Art, Aura, and Admiration in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Summary Walter Benjamin famously argued that the mass public of the twentieth century would necessarily correlate with a newly politicized art. But the world has changed considerably since Benjamin’s article was written, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer already were assessing less than a decade later. It is the purpose of this article to examine how the aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, though frequently still invoked, have lost some of their immediate relevance. The anti-establishment phase of the 60s, compounded by a pronounced taste for irony, rendered aura and exhibition outmoded values, while on the other hand, more recently, price escalation in the art market and digitization have made certain of the Frankfurt school arguments more pertinent than ever. Taking as examples Goldsworthy and Kentridge, this essay argues that a deliberate loosening of the artist’s control over both medium and reception displaces the warmed-over religious responses endorsed by Benjamin, positing instead increased intellectual agency on the part of viewers, whose identity as a mass public has become newly complicated.

Processing Algorithm of Irregular Table Image in Tobacco Package Based on Dual-coding Difference of Gaussians Method

Objectives: Currently, in a large number of print-out report documents from tobacco package, there exist irregular phenomena such as discontinuous vertical lines, misplaced frame lines and multi-page tables. Thus, the existing table recognition algorithm cannot be adopted to perform digital identification. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a table image processing algorithm based on the dual-coding difference of Gaussians iterative clustering. Firstly, the method of local regional sub-block is used to the skew correction threshold to conduct image correction. Secondly, the corrected images are coded by rows and columns, and 2D image features are transformed into 1D image features. Thirdly, the Gaussian differenced operation is adopted to obtain effective characteristic matrices that are stable and easily distinguishable. Then the iterative clustering analysis is performed to obtain the feature values of effective frame lines. Fourthly, after finishing the tasks, such as the table positioning, inner structure reconstruction, and text information identification, the dichotomy judgmentsof the integrity of multi-page tablesare realized according to the local pixel features. Finally, the text information inside the local regions and the reconstructed regions are merged, and the digital reproduction of the multi-page tables is realized. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, an experiment in the sample set containing 12,840 table images with different resolutionsis carried out. The average detection accuracies of table positioning, table cell reconstructionand multi-page incompleteness are 98.95%, 99.80%, and 95.85%, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is simple and effective, and can accomplish the digital reproduction of irregular tables.

Imperceptible–Visible Watermarking to Information Security Tasks in Color Imaging

Digital image watermarking algorithms have been designed for intellectual property, copyright protection, medical data management, and other related fields; furthermore, in real-world applications such as official documents, banknotes, etc., they are used to deliver additional information about the documents’ authenticity. In this context, the imperceptible–visible watermarking (IVW) algorithm has been designed as a digital reproduction of the real-world watermarks. This paper presents a new improved IVW algorithm for copyright protection that can deliver additional information to the image content. The proposed algorithm is divided into two stages: in the embedding stage, a human visual system-based strategy is used to embed an owner logotype or a 2D quick response (QR) code as a watermark into a color image, maintaining a high watermark imperceptibility and low image-quality degradation. In the exhibition, a new histogram binarization function approach is introduced to exhibit any watermark with enough quality to be recognized or decoded by any application, which is focused on reading QR codes. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can embed one or more watermark patterns, maintaining the high imperceptibility and visual quality of the embedded and the exhibited watermark. The performance evaluation shows that the method overcomes several drawbacks reported in previous algorithms, including geometric and image processing attacks such as JPEG and JPEG2000.

Digitizing Snow:

This thesis looks at the current state of digital reproductions for contemporary photographic artworks—how they are made, the purposes they serve, and how they are disseminated by cultural institutions. Using four selected photographic installation artworks by Canadian artist Michael Snow, this research examines how museums pursue reproductions of artworks that are installative by design and possess elements that are not easily reproducible like sound or the use of time. The reproduction process and terminology used at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada (two institutions with significant collections of Snow’s artworks) are both examined, as well as how digital reproduction is currently discussed and theorized by museum professionals and digital specialists. Reproductions are used for outreach, research, advertising, and conservation, but between texts and institutions alike there lacks consistent terminologies and purposes for reproductions due to the dearth of research into this type of imagery.

Digitizing Snow:

This thesis looks at the current state of digital reproductions for contemporary photographic artworks—how they are made, the purposes they serve, and how they are disseminated by cultural institutions. Using four selected photographic installation artworks by Canadian artist Michael Snow, this research examines how museums pursue reproductions of artworks that are installative by design and possess elements that are not easily reproducible like sound or the use of time. The reproduction process and terminology used at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada (two institutions with significant collections of Snow’s artworks) are both examined, as well as how digital reproduction is currently discussed and theorized by museum professionals and digital specialists. Reproductions are used for outreach, research, advertising, and conservation, but between texts and institutions alike there lacks consistent terminologies and purposes for reproductions due to the dearth of research into this type of imagery.

Aura dalam Reproduksi Digital: Membaca Ulang Walter Benjamin

<p><em>Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1939), has revealed the fundamental changes of modern work of art affected by its mechanical reproduction. Camera, tape recorder, print machine have turned the work of art to be mass consumption, autonomous from tradition and ritual, and it has now a political function. According to Benjamin all of those new technologies have faded up the aura since the work of art lost its authenticity and its uniqueness. We are in the different era than Benjamin’s because nowadays digital reproduction by means of the internet ends the need of medium for the work of art, multiply and spread it very rapidly. The author comments on Benjamin’s analysis and applies it to discuss the ontological, epistemological, and axiological issues of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction. He argues that in the digital age the work of art will be still auratic if it reveals ‘the extraordinary’ in the experience of our humanity.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p><strong>Key words</strong>:<em> aura, hyperpolitization, work of art, medium, attention, digital reproduction </em></p>