After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity

Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, February, 2021

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132752
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author Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer)
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.
Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer)
author_sort Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer)
collection MIT
description Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, February, 2021
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spelling mit-1721.1/1327522021-10-07T03:14:43Z After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity Authorship, automation, authenticity Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture Architecture. Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, February, 2021 Cataloged from the official pdf of thesis. Page 124 blank Includes bibliographical references (page 123). Walter Benjamin wrote in his seminal 1935 essay, "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art"--an essay that narrowly defines art and the craft of art up until that moment as something that is rooted in site specificity, ritual, uniqueness and non-reproducibility. This conception of art and artistic production fails to acknowledge the networks of transmission, transfer, and transformation that have always existed in parallel with the migration of objects, people and tools circulating the world throughout history. Almost a century after Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction, we have entered the digital, the post-digital, the automated, while at times have been nostalgic for the mechanical and the hand-made. That being said, the anxiety surrounding the Aura has in many ways not faded. We still bid wildly at auctions, flock into galleries in pursuit of the new or go on pilgrimages to architectural sites and museums to see and experience the original "in person." We also employ armies of scholars or dealers to find or authenticate the "original". In After Art, David Joselit asks for an expansion of the definition of art to "embrace heterogeneous configurations of relationships or links," freeing art from belonging to any particular time, space or medium, but rather as Pierre Huyghe says, "a dynamic chain that passes through different formats." This thesis attempts to document and utilize these dynamic chains through acts of copying using contemporary tools and conditions such as outsourcing and open sourcing. In experiments in outsourcing, I decided to digitally reproduce ornate, luxurious, objects valued for their rarity in order to make them more easily reproducible. In experiments in tools for copying, I designed a machine by utilizing an open source, anonymous, catalog of parts to imitate expired mechanical copying devices. by Kailin J. Jones. M. Arch. M.Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture 2021-10-06T19:57:20Z 2021-10-06T19:57:20Z 2021 2021 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132752 1265046728 eng MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 124 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Architecture.
Jones, Kailin J. (Kailin Jenifer)
After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title_full After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title_fullStr After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title_full_unstemmed After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title_short After aura : authorship, automation, authenticity
title_sort after aura authorship automation authenticity
topic Architecture.
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132752
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