The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis:
1991-1995)
Douglas Davis
Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon. (1995), pp. 381-386.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%281995%2928%3A5%3C381%3ATWOAIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
Leonardo is currently published by The MIT Press.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org
Sat Oct 20 19:14:46 2007
The Work of A r t in the 

Age of Digital Reproduction 

( A n Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995)
Douglas Davis
T H E A U T H O R A R G U E S T H A T T H E W O R K O F A R T I N T H E A G E O F D I G I T A L
reproduction is physically and formally chameleon. There is no longer a clear conceptual distinction between original and
reproduction in virtually any medium. These two states, one pure and original, the other imitative and impure, are now
fictions. Images, sounds, and words are received, deconstructed, rearranged, and restored wherever they are seen, heard, and
stored. What has happened to the aura surrounding the original work of art, so prized by generations of collectors and
critics? Digitalization transfers this aura to the individuated copy. Artist and viewer perform together. The dead replica and
the living, authentic original are merging, like lovers entwined in mutual ecstasy.
I am adding myjinger toyour sentence.
You canJeel it as-you gpe now, on-your hand, can't-you?
-The Queen of Touch [I]
There is apolice that is brutal4 and rather ph_vsical3" repressive (but the
police are neverpure4 pbysicaJ and there are more sophisticatedpolice that are
more 'kultnral" or "spiritual," more noble. But evev institution destined to
enfbrce the law is apolice.
-Jacques Derrida [r]
The work of art in the age of digital reproduction is
physically and formally chameleon. There is no clear
conceptual distinction now between original and reproduction
in vhally any medium based in fh,electronics, or
telecommunications. As for the fine arts, the distinction is eroding,
if not finally collapsed. The fictions of "master" and "copyJ'
are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say
where one begins and the other ends. In one sense, Walter
Benjamin's proclamation of doom for the aura of originality,
authored early in this century, is finally confirmed by these events
[j]. In another sense, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far
beyond the boundaries of Benjamin's prophecy into the rich
realm of reproduction itself. Here in this realm, often mislabeled
''virtual" (it is actually a d e r reality, or RR), both oripality and
traditional truth (symbolized by the unadorned photographic
"fact'? are being enhanced, not betrayed.
But the work of art is not only changing its form and means
of delivery. By far its most provocative extension is into the intimate
bowels of our body, mind, and spirit. Beside this, all
changes, even the Internet, even our recent evolution into the
World Wide Web, pale. No single element of the messaging now
going on disturbs the guardians of traditional modernity more
than this single fact. X few years ago, Frederick Jameson, the
senior and singular Marxist art theorist of our day, finally accepted
~ldeoas the real heat of contemporary art. But he complained,
rightly, about its inability to foster communication of any land.
Yet now we see communicative networks ribbing the globe.
You and I, online, are strapped down-maybe-like Prometheus
by a web of incisive personal signals. I have no doubt that
Jameson and his colleagues will shortly proclaim that this new
and highly intensive method of linking is improper material for
high art. He won't be moved by "The Queen of Touch" (whose
real name I don't know and don't need), who reached out to me
one night when I was dunking about this piece. Art, in the traditional
realm, is a commodity that must pretend to universality. It
Douglas Davis, 80 \X'ooster Street #4, New York, NY 10012-4347, U.S.A. 

Email: dmd@echonyc.com. 

Recezved lZ.fzy I, lppj 

LEOKARDO, 1'01 28, No. 5 , pp 3 8 1 3 8 6 , 1995 381
must reach out to touch many fingers,
not just yours or mine.
Let us try to turn this objection back,
and not only here, in this essay, whch I
invite you to amend, refute, or enhance,
on paper or online. Let us act as well.
When InterActions, a recent exhibition of
mine, opened at the Lehman College Art
Gallery in New York's embattled Bronx,
I knew the WWVC' only from hearsay. As
the weeks went on, I embraced it. I
went to Geneva, where the Galerie St.
Gervais allowed me to communicate
with New Yorkers live over the Internet
in a performance. Later, Lehman College
Art Gallery imported the means not only
to create a V(%VC'VI' home page but also to
prompt direct responses from around
the world. We hung both Inte~4ctionsand
a new Web-style exhibition out on the
digital nerve system on December 8,
1994-they're still there [4]. And we
decided to invite the world to compose
its own sentence, perhaps the longest
ever written (as well as the first that is
truly multiple in authorship): thus its
title, The World? First Collaborative Sentence.
We opened the "sentence" to words,
photographs, video, graphics, WWVir
links, and sound sent via the Internet,
the World Wide Web, email, regular
mail, and personal visits (children visiting
the gallery in the Bronx, for example, are
handed paper, pencils, video cameras).
As I write now, more than half a
year later, the "sentence without a period"
stretches at least a city block, if not more.
At first we announced that when the
sentence reached 3 miles in length--or
February 1j , 1995 (whichever came
first)-we would stop it, temporarily, by
typing in a period. When I followed
through on our pledge in Warsaw, however,
I knew it was wrong to stop the
world-only God might take so final a
step. On the next day, we unlocked the
overnight conceptual gate. Now the
"life sentence" will go on as long as the
world continues to write and think.
You'll have to look hard in this collage
of images, sounds, and words at
any time, now or in the next century, to
find a single uniuersali~.Each fragment,
each image, each sound is unique, personal,
quivering with the sense of self.
My Queen of Touch-that is, the idea
she represents-is talilng over the world
mind and splitting it apart. This is precisely
what the work of art in the age of
digital reproduction is trying to tell us.
Can we understand and follow?
Infinite Forms
A word about the difference between
analog signals and what might be called
digital messages. Analog signals may be
compared to a wave breaking on a beach,
breaking over and over but never precisely
in the same form. That is why copying an
au&o signal or video signal in the past
always involved a loss in clarity. But digital
bits, compatible with the new generation
of tools that see, hear, speak, and compute,
march in precise, solderly- fashlon,
one figure after another. Trus means that
any video, au&o, or photographic work of
art can be endlessly reproduced without
degradation, always the same, always perfect.
The same is true for handmade
images or words that can be scannedthat
is, converted to dgital bits.
But more to the point, each of these
bits can be endlessly varied. My photographic
self-portrait can be turned
upside down, my ear can be chopped
off, the background can be changed
from black to gold-and t h s manipulation,
like Ted Turner's colorized blackand-white
film classics, will reproduce
in this manner forever, millions and
millions of times. My virtual self (that
is, a three-dimensional worhng model
of the author) can be transmitted even
now from New York to Lodz, Poland.
Needless to say, these modes of
address and interaction are charged with
powerful social and psychological implications.
In the end, they will touch each
of us, as artists, photographers, filmmakers,
video-makers, writers, readers,
viewers, voters, consumers, managers.
In a valuable early essay based upon
research and inten~iewswith humanists
and social scientists at Stanford in 1984,
Peter Lyman concluded that the cybernetic
premise upon which computer
programs were based led inevitably to
the centralization of control:
X computer 1s both an object, a machine,
and a series of "congealed" soc~alrelat~ons
which have been embedded withln the
object: it is a tool which makes the work of
writing more efficient; ~ t ssoftware contains
a cybernetic model of knowledge derived
from techn~calculture which does not
address the ethical and social issues which
have been part of the project of qualitative
soc~alresearch; ~t is embedded wthin an
everyday male culture of aggressive Images
of control which constitute a cultural barrier
for some users 151.
As prescient as Lyman was about one
direction that digtalism or politics might
still take-in league with Derrida-he
overlooked an equally powerful reverse
direction. So dtd Benjamin and George
Orwell. It seems clear as the century
unwinds that the prophets of technocrauc
control, frightened by Hitler, by Stahn,
by 1984, overlooked the capacq of an
educated elite (infused with the anarchtc
vitahty of contemporary fine and popular
cultures) to resist control naturally, without
conscious intent. Our prophets further
overlooked the sheer profit awaiting
those inventors and entrepreneurs able
to create sensitive, intuitive computer
programs, among them Hjpercard and
QuickTime; videoconferencing software
(just hitting the market as I write this)
like Sun's ShowMe and the primitive but
freewheeling CUSeeMe developed by
Cornell University; and the complex of
browers able to instantly access the
World Wide Web (such as Mosaic and
Netscape). Each of these programs in
one way or another unlocks for the individual
user a pluralist world of visual
imagery, transmitted on demand and by
personal choice.
These events empower imagination
rather than reason, as new tools placed
in the hands of people with open minds
always have, No hard-headed determinist
wuld have predicted, in the fifteenth
century, the evolution of the printed
word lnto concrete poetry or James
Joyce's L$rses. Marshall McLuhan h m self
dld not detect the comng of CNh,
C-Span, Erme Kovacs, Damd Letterman,
what we now call interactive video, or
indeed the World Wide Web itself. But
I do not doubt the potential for a ferocious
backlash, already in evidence at
this writing as the U.S. Congress considers
whether and how to purge the
382 Dni~,eJaiDar~s,The X o r k of 4rt In the 4ge of Dig~talReproduction
Internet of "indecent" messages.
Derrida's warning must be heeded: the
cultural police are with us again, refined
down to subtle harmonies. Our task is
to protect above all the higher, more
complex realms of speech and action.
In this quest we ought to be aided
by certain natural tendencies overlooked
by Lyman and his colleagues. The
instant access enjoyed by the Stanford
researchers decades ago can be seen as
a decentralizing movement, too. It leads
some of us to argue that all information
is potentially and morally free, that is,
beyond government control or individual
copyright. More than a decade after
Lyrnan, libraries increasingly offer not
stolid, imperious texts but fields of
knowledge on a terminal with which the
user can interact, revising and extending
the central text. Potentially, the reader is
now, as Lyrnan said in another context,
the author [b].
The handmade arts of writing, drawing,
and painting, normally presumed to
be beyond digtization, are also affected,
though in different ways. Now small
personal computers able to respond to
handwriting on a screen are available, at
once reclaiming the hand and subjecting
it to infinite replication. The moment a
painting can be scanned, the original
landscape, portrait, or color field can be
altered or cloned in the manner of a
vintage film. Already Ethan Allen, the
furniture chain, markets paintings reproduced
on canvas by laser-transfer technology
acting on dutifully scanned bits.
Only the unwary mind would deny
the further inevitability that a "neurasthenic"
computer, programmed by
humanoid codes (a fuzzy logic program,
for example, such as those already used
by the Japanese to run washng machines
and park cars) wdl shortly mate paintings
from first stroke to last. Or that the
rapid introduction of voice commands to
a host of computerized functions, in
cameras as well as word processsors, will
open up an incalcuable range of sound
structures, begnning with simple spoken
commands. Urszula Dudziak's wonderful
layered singing, using a digital tape
recorder that allows every h e of a song
to invade the next line, pointed in this
direction years ago. Virtual art is as certain
a fiture of the Digital Age as the
kind of virtual reality created by rnicroprocessed
programs that insert the user
in a totally artificial universe through the
medium of stereoscopic glasses and sensate
digital gloves. Thus clad, we can
walk, think, and feel the manmade world
in llrtually the same way we experience
the "real" world.
Vision and Revision
Yet more is at issue here than simply
reproducing or mimicktng the art of the
hand. The mind is at issue, too, most of
all in the perceptions it will now inexorably
bring to both art and life, to that
sacred line between "original" and
"fake." Often the forger--of Rembrandt,
of Vermeer, of classical Greek and
Roman art-argues that his work brings
pleasure in the same measure as the
copied master. A stylish gallery in New
York called True Fakes, Ltd., openly
indulges this thesis. On another level, all
post-Dada vanguard art has seemed to
defy the sanctity of the original. A u-uly
provocative artist like Elaine Stutevant,
whose Warhols and Rauschenbergs often
improve on the "originals," represents
the other end of ths pole, as does all
critical theory that emphasizes mind
rather than matter (or product).
The very act of deconstruction
implies that the breaking apart and rearranging
of the primal elements of art,
or of the sentence, has its own singular
value. Derrida's refiguring of the text is
simply one obvious example. Another,
the dominant mode in architecture of
the past decade, is the collaging together
of &sparate orders taken from discordant
centuries, as in hfichael Graves's proposal
to revise and enlarge the U'hitney
Museum, A third example is the digital
rearrangement of photographic reality
using a simple software program like
Adobe Photoshop, now common coin
for virtually every art student under z j .
As William Mitchell points out in his
recent book, The Reconjgured eye: Digital
Images and Photographic Truth, the early
years of this decade marked the moment
when the apparently truthful silver-based
photographic emulsion gave way to
the apparently deceptive computerprocessed
image [7]. Larry Friedman's
Shakespeare Project at Stanford, which
revises filmed or taped scenes, moving
sounds and lines (as digital soldiers)
from one pair of lips to another, is a
consequence of this moment, as is the
compact disc recently issued of Handel's
Messiah, providing no less than nine
"original" versions of the work, each
track instantly available to the ear while
a second track is playing.
By finding the means to transfer my
early video works from analog to digital
meha, I can contemplate rellsions on my
computer that wdl allow me to change
my mind, two decades later, about points
where I erred long ago. Th~sallows me to
produce a "post-original original." Not
long ago, using VideoFusion software,
I rellsed the last few seconds of The L J ~
iVine r1Iinutes, the conclusion to the frst
artist's satellite broadcast, which I co-produced
and performed with Joseph Beuys
and Nam June Paik for the opening of
documenta 6 in 1977. In the revision, I
crash through the TV screen and land in
your hands in a multiplicity of colors.
Digital video, the equivalent of digital
audiotape or DXT, blurs the line
between live and taped imagery. \X7ith a
Sony 8-mm camera, it is impossible to
see the difference between the live closeup
of a face and a taped close-up, even
after it has been transferred several
times between camera and VCR. In
h'ew York, the Blue Man Group, an
ensemble that has turned performance
art into highly accessible theater, plays
constantly on the ambiguity between
"live" and "taped" through its use of a
portable camera and a large, mural-sized
screen poised on the lip of the stage.
\%%en members of the group disappear
off-stage, the audience is never sure
whether their antics behind the curtain,
labeled "live" on the screen, are actually
live or taped.
In QuickTime movies sent over
computer networks and the phenomenon
of video conferencing, we see
yet further squeezing of now and then,
here and there, real and artificial, original
and manipulated. For example, the
act of digitizing live long-distance video
signals sent from Peking to Los Xngeles
allows us the luxury (or deceit) of distorting,
toning, and stretching verbal
Ilouglai Dai'rs, The Work of Art in the Age of D~givaiReproduction 383
and visual messages as they are filed
and stored on the computer terminal
[a]. The work of a primal fdmmaker like
Dziga Vertov could be receir-ed, deconstructed
or rearranged, then archived; later,
if we wished, the orignal signal could be
represented in the state first intended.
Compressing the video signal before
transmission currently allows an even
purer and cleaner signal to be sent over
a dedicated phone line than can be sent
via satellite or analog relay. This digitized
signal can be stored or directly
viewed on large, high-definition video
screens by entire classrooms or auditoriums,
providing visual access far beyond
the scale of the computer terminal
itself. Not far from my studio in New
York's Soho, at the Here Arts Center, I
can "dial" my colleagues in Moscow via
the PictureTel teleconferencing system;
the signal passes through a studio at
Brown University in Providence, Rhode
Island, that is linked to a Sputnik satellite
and is received in Moscow, at the
Institute of Space Research. When my
Moscow friends respond, the signal
reverses course, landing at Here for a
minimal sum. Here, as in many other
cases, There is Here.
Wdham _Wtchell's description of the
implications of digital photography apply
to all media transformed in this way:
The distinction between the causal processes
of the camera and the intentional process of
the artist can no longer be drawn so confidently
and categorically. . . . The traditional
origin narrative by which automatically
captured . . .images are made to seem casual
things of nature . . . recited . . . by Bazin,
Barthes and Berger, Sontag and Scruton-no
longer has the power to convlnce us.
The referent has come unstuck [9].
Persistence of Aura
I am not predicting that our culture
w d entirely embrace the purely technocratic
meaning of the digital world. The
great mistake of theoreticians in the past,
as we have seen, was to ignore resistance,
contradiction, inspired madness,
and primal human cussedness. Walter
Benjamin saw accurately the logical
implications of mechanical reproduction.
He ignored anulogc. He erred in assuming
that the world would bow to logic,
that the endless reproduction of a painting
or a photograph would diminish
what he called the "aura" of the orignal.
As Sidney Tillim once pointed out in
-4lyortml, nothing like ths has happened
[lo]. We still bid wildly at auctions and
employ armies of scholars to find the
"original," the "authentic" masterpiece.
Each fall, legions of artists, critics, and
collectors flood hungrily into galleries
and museums in pursuit of the new, or
at least the lllusion that somethng d@rent
is about to happen. As these legons
increase, spawned by universal education,
and as they turn to the computer terminal,
where networked information allows
contact with exhibitions and roices thousands
of miles away, the search turns
unirersal, eroding all lines between east
and west, north and south.
In h s quiet, quite increlble book The
Cultural Politics of E r l e ~ d qLife: Social
Cons~ctionism,Rhetoric, and Knowing $ the
Third find, John Shotter argues that identity,
"a unique f~st-person'I'," can only
be defined in terms of social interaction
[II]. At a moment when long-distance
discourse, friendship, love, and lust are
simpler than placing a telephone call was
in my youth (I refer of course to the
Internet "chat hes," public and private),
the status of the first person rises in
potential. My Queen of Touch could
have reached me from New Zealand or
New Guinea as easily as from Brooklyn.
On the surface, Shotter seems to align
htmself with the Social Constructionists,
engaged in framing an ideological position
as rigd as Marxist determinism used to
be or as supply-side economics was in the
early 1980s. But the fact is that he sees
this situation-of global discourse-as
open-ended, vergng on the third realm of
knowing. None of us can say where these
unprecedented links wdl end, or take us.
As I ha\-e worked to create a global
classroom deroted to long-distance art,
theater, and other media simultaneously
connecting students in Poland, Russia,
and the United States, all of those
involved have tried to frame flexible
goals. It is simply impossible to conceire
of the papers, dialogues, and joint performances
that will result from the
bonding of these disparate societies,
particularly now, when the swift ease of
email seems certain soon to include the
capacity to deli~rerboth hypertext and
exact renditions of rintage manuscriptions
[IZ]. Certainly we will end with
metaphors of unprecedented richness,
asymmetn-, and contradiction. Yet it is
only through such figures that we will
begin to refute the entrenched conviction
that the world mind is one mind.
Twentyfire years ago, in a prescient
essay, A. Michael Noll, an engineer then
conducting theoretical research for Bell
Telephone Laboratories, sensed the
contradicton- implications of the digital
computer: its very dexterity, he predicted,
would free many of us to indulge in
spiraling, multifaceted, even chaotic patterns,
not simple order or reproduction
[I j]. Now there is clear evidence of this
1
reversal, following hard upon the
world's refutation of Benjamin. Perhaps
every dominant mode, or style, is rejected
in the end. Even now, in an age
when copying is high art, when the simple
physical availability of vintage masterpieces
is dwindling, when postmodern
theories of assemblage and collage inform
our sensibhty, the concept of aura (if not
of its material realization) persists [141.
Surely it must now be further transformed,
simply to survive the technical
assault brought on by the dtgtal age. But
transformed into what? Dematerialized
idea? Symbol? Presence?
Of course these questions are impossible
to answer definitirely at a moment
when the digital era is dawning. They
are nonetheless pressing enough to warrant
the hazard of a guess, informed at
once by the elite culture, by vulgar
analogies in the popular culture, and by
the demographics of the century now
coming to a close. If the clutch of tendencies
rariously described as "poststructurahsm,"
"postmodernism," "posta~~ant-garde,"and
"appropriation" (together
with a wide rariety of post-painterly
tendencies prefixed by "neo") have any
single, unifying thread it is the discordant
power of unique interpretation, or
reinterpretation. \K'hen I deconstruct
meaning, I recreate it within a subjective
context that is inevitably unique, no
matter how ordered or predestined.
One night at the hstor Place Theater in
384 Doiq$as Dazis, The \York of Art In the Age of Dlgltai Reproduction
New York, chancing upon the Blue
Man Group's Tubes show for the third
time, I found myself saluted by name
on the electronic message screen flashing
in the middle of the proscenium
stage shortly after I sat down. Later I
learned that I had been detected by a
computer program through the use of
my credit card.
Granted, this is individuation
employed either as wit or whimsy. But
surely at hstor Place we can detect a
stubborn resistance to technology's supposedly
fatal inhumanity. Not long
afterwards, I participated in a virtual
reality panel at the Jack Tilton Gallery
in New York. At no point d ~ dI detect
from any of the artists present ormore
sipficantly-from the audience a
single gram of insensitivity to the phenomenological
danger posed by immersion
in a created world. When I
predicted in the question-and-answer
session that we would shortly see a call
in the art colleges for courses in "real
reality" to counterbalance the dictates
imposed by "virtual reality," the audience
agreed vociferously, surprising me.
But I shouldn't have been surprised,
nor should you. My wish, everyone's
wish is to find ways to increase the power
of our subjective presence in the other
reahty, precisely as the painter orders his
or her field. Jenny Holzer speaks directly
for this contrarian impulse: "I haven't
quite figured out how my worlds will
look," she writes about the potential of
virtual reahty. "One thing I do want to
explore is what happens when you fly
through a floor" [I 11.
It is not so much the signifiers in
each of these cases that matters as it is
the signified, or the punch line to the
joke, which is widely shared by our new
audience. This educated (yet democratized)
elite, mixing all classes, creeds,
and colors, is now immense in both
East and West. Gorbachev's perestroika
revolution rode on its back, an overwhelming
social fact ignored by our
media and political strategists. Without
hesitation, artist, audience, and publisher
in each of the incidents described above
embraced the individuating mark, not
the erasure of presence that accompanies
replication (the "copy"). It seems
to me a reversal of Benjamin and Orwell
to find digital technology so accomplished
at providing that individuating
mark. VideoFusion software allows me
exquisite variations in video copying:
now each issue of The Last Kine Minutes
can subtly reorder pace, pitch, even the
shades of red, blue, green, and white.
And it is not only the reader-user envisioned
by Peter Lyman who can alter
books printed out on library computers.
The proprietors of hand-held Newtons
and Sharp Wizards will soon be able to
call up entire videos and films as well as
books on their hand-held screens. They
will edit this information as they walk
along and transmit the results, probably via
a wireless Net, to friends and colleagues
across the city, the nation, the world.
What begins to emerge in the first
digital decade is a fine-grained sensitivity
to the unique qualities of every copy,
including the digitally processed photograph.
Four years ago in Russia I found
an old book in which the one-time owner
had glued six copies of a photograph
of a woman. Not one copy resembled
the others, save in its sharing of a single,
forgotten source. His work inspired
me to continue copying in his book, in
a myriad ways, images of Russian,
Polish, and American women who had
moved me, utihzing faxes, laser-jet printers,
and Stylewriter I1 printers as copying
modes. Similarly, for the past few
years Lucio Pozzi has been reperforming
h s original performances in New York
with the aid of the Dia Foundation,
among other sources, never conceding
the slightest indication to the audience
that they are old or revised versions of
an allegedly superior original. Each time
he performs, the work is immanent for
those in position to see it. The Roman
numerals beside so many of our popular
films (Back to the Future 14 are vulgar signifiers
of what I am trying to say: it is the
repetitive copy that is dead, not the on@.
The one and the other are not separate.
My last example is harder to explain
but central to my thesis. In 1971, not
knowing entirely what I meant, I proclaimed
in a manifesto for an early interactive
television performance (in which
viewers sang and shouted over telephone
lines, creating participative "music" for
our actions): Open a Channel to Every
hfind . . . Let Every Mind Communicate
with Every Other &find [I61. In the few
years that have passed since I f ~ s tpublished
the ideas in this essay you are
now reading, ule have witnessed a meteoric
rise in the use of both Internet and
World Wide Web. Though originally
developed in the United States and
Europe for scientific-military purposes,
the Web has been joined by artists, writers,
philosophers, inventors, salesmen,
and lovers all over the world. What is
already increasingly apparent-though
totally unforeseen as recently as 1992is
that the moment when finally "everyone
talks to everyone" is the moment
when the inner self is liberated rather
than chained.
Liberated for what purpose? Again I
argue that we cannot predict this. In a
1994 opinion piece published in the
Rocky iVlountain News, I pleaded with the
U.S. Congress, in considering legislation
to advance the building of the Internet,
to leave us alone [17]. Let anarchy thrive.
Let our voices be freed from control,
so that in interaction with each other,
new modes of thinking, art-mahng, and
deep personal touching can occur. I cited
another element of the message I
received from the Queen of Touch on
a chatline in the middle of the night:
"You may be the King of Words, but I
am the Queen of Touch. Here is my
hand . . . tighten your fingers" [18].
No one could have imagined this
fanciful personal exchange occuring
over the authoritarian computer as
recently as 1984, when I recall countless
voices warning against the consolidation
of police-state power in technocratic
hands. Nor could they have predicted
any lines as moving as those described
by Jon Katz, media critic of Rolling
Stone, in the ,LTew York Tzmes. Katz and
many others, have found a deepening
of personal exchanges on the Internet.
Separated from each other by space and
time, people find themselves able to say
what often cannot be said face to face.
Death is surely among these hitherto
unspeakable subjects, as Katz discovered
one night in early 1994 when he
and others on a chat line received the
following message:
Dougias L)UI,IS,The Work of Art In the Ape of Dtg~talReproduct~on j8>
LIy daughter has cancer. As some of you
know, she is 8. In all the world I never
conceived of all the sorrow I would feel at
learning th~s,all the horror at watching her
suffer so stolcal1~-through test after test.
There is not a lot of hope just a lot of
medicine. \Y'e are preparing ourselves for the
worst....I have decided to journal every day,
those of you who can bear to read it, Feel
free to answer, to offer sympathy,
encouragement or whatex-er else you are
feeling. Please feel free to check me if I am
too sorry for myself or for her [191.
For these and various other reasons,
the supposedly indomitable powers of
mindless collectivization and reproduction,
threatened throughout this century,
do not seem at its end to be in the
ascendant. Rather we respond to the
reverse, which poses its own dilemmas.
We reach through the electronic field of
ease that cushions us, like amniotic fluid,
through the field that allows us to
order, reform, and transmit almost any
sound, idea, or word, toward what lies
beyond, toward the transient and ineffable-a
breath, for example, a pause in
conversation, even the twisted grain of
a xeroxed photograph or videotape.
Here is where the aura resides-not in
the thing itself but in the originality of
the moment when we see, hear, read,
repeat, revise.
References and Notes
I. Queen of 'Touch, online message, Amer~ca
Onl.ine, Dec. I 5, 1994.
2. Jacques Derrida, "AfterUCTord," in Ihited, 

Inr. (1988). 

3. \Yalter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the 

Age of lviechanical Reproduction," in 

Illtiminations p e w York: Harcourt, Brace & 

World, 1968). 

4. Both Inter.4rtions and Ti,? 1Ybrldk Fir~t 

Collaboratzve Sentence can be found at the \Y'orld 

Wide Web address 

http://mathz40.1ehman.cuny.edu/art. 

5 . Peter Lyman. "Reading, \Yriting and Word
Processing: Toward a Phenomenology of the
Computer .\ge," Qualitative Jbriolqgy 7 j -89
(Spring-Summer, 1984)
6.Conversation wlth the author, May 1992.
7. William Mitchell, The Reconjiured Eje: Dz~ital
Images and Photographic 7kuth (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992) p. 18.
8. "Three Cultures at Issue," a teleconference
or global classroom planned for 1996, will
employ these methods. Managed by the Center
for Long-D~stanceArt and Culture at the
Lehman College Art Gallery, it will also
involve the Guggenheim Museum, New York;
the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the Russian
State Univesity of the Humanities; the Center
for Contemporary Art and B'arsaw University,
\ri'arsaw; Lodz Cnivers~tyand the Museum
Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and selected universities
in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. Its
vital supporters and advisers include Takeshi
Utsumi, Gary B'elz, Peter Kn~ght,Sun
hf~crosystems,Apple Computer, and the U.S.
Information Agency.
9. Ifitchell 171 p. 30. 

lo. Sidney Tillim, "Benjamin Rediscovered: 

The Work of Art After the Age of Mechanical 

Reproduction," Arforum 21, No. 5, 65-73 (Ifay 

1983).
11. John Shotter, The Cultural Politics o/Ez.ety+y
Lifi:Social Constrttctionzsm. Rhetoric, and Knowing of
the Third Kind (Toronto, Canada: University of
Toronto Press, 1993) p. 260.
12. See Julie Chao, "New Adobe Software
Conveys Documents in Cyberspace," Wall
StreetJournal, May 5, I 99
13. A. M~chaelNoll, "The Digital Computer as
a Creative Medium," IEF55 Jpectrxm 4, KO. 10,
89-9 5 (October, 1967).
14. Douglas Davis, The hfureum Tranfomed;
Deszkn and Glture in the Post-Pompidou Era (Kew
York, 1990) pp. 1?5-179.
15. Jenny Holzer, ''r\ctivit!- Can Re
Overrated," ~ l r 0 ~ g hthe I-ooking Glass: ilrtzsts'
First Enconnters with T,?rtual Reaiig, J. Cirlncione
and B. D'hmato, eds. p e w York: Sofnvorlds,
1992) P P 25-29.
16. The E/rctronic Hokkadzm, jointly sponsored
by the Corcoran Galery and \YTOP-TV in
Washington, D.C., funded by a small grant
from the Kational Endowment for the Arts.
The word "Hokkadim" is derived from the
ancient ,\frican word "Hochet," which
describes a ritual form of partic~pativemusic.
17. Douglas Dav~s,"The Net Works," Rocky
Afountain .Yeus (May 8, 1994).
18. Queen of Touch [I].
19. Jon Katz, "The Tales They Tell in
Cyberspace ,\re a Whole Other Story," .\>iv
York Times (January z j , 1994).
Douglas Davis is an artlst, educator, author,
and performer known 3s a pioneer in man)
fields of long-distance art. He has taught
advanced media at more than 25 unirers~t~es
and art colleges ~nternationallyand was awarded
a Pulbright fellowship for the fall of 1995
at the Russ~anState Unlrers~tyof the
Humanities, to teach a global classroom under
the ausplces of the new Center for LongDistance
Art and Culture at Lehman Collegc
in the Bronx, S e w York. His videotapes, performances,
films, pnnts, and drawings have
been exhibited at the Guggenheim >luseum,
the Whitney Museum of American Art, and
the Metropolitan hluseum of Art, S e w York,
and elsewhere around thc world. 131s
1'ntec-ictiot2s 1967--1~87,sponsored by Lehman
College Art Gallery, is on view on the \Yorld
\Tide \Y.eb. along with The IYorld? l i n t
Collahoratz~~e.Gntet2ce.
386 Dostgins Dauii, The F o r k of Art !n the Age of Digital Reproduction