I find the constant need and “desire” of humans to reproduce not only art but also reality to be an intriguing observation. Walter Benjamin in his paper The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction discusses at great length the rise of techniques and technologies that are used in creating numerous reproductions as to meet “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly.” This desire as well as the advances of technology continues on even in our “contemporary” age. One thing Benjamin fails to mention in his paper, however; is that even original art is many times a reproduction of our world around us. While we as humans have a desire to bring pieces of art “closer” through reproduction and mass marketing, we also have a desire to bring our world “closer”. We build technologies that will then help us in achieving capturing a moment in time in the realest sense possible.

Painting a picture was one of the first methods for reproducing reality. People would paint a picture to capture a landscape, a person, or a moment. Painting a picture was used in similar fashion as photography has also been used for capturing reality. Walter Benjamin comments on how an original and “authentic” painting has “a presence in time and space, a unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” He argues that because we can use various techniques to date a painting these “authentic” paintings are therefore more connected to the time in which they were created. This brings up an interesting point when he shifts his discussion to that of photography. We are now left to question if photography is less “authentic” and maybe even less artful then a painting, because it cannot be branded in time and can be reproduced infinitely. At this point I would comment that a painting is just as much of an expression of reality as a photograph, and is still only a method for capturing and reproducing our reality. Just because we can approximate the time in which an original painting was created does not mean that it serves any greater of a purpose to photography.

He also argues that an original piece of art has an “aura” that cannot be recreated in a reproduction. Again he fails to mention how the art is also lacking the “aura” of the reality that it was reproducing. It is still very much one person’s perspective at attempting to recreate, reproduce, and bring “closer” our natural and physical world.

Most recently, with the introduction of digital technology we have moved into an age where we recreate reality with algorithms and physical models of the world. What is interesting about using this technological direction in attempts at reproducing our environment is that it is almost solely based on logic and arithmetic. In 1945 Dr. Bush had exclaimed in his paper As We May Think, “If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world.” Yet this is exactly what we have done with digital technology. The one element that paintings and photography have that digital technology seems to starkly lack is the artist themselves. The painter or the photographer has a unique perspective on the time and place in which they are capturing their image. No matter if the art is “authentic” or reproduced the presence of the artist is felt by the perspective in which they specifically chose to document the reality around them. In the digital world the human element has been mostly forgot and time and presence fail to exist. In the digital world the algorithms become the artist.

With the advent of digital technology, we have been able to create and reproduce reality to a level where it has even started replacing our actual reality. Virtual reality is the new hot topic as we attempt to place people into 3Dimensional representations of the world, however; we forget to recognize that virtual reality has been in effect ever since the advancement of digital technology. We have created virtual worlds, communities, and profiles using digital technology. People build social media profiles that represent a virtual self, an image that is then perceived an interpreted by others as a realistic visual of that person’s self. We have created sound and visuals that people interpret as reality. In our attempts at bringing reality “closer” we have begun to create new realities.

While our desire to reproduce the things we see around us is still in question it can be said, with great certainty, that through this desire we have evolved not only the means for reproduction but also our own perceptions and ways of interaction. Through our striving to understand and recreate reality we have broken the laws of time and space. What this means for the advancement of future perceptions and art can only be speculated. But it is with no argument that these advances in technology will change the movement and direction of humanity as a whole.