinite duplication; many decisions about goals, costs, and standards assume this.
The presentation questions this approach. Logically or mathematically it may be true, but technically and visually it is limited. First, is it correct that digital images deliver better and wider control over processes of duplication than earlier technologies used to mediate images of artworks? Variation in the projection of one digital image-file from one context to another is possibly just as great as variation in the variation of photographic prints produced from the same negative or displayed in different galleries. Second, are there reasons to preserve (rather than try to overcome) phenomena of duplication in visible chains of reproduction in art history--differences not only from artwork to photograph to digital image but also between photographs digital images)? Because the manipulation of images becomes ever more easy in their digital mediations, it may be a crucial task of critical thinking to be maximally alert to duplicative activity, especially when images are specifically proposed as "reproductions" of an original (e.g., the way an artwork or a person "really looks"). Third, digital mediation may be changing our very standards of what counts as "the same" or "different" in the experience of an image of something, its "reproduction." How do we preserve an awareness of other regimes of duplication-- regimes within which many artworks were (re)produced in the past?
In regimes of the digital mediation of images, has the duplicate overtaken the reproduction? Using digital technologies, it is notionally possible to duplicate an image through a vast field of possibilities ranging from the production of mediations that are virtually indiscernible from the prototype to mediations that are visibly disjunct from the prototype along well-defined axes of variation, all of which can be converted into one another (and into other images) in quick and easy ways. The presentation advocates that much can be learned from experimenting with practices across this entire field, kept visible as such, as opposed to sticking with narrowly defined criteria for adequacy of reproduction in relation to the putative primacy of originals artworks and original perceptual experiences.