Walter Benjamin, film, and virtual distractions

Benjamin has a very special concept of "art" in mind, if I understand him, when he discusses what happens to works like paintings and performances when they are reproduced on photo, film, radio, and made available to large audiences. They lose some of their special, place-based qualities and sensualities; however, some forms of technological reproducibility, like that of film, allow for new forms of perception and tactility. Benjamin rather beautifully describes the camera's ability to magnify and diminish space, allowing us to see multiple angles, and imagine ourselves in different times and spaces or witness to movements and motions that we would never be able to "in real life", like extreme slow-motion or even the act of montage itself.

We can see the same movie in numerous locations, given the right equipment, but the movie won't be the same, really- the context might change, and the movie itself can be spliced and re-spliced ad infinitum. Alternately we might see numerous locations in the same movie, and interpret the space-time of the movie according to narrative conventions.

I especially like this quote: "For contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment."

I wonder what he would have to say about the fuzziness or poor quality of television, video, web cam communication, and digital video online created by amateurs (not saying that all amateurs post poor-quality videos.) Is art an imitation of life? Is life an imitation of art? Are we looking for "reality" or photographic realism in art? Or are we searching in art for new forms of experience and perception, redefined by "technology" and then by profiteering?

Finally, here's an excuse to put this on my blog: I used to watch Concrete TV, a mashup show on public access tv during my late nights in college. Here's a Boing Boing link. Be warned as some viewers might be offended. There are a lot of women in skimpy outfits, excerpts of car crashes and scenes from kung fu movies. I am so happy that public access television exists, as it is a "somewhat" curated form of audiovisual experimentation for mass public consumption, unlike websites that aggregate everything like YouTube. One could argue though that YouTube videos are curated into channels by individual users.

Also a friend of mine introduced me to this really strange thing called chatroulette that's been the subject of recent press conversation. I guess it relates to this current discussion of new forms of experience via technology. The Fast Company article that I have linked to compares one's experience on the site to "psychedelic performance art territory". I wouldn't advise going on the actual site (well, that's my scholarly advice but you can do whatever you damn well want); in short you can webcam with strangers as if you had ADHD. The point of it isn't to have any kind of extended conversation, but to casually, and quickly, (like literally five seconds at a time) browse through random people sitting in front of their webcams. Life in the age of real-life digital manipulation.