Don’t Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns

Abstract

When Milo Hoffamn (Ryan Phillipe) first meets Gary Winston (Tim Robbins) in Antitrust (Dir. Peter Howitt, 2001), he immediately comments on a “digital canvas” on the wall of Winston’s office that changes copies of paintings with each person’s entry into the room. Winston, a Steve Jobs–style billionaire, is unbothered by Walter Benjamin’s statement that a copy of an art work loses its “unique existence in a particular place … that bears the mark of history to which the work has been subject” (103); instead, Winston casts aside any “authenticity” or “aura” (the “here and now of the artwork” [ibid., 103]), stripping out the ritual of the work and instead replacing it with its exhibition (ibid., 106). Nearly 70 years after Benjamin was writing, Winston’s digital canvas encompasses a process familiar to the digital native who is constantly sharing one digital “copy” of many different types of documents (textual, pictorial, video, etc., not just art work), retrieved from a server and brought back to his/her devices, that, once downloaded, s/he can then redistribute or display themselves. Van der Weel summarizes this by explaining “the digital document has, as it were, a built-in copying press, which manufactures a copy for any potential reader” (151). Yet, as David R. Koepsell’s in The Ontology of Cyberspace (2000) states, “the only differences between digitally encoded and expressed information, and that is which is encoded and expressed in analog form are difference in degree.