Returning to Benjamin

“In the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin raised the question of the relationship between art and the dominant representation of technology of his time: photography and cinema. To return to this essay today, in the spirit in which it was written, is to ask the same question about the hegemonic representation of technology in our time: the digital. Benjamin found that the medium of photography and film had dissolved the auratic quality of art. Digital technology has dissolved the very category of “medium”. »

Walter Benjamin's cultural criticism essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction became a "classic" text, resonating throughout the 20th century and beyond. In this succinct and pointed new essay, artist and writer Victor Burgin rereads Benjamin's 1935 text, to craft a new argument that the camera today is deeply embedded in what is not visible.