Digital Authenticity

The Cultural Logic of Remediation

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When, in 1951, Theodor Adorno wrote of the 'total interconnectedness of the Culture Industry' (1996: 206), he was referring to the manner in which elements of artistic culture, in his case film, related to the everyday practices of culture - the 'meanings people construct and share' (Lewis, 2002: 3). His words, however, seem equally applicable to another trend in the dissemination of cultural capital; that of remediation, and its composite parts, immediacy and hypermediacy, especially in relation to its implications in context of the cultural practices associated with any given medium. Despite the apparent advantages of remediation, with regards to the ease with which it allows many to access previously unreachable media, it neglects to take into account these cultural practices, whatever they may be, replacing them instead with the convenience and reliability of technological reproduction. Thus, rather than operating as an artistic statement in its own right, it can be argued that a remediated product must instead function first and foremost as part of the logic of late capitalism.

An apt example of this cultural trend, particularly in light of Adorno's own views on new technologies and their relation with his concepts of culture and art, is presented by the 2009 iPhone application Hipstamatic, and its ability to take photographs using the phone's own digital camera, but digitally alter them to replicate the aesthetics of obsolete or obscure technology through a user interface that visually bases itself on the technology it is aiming to replicate. In addition to this, the app provides the user with the option to upload photographs to various social networks, and purchase prints from an online store.

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Hipstamatic in Action

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As can be seen, Hipstamatic offers an almost complete view of how immediacy and hypermediacy combine to provide a sense of remediation. Bolter and Grusin argue that immediacy involves 'experience without mediation' (2000: 22-23), or, in other words, an experience in which the viewer or consumer is unaware of the medium. This is present in Hipstamatic's faithful renditions of photographs that, despite being taken digitally, have the appearance of older productions, perhaps taken with a lomograph or polaroid. When printed out, or viewed on a screen of high enough quality, the product is, aesthetically, essentially identical to one taken with technology decades old. The digital medium is forgotten in exchange for an analogue experience; as the product's own tagline tells us, 'Digital Photography never looked so Analog' (sic).

Hypermediacy, on the other hand, functions in a contradictory manner. Rather than hide the medium, it instead emphasizes it, bringing the user 'repeatedly . . . back into contact with the interface' (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 33). Instead of the homogeneity of immediacy, hypermediacy, in the words of William J. Mitchell, 'privileges fragmentation, indeterminancy and heterogeneity' (Bolter and Grusin, 2000:31). This can also be seen within the Hipstamatic application, with its numerous links to social networking sites and online stores, as well as the app itself functioning within the iPhone's own OS, perhaps the latest advance in hypermediacy's obsession with windowed, heterogeneous space.

Brining these concepts together provides the basic logic of remediation: 'the representation of one medium within another' (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 45). The Hipstamatic combines the immediacy of aesthetic reproduction with the hypermediacy of its own function within the digital mediascape, ostensibly in order to facilitate the dissemination of various media within one larger medium. However, once it is analysed not only as an element of digital technology centred on communication, but also as an element of digital technology that results in artistic expression, it instead only highlights the distinction between a remediated production and the authentic artefact itself.

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In order to examine Hipstamatic not simply as a medium devoid of ideology, but as an artistic tool, and its subsequent political implications, the works of three theorists, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, are particularly pertinent. In his work on the art of photography Camera Lucida, Barthes investigates the various connotations associated with the medium, presenting an argument that a photograph's power comes from the system of values that the viewer places around it; thus he is 'unable to believe in lifelike photographs' (2000: 20) in the sense that they do not exist merely as physical images or representations.

Rather, for Barthes, a photograph is divided into two distinct areas, the studium and the punctum, with the former representing the cultural, linguistic and political associations of a photograph, such as context, lighting and frame, and the latter instead denoting the 'prick' that one feels when viewing images that have personal significance removed from cultural influence - Barthes' book is essentially a eulogy for his mother, for he perceives the punctum in photographs of her where others would merely experience the studium. It is this latter area of photography that Hipstamatic is able to replicate in its remediated form, for the punctum is entirely reliant on personal reaction, not on the technical and cultural specifications of the image itself.

However, given the studium represents 'application to a thing' and is participated in 'culturally' (2000: 26), and is therefore intimately linked to the processes surrounding photography itself, surely the aesthetic reproduction provided by Hipstamatic lacks the ability to provide the viewer with this sense of cultural recognition, for it bypasses the very processes that allow it broader appeal. Rather than require the photographer to take into account the lighting of his shot, it is instead digitally altered once the photograph is taken; replacing the time and timing needed to use older cameras, Hipstamatic photos are never more than a second away; the pressure to make the one shot count with mind to conserving film; countless can be taken and one selected; hours of darkroom work developing and preserving image is superseded by the ability to view before printing, and to then produce exact physical copies of the digital image. The authenticity of photography, rooted in 'the principle of adventure' that surrounds its practices (Barthes, 2000: 19), is sacrificed for the ease and emptiness of remediated reproduction.

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The idea that remediation provides empty aesthetic masquerading as authentic cultural capital ties in with Walter Benjamin's work in his seminal 1935 essay 'The Work of Art in the Technical Age of its Reproduction', in which he presents an argument on the 'aura' of art - 'a highly sensitive core . . . its authenticity' (2007: 61-62) - and its depreciation when faced with seemingly limitless mechanical reproduction; 'what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura' (62). By reducing the practices and signs associated with older photography to a set of digital sequences and automated functions Hipstamatic eliminates the aura of various methods of photography in exchange for allowing their reproduction by virtue of its hypermediacy. If, as Benjamin argues, 'the uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition', then the application sacrifices this by amputating the traditional aspects of photography - its studium - in favour of convenience and, through this, consumerism.

Remediation, by annexing an aesthetic from the artistic tradition to which it belongs, removes itself from the realms of artistic endeavour and instead places it firmly within the realms of the theories of another critic, Fredric Jameson. Arguing that, within a postmodern world, every position from that framework is 'necessarily an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism' (1991: 3), Jameson presents a case that art is now driven by consumerism, with postmodernity merely functioning as the 'logic of late capitalism'. Taking its cues from Adorno's theory of the Culture Industry, that is, the concept that mass culture and media has led to the commodification of culture itself - 'the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms' (Adorno, 1991: 99) - Jameson's work presents an argument implying that the intrinsic value of artistic endeavour has been overruled by the need to function within the paradigm of late capitalism. Hipstamatic combines Jameson's theory that the postmodern world is obsessed with 'nostalgia . . . and nostalgia for nostalgia' (Jameson, 1991: 156), with the commodification of not only the 'art' that it produces, but also its own digital existence - the user is able to purchase different cases for their phone; cases that are viewed on screen as part of the remediation process, and do not exist in reality - to ensure its relevance in society, not through a pursuit of authenticity, but rather a pastiche of it.

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Remediation may push the boundaries of reproduction, and result in an aesthetic verisimilitude that cannot be faulted by the naked eye. It may give access to obscure forms of production with ease and fluency that can only be achieved with digital technology, and give these to the masses rather than the few. It may preserve dying methods of communication within the amber of its automated potential. It can never, however, provide a substitute for authenticity. The immediate visual components of photographs taken with Hipstamatic may, for a moment, seem synonymous with the original forms from which they take their cues, but, devoid of the studium of traditional photography, and absent the aura that art requires, they will never fulfil the same requirement. That is not to say that they are invalid as photographs, but rather it is essential to acknowledge their place not simply within the scheme of photography, but more importantly, within late capitalism itself, for it is only through their bond with the superstructure of multinational capitalism that they are able to take meaning.

In a sense, the remediated product, in this case the photographs taken with Hipstamatic, are to photographic art what Hearst Castle, the bloated mansion built by William Randolph Hearst in Central California - a pastiche of seemingly every movement in 'high art' from the dawn of Western Civilisation - is to Versailles. On the surface both fulfil the same function, but they will forever be separated by authenticity and tradition.

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Reference List

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 1991

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life trans. E.F. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1996

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000

Benjamin, Walter. 'The Work of Art in the Technical Age of its Reproduction' (Third Version) The Cultural Studies Reader (3rd Edition) ed. Simon During, London: Routledge, 2007: 59-80

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 'Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation' Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000: 22-50

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991

Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage, 2002