However much we resist the digital tide, we're all caught up in its undertow. Who knows what he would have made of the digital age in all its dazzling possibility, its endless capacity for distraction as well as its thus far underused capacity for inculcating knowledge rather than disseminating information. He did not mourn the loss of this aura in art instead, he mused on what might arrive in its place and what kinds of collective experience might replace the solitary appreciation of a piece. The aura was to do with its uniqueness, its originality and, thus, its authenticity. In 1936, philosopher Walter Benjamin published his influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in which he suggested that a painting possessed a certain "aura" which a photograph or a film did not. Again, it is the hands-on approach that matters, the care and attention needed in both the preparation and execution of a work. She calls up the ghosts in these old, supposedly obsolete machines, then exorcises them with a gleeful conceptual flourish.įor Daniel Grendon, a photographer who uses vintage film cameras, and Claire Askew, who composes poetry on a typewriter rather than a laptop, the process of creating art seems as important as the end result. She customises mechanical musical hardware – gramophones, shellac records – then plays them to create live sound that allows for, and thrives on, the accidental: distortion, repetition, amplified crackles, rumbles and echoes. "It's not about the era," insists Durham, "more the quality of the equipment made."įor Durham, and his rockabilly group, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis, though, authenticity is all: the sound of the recording matching the cut of the period clothes, the curve of a vintage guitar, the propulsive thump that only a stand-up bass can produce.įor artist Naomi Kashiwagi, old technologies are simply a means to new and surprising ends. In the age of Pro-Tools, where every miscue, dropped beat and fluffed syllable can be corrected digitally, musician Lewis Durham, perhaps the most obsessive champion of all things analogue, has constructed a recording studio in which a resurrected Elvis would feel at ease. What also unites these four is a willingness to slow down, to run counter to the furious momentum of digitised contemporary culture, its speed and its pursuit of sanitised perfection – of sound, image and format. Today, though, our lives are so taken up with tweeting, blogging, browsing and networking that the time it takes to master a trade or a musical instrument, or read a discursive book like Sennett's, is time many of us think we can no longer afford. Instead of constant distraction, he celebrates modes of creativity that involve slowness, attentiveness and contemplation. In his book The Craftsman, American thinker Richard Sennett warns that we are in danger of losing ourselves if we turn our backs on the learnt skills and craftsmanship that helped give our lives meaning. It values the hand-made, the detailed and the patiently skilful over the instantly upgradeable and the disposable. The work of these artists is born of a dissatisfaction with digital culture's obsession with the new, the next, the instant. Nowness is everything, reflection seems old fashioned opinion is dominant scholarship and expertise seem scarcely to matter. Today, for instance, there is a creeping anxiety about the ways in which the internet is rewiring our brains and, some experts have argued, making us less literate and less able to concentrate for long periods on a single subject. In 1970, sociologist Alvin Toffler coined the phrase "futureshock" to describe a psychological state for those faced with "too much change in too short a period of time".
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