Copies of copies of copies

This week’s readings and activities were right up my alley- ever since beginning my career transition to cultural heritage four years ago as a volunteer cataloging and digitizing local history, the question of whether or not surrogates are effective has been a pressing question to me. As someone who also has a hefty background in more technical image processing as a compositor, the bits and bytes we use to represent ourselves, our stories, and our society have certainly framed a lot of the ways that I approach cultural heritage. To create, in one form or another, is to abstract. But how many layers of abstraction and how many copies of copies can exist before they become something different altogether? It’s quite a philosophical topic, and Emma Stanford’s article “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates” did a fantastic job in laying out the points of interest in this discussion succinctly. 

Of course, no conversation about representation of an original is complete without at least acknowledging Walter Benjamin. The conversation of how accurate a surrogate could possibly be has its genesis in the advent of the publicly accessible camera; now that any person can capture an accurate image, what purpose does the original serve? Benjamin’s response (the concept of “aura”) points to the unique physicality of viewing originals, and nearly a hundred years later, we still unequivocally prefer to see the original, regardless of medium. Stanford, however, classifies this as a fundamental (if common) misunderstanding of what the purpose of a surrogate for an art object is. It is neither “a perfect substitute or […] a threat to the original’s authenticity”: It is a tool for delivering a singular perspective of a three-dimensional object, which comes with its own set of pros and cons. As we move beyond simple 2D recreations of objects and into the realm of more advanced digital surrogates (such as the parallax viewer tool created by the Victoria and Albert museum that we explored in class), these questions are pushed back to the forefront of the field. Whether or not more advanced surrogates will actually advance the study of art history seems to be the focus of exploration in this course.

Stanford also touches on something absolutely vital to the creation of advanced surrogates for long-term use: longevity. From an archival standpoint, we have been inundated since day one with the mantra “the archivist is not neutral,” and the same goes for collecting institutions of all kinds. What gets saved, acquired, processed, and made accessible is a slice of a slice of a slice of the overall experience of humanity. I’ve always appreciated Michelle Caswell’s quote, “Not all events ­are recorded; not all records ­are incorporated into archives; not all archives ­are used to tell stories; not all stories are used to write history. Power is implicated in each of these moments; which stories get told, which get for­got­ten, when, and by whom, is inextricably linked ­to the power to tell and to remain silent.” The introduction of power into the equation makes these choices of what and how to digitize that much more pressing and complex. When we take into account the resources necessary to maintain surrogates long-term, this problem further devolves into a case of the haves and have-nots. So, from step zero, there is a massive amount of push and pull from external sources that clouds our ability to answer the question of efficacy. Stafford also echoed a sentiment that anyone who has ever worked with digital objects of any kind has encountered; the tools are arbitrary, and it is the fundamental way of approaching a specific problem that ultimately determines how successful the result will be. 

In taking the time to explore what it takes to make a clean, high-quality, and accessible static digital image, we got to experience first-hand how some of these small decisions quickly shape the experience of the surrogate’s viewer. I brought in a book I purchased for an art history course nearly a decade ago titled The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 because I was kind of tickled by the idea of reproducing an image from an era focused on what it means to reproduce, re-contextualize, and re-appropriate an image. I scanned a page with one of Barbara Kruger’s untitled works from 1981 (Your gaze hits the side of my face) printed on it, and got to see firsthand what was lost in the interaction. For instance, when on exhibit, the work is placed in a frame painted bright red- her signature accent color for this era of her work. The frame’s vibrancy only partially made it into the image in the book, and when scanning the image in the book, the stark red border was only further diminished by my (somewhat rushed) cropping job. Frames are such a large part of presentation, and Stanford even describes them in the article as a context clue for the larger meaning of a work. Sure, it’s just a thin, red border, but red is such a prominent part of Kruger’s visual language and seeing it get smaller and smaller in this exercise made me a little sad! Some artifacting from the book’s printing was also included in the scan; there is an inherent graininess to the work, but this scan overly exaggerates its texture. I played around with frequency separation (a retouching method used often for skin in beauty photography) as a method of reducing texture, but ultimately found that separating the grain of the image from the grain of the book’s printing to be nearly impossible. 

I was, however, much more satisfied with the scans for two additional items that I brought in to compare how digitizing printed and original works differed. The postcard I brought, which was another printed material, had a similar result as far as added texture and graininess. In this case though, the artifacting present is much more in keeping with the nature of a cheaply printed souvenir photo postcard. I also know for a fact that many, many photos have been taken of this exact angle of downtown over the years (I’ve encountered many a Raleigh skyline postcard in my years with the City’s special collections), so the “aura” of the photo and of the original view feels less important in the digital reproduction from my perspective. I was also quite happy with how the scan of my linocut print (one of my very first) turned out. As a print, which is technically another type of “copy,” I feel like this surrogate comes pretty close to the original intent for the viewing of this work, and I felt a lot more confident being able to edit it myself to fit that view. I wonder if in today’s age, digital reproductions (from living artists, at least) are best obtained from the artist themselves? I think if artists were included in the determination of a “particular interpretation” of their work, as Stanford describes, it would be more accurate; the idea of digital surrogates suddenly becomes much more feasible for artists currently working.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–251. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Caswell, Michelle. “Archiving the unspeakable : Silence, memory, and the photographic record in Cambodia.” University of Wisconsin Press. 2014
Stanford, Emma. “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, 1st ed., edited by Kathryn Brown. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505188-19.