Authors:

 Lovejoy, Margot.

Title:

 Negotiating the Dialectics of "Aura" and "Speaking Between" in Interactive Media

Keywords:

 aura; interactive media; agent; dialectic; negotiation
click here to download the full paper

Abstract:

 Does aura exist in digital art works? How is meaning negotiated? First discussed in depth 70 years ago by Walter Benjamin in relation to the loss of an artwork's aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, aura refers to a work's "cult" origin, its source, its uniqueness --in the sense of its power to "return our gaze" and to provide an experience which may result in insight or meaning at the level at which feeling emerges into consciousness.

While many theorists argue that Benjamin's position of the "decline of the aura" means a disappearance of it, others (Didi-Huberman; Bhabha) argue that "decline" does not mean its death and refer to the development of Benjamin's thinking about aura in several of his other writings as art's phenomenon of remaining "uncompleted and always open". Benjamin also refers to the "dialectical image" as existing in a "noisy labyrinth of mediations" as a form of negotiation --as a "breach between experience and knowledge".

Aura seen in this context of his thinking allows it to be discussed in relation to the interactive artwork. Here the artist while still making the work, gives up total control (as its author or producer) and becomes rather its agent, overlapping with the intrusive one of the spectator/participant as mediatory agent in a "speaking between". The openness of an interactive work can be discussed in another of Benjamin's descriptions of aura as not the source, "but a whirlpool in the river of becoming that pulls the merging matter into its own rhythm". This is a form of connection to contention, a place for seeking on "the cusp of creation" --the inititiation of communication. It is this very "speaking between", the social relations in the positioning of both agents that can clarify the effect of interactive forms. This place potentially allows for transformation, a way of intervening in the forest of signs, of mediating and interpreting today's uneasy space and time relations and what may seem to be the contradictory realities of the human condition in terms of the values and complexities of post modernity.
Margot Lovejoy is Professor of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase and author of "Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in  the Age of Electronic Media" (1997). She is recipient of a 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1994 Arts International Grant in India.
Exhibited internationally, she has had many solo exhibitions in and around New York including those at the Alternative Museum; P.S.#1 Contemporary Art Center; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art; Queens Museum of Art; Neuberger Museum of Art; and the Islip Museum, Her work is in the
collection of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art; the Getty Institute; the Neuberger Museum. Apart from authoring numerous essays in various journals and catalogs, she has also published several visual books:"Labyrinth" in 1991and in 1995 "The Book of Plagues","paradoxic mutations"
and "manifestations".