Reproduction Technology
Design, as an industrial reproduction, does not keep an unchanging and unique meaning as an isolated object, but rather always has a meaning in relation to the other objects, people, and things that surround it, and thus its meaning changes as the context changes.
Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was the first to theoretically clarify the situation-dependent nature of industrial products. Benjamin argued that the machines involved in expression, such as the photographic machine and the phonograph, do not produce simply degraded copies (Bild) of the original, but technical reproductions, Abbild, that detach (ab) the nature of just copies. According to Benjamin, technical reproduction erases the “aura,” the authentic atmosphere of the original that holds “worship value,” and constitutes a new value, “exhibition value,” by placing the copy in a new context. For example, a record of an orchestra’s performance is not a degraded copy of the live performance. By being played (and displayed) on a gramophone in a bedroom, the record provides the listener with a new experience of listening to an orchestra while sleeping in his or her room, an experience that should be called original in itself. Depending on the context in which they function, the technological reproductions provided by industrial mass production can constitute infinitely different realities, that is, “here and now” actualities.
Sony’s Walkman, for example, brings music into the context of urban life in various ways, changing the message of the same music in different ways each time. At the same time, it also rewrites the message of the familiar scenery on the way to work. The portable music terminal is an exhibition device that infinitely changes and disperses the actuality (inside and outside, of music and the city).
In the 20th century, workers (proletariat) were also standardized parts mass-produced in schools and factories, which should be called replicas themselves. Benjamin believes that when the impersonal fragments produced to be part of the factory machines acquire a new meaning in combination with the machines and other people, the meanings of the humans who serve as the machines are also mutually renewed, and each is reborn as a new existence. When such an “exhibition” is made, power based on authority is transformed. Benjamin calls this the “politics” by exhibition value.
An industrial product is designed as a technical reproduction of a prototype in large numbers. However, these replicated devices are open to an as-yet-unseen “interplay” with other machines, and depending on the way they are combined, they can have different meanings and functions. Benjamin calls such a project, or a machine open to the possibility of editing, a “second machine,” in contrast to the “first machine,” which aims to control and dominate nature and people. Benjamin’s thinking has strongly functioned as a basic theory for media art and the makers’ movement and is still considered to be active in design in terms of rethinking the relationship between industrial products and humans in terms of editing operations.
(KOGA Toru)
Related Classes
- Design Futures Course, Philosophy of Design
- Design Futures Course, Design Aesthetics
References
- Walter Benjamin(1939:1983), Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Gesammelte Schriften Band I, Suhrkamp.