Digital medium — memory or forgetting?

©Rose Borschovski aka Saskia Boddeke

Dewey cited in Brandi, 2006:2

An artwork, no matter how ancient and classical, is truly, and not merely potentially, an artwork when it lives in any individualized experience […].

Thus every artwork is recreated, regardless of its storage or material consistency. This aesthetic instance, which Cesare Brandi places above physical consistency, gains added importance in the cyberworld, especially since ubiquity and deterritorialization relegate the historical dimensions of time and place to a diffuse and ephemeral plane. On the other hand, the question of conserving or restoring an artwork is excluded by the immutable nature of its materiality. But might cyberspace pose questions analogous to those of organic nature?

If what remains of a digital artwork is a set of binary information dependent on a digital medium and protocol, one could say that the material consistency of the digital artwork is itself multiplied by an infinite number of replicas — as many as storage space allows. Plato, in the Meno dialogue, reduces memory to a technique of recollection from given information. This techne of recollection “requires a substance or material to work on and to give form to […]” (Caygill, 2006:53). Could cyberspace be a technique of recollection based on a global archive? Is the hierarchy associated with the archive dissolving? (Caygill, 2006).

©Rose Borschovski aka Saskia Boddeke

Against the promise of a new art of memory, we set ephemerality, contingency, or system failure. Against the reproducibility of the digital artwork, we set the spread of artistic forgeries.

The ease with which the “object” can be copied, manipulated, and multiplied confronts us with the danger of transferring monumentality from an organic process to a cognitive process. If that shift had already begun with the advent of the press and photography, cyberspace reopens the discussion about its potential as the future vault of our collective memory.

Bibliography

• Brandi, C. (2006). Teoria do Restauro. Amadora: Orion.
• Caygill, H. (2006). Meno e a Internet: entre a memória e o arquivo.
• Revista NADA, 8, 52-63.