ABSTRACT
Although the latter half of the twentieth century has seen enormous technological changes that have had, and continue to have, a direct impact on the modes of experience and interpretation of cultural heritage, discussion of the impact of what were then the ‘new’ media (now perhaps better designated as ‘old’ media), primarily photography and film, was already well underway in the first half of the century. One of the most important of these discussions occurs in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay from 1936, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin 1969). In that essay Benjamin focuses on the particular form of cultural heritage that is the artwork, arguing that mechanical techniques of reproduction and re-presentation such as film and photography, but also advances in
printing, have had the effect of destroying what Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of the artwork – its character as a uniquely existing object. In this respect, one of the key points in Benjamin’s analysis concerns the spatio-temporal character of the changes associated with the new technologies at issue. Thus Benjamin writes that:
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.
