Reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanial Reproduction - Walter Benjamin

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”
Technical reproduction does not reserve authority.The authority of the original is not in reporduction/ nor as the reproducer’s authority. As it proclaims its neutrality, audience projects their own creation of the authority that is from their own.”

I am checking my email more than five times a hour if i happen to be in front of the computer. I can be in front of the computer all day long. bet other people will be the same. It is so familiar and part of my daily routine that I do not question anymore. It is like using water, gas and electricity that brought to my house, I watch, read and listen from the internet and also write,record, draw, publish and post my opinions in whatever form.

How convenient and how familiar it is that we gain our experience through this platform! On web, quality of reporduction is not only not less than the original, but it is mere THING/ PLATFORM that constantly being reproduced on so many monitors and being shared, shown and welcoming the dwellers without the boundary of time and space. If an original has an aura, there is none in this place since it is not rooted to such thing that can have one.

In His article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanial Reproduction - Walter Benjamin said, the mass desires to bring the things(,which includes aura) close spatially and humanly which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.

We are well adjusted dematerialized and new ground and vise versa.

Walter Benjamin comparison between mosaic in the cathedral verses painting and more to film, shows the the progression of accessibility. It was first accessible in specific time or to people in higher social status and art became movable as painting which only provided solely to individual level. However, Film made the mass to be emersed themselves in, with penetrating, revealing, stripping down the reality as he descibes the slowmotion revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” We are to realize more precise and unconscious level of our action and world to experience the connection with cosmic level of reality.

In architecture public is always the user and the one who perceive by touch and sight. Such appropriation of the everyday users’ cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. Not by attention but by habit, one can really experience and moreover, by this inexchangeable, uncompromising (tactile)continum can open different realm of even optical reception. Thus the work of art as becoming ritualistic surrounding without realizing is important.

In describing all things above, i read that he is talking about the coming of useful art, beautification(in non- coventional , non aesthetical but compelling way) of life itself which will prevent the danger of ‘art for art sake’- which brings the consummation; the war, ultimate destruction; that is us only being immature enough to incorporate technology as its organ bring. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets…… Mankind is now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

I am willingly shifting not only ‘in order not to go to the total destruction’ but we are emersed in work of art to to really adjust and know what it is that we are settling in.