Abstract
When Milo Hoffamn (Ryan Phillipe) first meets Gary Winston (Tim Robbins) in Antitrust (Dir. Peter Howitt, 2001), he immediately comments on a “digital canvas” on the wall of Winston’s office that changes copies of paintings with each person’s entry into the room. Winston, a Steve Jobs–style billionaire, is unbothered by Walter Benjamin’s statement that a copy of an art work loses its “unique existence in a particular place … that bears the mark of history to which the work has been subject” (103); instead, Winston casts aside any “authenticity” or “aura” (the “here and now of the artwork” [ibid., 103]), stripping out the ritual of the work and instead replacing it with its exhibition (ibid., 106). Nearly 70 years after Benjamin was writing, Winston’s digital canvas encompasses a process familiar to the digital native who is constantly sharing one digital “copy” of many different types of documents (textual, pictorial, video, etc., not just art work), retrieved from a server and brought back to his/her devices, that, once downloaded, s/he can then redistribute or display themselves. Van der Weel summarizes this by explaining “the digital document has, as it were, a built-in copying press, which manufactures a copy for any potential reader” (151). Yet, as David R. Koepsell’s in The Ontology of Cyberspace (2000) states, “the only differences between digitally encoded and expressed information, and that is which is encoded and expressed in analog form are difference in degree.
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Notes
While I don’t specifically use them, I found Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)
Lawrence L essig’s Free Culture (New York: Penguin Books, 2004)
Simon Reynolds’ Retromania (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011) very helpful.
Because Total Recall and Blade Runner don’t really reflect Internet usage, I didn’t go very far in-depth with my analysis. I did however enjoy Alison Lansberg’s Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and found it useful in forming the arguments of this chapter.
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© 2014 Aaron Tucker
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Tucker, A. (2014). Don’t Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns. In: Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386694_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386694_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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