Boris Groys
From the image to the image file – and back.

The presence of digital video images in the museum prompts us to think about what it means for the art system that moving pictures are shown especially at this location and, in general, in a traditional exhibition space–independent of whether it is an analog film or a digital video. Within this context, I would like to examine in particular the problematic nature of digitalization, which applies not only to the video, but also to digital photography. Because the video image is both: digital and moving. For this reason, one can describe it best if one separates these two characteristics, as there are analog images which are also moving images (film), and digital images which are motionless (photographs). Now: When moving images are placed into a museum context, their perception is essentially determined by the expectations we generally associate with a visit to the museum–that means by the expectations that stem from the long, previous history of our contemplation of motionless images, be they paintings, photographs, sculptures, or ready-made objects. These are primarily expectations related to the duration of our contemplating such images.

In the traditional museum, the viewer–at least in the ideal case–has complete control over the duration of his or her contemplation: He can interrupt contemplation of a particular picture at any time to come back to it later and assume viewing it at the same point it was previously interrupted. In the period of time of the absence of the viewer, the motionless image remains identical to itself and for this reason does not elude repeated viewing. One could even maintain that the production of this continual self-identity of exhibited pictures represents the true task of the museal system as such. The overall effort of the storage, protection, and restoration of the images being "preserved" in the museum serves to maintain their identity–that means the unchangeability of their form, which should consistently be available to the returning attention of the visitor to the museum. One can certainly claim that this identity, produced through preservation in a museum, is an illusion–but as it determines the viewer's expectations, it is precisely this illusion that matters.

In this sense, the protecting, preserving production of the identity–understood as unchangeability, immovability– of the image over time actually makes up what we in our culture refer to as "high art." In our usual, 'normal' lives, time for contemplation is clearly dictated by life itself. With respect to life images, we do not possess autonomy or administrative power: We are only able to see what life shows us, and only as long as life does so. In life, we are always only accidental witnesses of certain events and certain images, whose duration we cannot control. All art therefore begins with the wish to hold on to a moment, to let it linger for a long time–the tendency is for an eternity. It is only then that the viewer has the endless time reserve he requires to determine the duration and rhythm of his viewing completely on his own. Thus the museum–and generally an exhibition space in which motionless images are exhibited–obtains its real justification for the most part from the fact that the viewer's autonomy–understood as his ability to administer the duration of his attention– is guaranteed by the system of museal storage and presentation.

However, the situation changes drastically with the introduction of moving images into the museum, as these begin to dictate the time needed to view them to the viewer–and to rob him of his usual autonomy. In our culture, we have two different models that allow us to gain control over time: The immobilization of the image in the museum, and the immobilization of the audience in the movie theater. Both models, however, fail when the moving images are transferred into the space of a museum. In this case, the images go on– but the audience also continues on. One does not remain sitting or standing for any length of time in an exhibition space, rather one retraces one's steps through the space again and again, remains standing in front of a picture for a while, moves closer or away from it, looks at it from different perspectives, and so on. The viewer's movement in the exhibition space cannot be arbitrarily stopped because it is constitutive for the functioning of perception within the art system. In addition, an attempt to force a visitor to watch all of the videos or films in an exhibition from beginning to end would be doomed to failure from the very start–the duration of the average museum visit is simply not long enough. Thus a video or film installation in a museum radically lifts the ban on movement, which determines viewing these images in the cinema system– images and the audience are permitted to move simultaneously.

It is obvious that this causes a situation to arise in which the contradictory expectations of a visit to a movie theater and a visit to a museum clearly conflict–sending the visitor to an installation into a state of doubt and helplessness. The visitor to an installation basically no longer knows what to do: Should he stop and watch the images moving before his eyes like in a movie theater, or should he, like in a museum, continue on in the confidence that over time, the moving images will not change as much as one fears they will? Both solutions are obviously unsatisfactory–actually, they are not real solutions at all. One is quickly forced to recognize, though, that there cannot be any adequate or satisfactory solutions at all in this new situation. Each individual decision to stop or to continue on remains an uneasy compromise–and later has to be revised time and again.

It is precisely this fundamental uncertainty that results when the movement of the images and the movement of the viewer occur simultaneously, though it creates the added aesthetic value of shifting moving images into the museum mentioned above. In the case of the video installation, a struggle arises between the viewer and the artist over the control of the duration of contemplation. Consequently, the duration of actual contemplation has to be continually renegotiated–and this can never result in complete comprehensibility of the images. Thus the aesthetic value of a media installation in a museum primarily consists in explicitly thematicizing incomprehensibility, uncertainty, the viewer's lack of control over the duration of his own attention in museum spaces, in which previously the illusion of complete comprehensibility prevailed. This is, by the way, not the notorious 'inexhaustibility' of the meaning of a work of art, i.e., the 'intellectual' inability of the viewer to completely fathom its meaning. Rather it is a purely physical, time-related inability to even grasp the material form of the work of art even prior to any possible interpretation. This inability is further aggravated by the increased speed at which moving images are currently able to be produced.

For the viewer, in former times the paramount investment in terms of work, time, and power required for the creation of a traditional work of art stood in an extremely favorable relation to the duration of consuming art. After the artist had to spend a long time and work hard on creating his work, the viewer was allowed to consume this work without effort and with one glance. This explains the traditional superiority of the consumer, the viewer, the collector over the artist-painter as a supplier of paintings which had to be produced through arduous physical labor. It was not until the introduction of photography and the ready-made method that the artist placed himself on the same level with the viewer in terms of temporal economy, as this also enables the artist to produce immediate images. But now the camera that produces the moving images can also record these images automatically, without the artist having to spend his time doing so. This gives the artist a clear time surplus: The viewer now has to spend more time viewing the images than the artist required for their production. And again: This is not an intentionally lengthened duration of contemplation that the viewer possibly needs to "understand" the image–as the viewer is completely in charge of the duration of conscious contemplation. Rather it is the time a viewer needs to even be able to watch a video or a film in its entirety–and which can absolutely exceed the duration of a customary visit to the museum. Thus at different levels of temporal economy, media installations force the viewer to make decisions with regard to his contemplation behavior which at the same time–at least this is the tendency–may prevent him from consummating the act of viewing.

The basic experience had by the viewer of a video installation is thus the experience of the non-identity of the exhibited work. Each time someone visits a video exhibition, he or she is potentially confronted with another clip from the same video, which means that the work is different each time–and at the same time partially eludes the viewer's eye, makes itself invisible. The non-identity of video images also presents itself at another, as it were, deeper level. Like a film, a video is initially produced as a copy. But can one say that all of the copies of one film are identical to each other? As long as a film is shown under the standardized conditions of a visit to the movie theater, one may perhaps say that yes, they are. However, the situation is fundamentally changed if the film is shown within the framework of a film installation in an exhibition space, because in this case, both the space as well as the duration of the presentation are explicitly thematicized. One begins to compare the film with other objects or works of art possibly found in the same exhibition space–paintings, photographs, texts, and so on. In the end, a copy begins to distinguish itself from another copy of the same film by the way in which it is shown, presented, curated. The explicit contextualization of the showing makes the enpropriation and thus the non-identity of the film or the video clear, which are often overlooked. However, the non-identity of the image manifests itself even more clearly in the case of the video–because of its digitality. The digital code of a video as such is invisible. And when it is made visible, for instance in a famous scene from the film Matrix,this code is radically different than the image that was recorded and stored with the aid of this code. Here the image begins to function as a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece as it is not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. But this means that a piece of music is essentially enpropriate, non-identical. Thus in addition, the video, as well as digital photography, make the image non-identical. In general, the self-identity of the image is an illusion which conceals a specific curatorial practice of presentation. The video image makes this kind of concealment structurally impossible. Here it becomes completely obvious that in order to be seen, the image is to be shown, presented, curated. Thus one may assume–and it is actually already happening–that the presentation of an image in the sense of an image file becoming an image will soon be just as innovative as a theater performance, for instance, can be innovative today in that little remains of the author's original script and in that it interprets the context of the piece in an entirely different way.

To a certain degree, this kind of strategy is even unavoidable, as the space in which videos circulate today is an extremely heterogeneous one. One can view videos with the aid of a video recorder, but also as a projection, on television, within the context of a video installation, on the monitor of a computer, on a cell phone, and so on. In all of these cases, the same video file looks different on the surface–not to mention the very different contexts within which they are shown. If one changes certain technical parameters, one also changes the image. And these kinds of changes are unavoidable because technology is constantly changing: hardware, software, monitors– simply everything. In this way, the image is also transformed with every new presentation. Can one perhaps preserve old technology so that the image remains self-identical? As Siegfried Krakauer remarked, and rightly so, preserved technology shifts the perception of a specific image from the image itself to the technical conditions under which it was produced and presented. Thus we are less interested in the subject in old photographs or the individual attitude of the photographer. What we primarily react to is the old-fashioned photographic technology that becomes apparent when we look at old photographs. The artist did not intend to produce this effect, however; he simply lacked the possibility of comparing his work with the products of later technological developments.

Thus the image itself may possibly be overlooked if it is reproduced using the original technology. And so the decision becomes understandable to transfer this image to new technological media, to new software and hardware, so that it may look fresh again, so that is it not interesting merely in retrospect, but rather appears to be a contemporary image. With this line of argumentation, however, one gets caught in the same dilemma out of which, as is generally known, contemporary theater is unable to come. Because no one knows what is better: to reveal the epoch or the individuality of the play during its performance. But it is unavoidable that every performance reveals one of the two–or even both.

Beyond this, today's technology thinks in terms of generations–we speak of computer generations, of generations of photographic and video equipment. But where there are generations, there are generation conflicts, Oedipal struggles. Anyone who attempts to transfer his or her old texts or images onto new software can experience the power of the Oedipus complex over current technology–many things are lost in the process, many things are destroyed, many things get lost in darkness, become blind. Every university professor knows what it means to convey traditional, selfidentical knowledge to the next generation of students–to transfer it into their brains. As soon as technology begins to think in generations, then it plainly and simply ceases to be a medium of identical reproduction, of preserving, stabilizing, storing. The biological metaphor says it all: Not only notorious life, but also technology, which supposedly opposes it because it is reliable, has become the medium of non-identity.

However, one can also use technical constraints productively–one can play with the technical quality of a digital image on all levels, including the material quality of the monitor or the projection surface, the external light, which as we know substantially changes the perception of a video image–not to mention that one can only fundamentally change the image through the context of its presentation. Thus each presentation of a digitalized image is a re-creation of the image. There is no such thing as a copy. In the world of digitalized images, we are dealing only with originals–that means only with original presentations. Digitalized music recordings can also be presented as originals, as manifested in the job of DJ (by the way, in the meantime there are also video disc jockeys, or VJs). Thus we are forced to radically rethink and redefine our notions of the fate of images in the age of their technical reproducibility as described by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

In this essay, Benjamin assumes the possibility of a perfect reproduction which no longer allows a material distinction between the original and a copy. Benjamin insists on this perfection time and again in various passages in his text. He speaks of mechanical reproduction as a "most perfect reproduction," which "may not touch the actual work of art."1 You see, Benjamin wants to imagine the most extreme possibility of absolute perfect mechanical reproduction, in which traditional art such as painting or sculpture become absolutely reproducible and thus begin to function under the same circumstances under which, for instance, photography or film function–i.e., under the conditions of the original distinguishability between original and copy. The question Benjamin poses is the following: Does the blotting out of the material distinction between original and copy also mean the blotting out of this distinction as such?

Benjamin answers this question with "no." The–at least potential–disappearance of any material distinction between original and copy does not blot out a different, invisible, but no less real distinction between the two: The original has an aura which the copy does not. For Benjamin, the aura is the relationship of the work of art to the place in which it happens to be–to its outer context. Thus for him, the distinction between original and copy is a topological one–and as such completely independent from the actual work of art. The original has a specific place, and it is through this special place that the original is etched into history as a unique object. The copy, in contrast, is virtual, placeless, ahistorical: From the very beginning, it manifests itself as potential multiplicity. Reproduction is delocation, deterritorialization; it transports the work of art into the networks of topologically indefinite circulation. Benjamin's formulations in this regard are well known: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." He goes on to write: "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity, and upon whose foundation for its part the notion of a tradition lies which has passed on this object as itself and identical up to this very day." The copy is therefore not false because it distinguishes itself as such from the original, but because it cannot be placed anywhere– and for this reason cannot be etched into a tradition or into history: "The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated"– and thus its status as an original as well.

Benjamin therefore conceives of the profane space of the circulation of photography, film or, let's say, video as a homogenous space in which the identity of the copy is in any case guaranteed. Because the "originals," which used to be housed in exclusive, protected, sacred places, are beginning to be copied true to the original and to circulate within the profane networks of the mass media, it is justified to say that profane space has become totally "mechanically reproducible," and the image definitely so and identical to itself. However, as we have seen, the reality of reproduction technology has in the meantime become a completely different one. Even though the digital version of an image, i.e., an image file, can be conceived of as circulating freely, this image file is not visually identical to the image itself. However, by manifesting this image file as an image, this image is likewise not identical to another presentation of the same image file. The topological homogeneity of the technological, mass-media space of digital reproducibility is an illusion. This space is de facto highly heterogeneous, because it includes very specific contexts as well as very different and not always compatible technologies.

One cannot even guarantee the necessary self-identity at the level of the image file. The central characteristic of the Internet consists precisely in the fact that in the Net, all symbols, words, and images are assigned an address, i.e., they are placed somewhere, territorialized, etched into a heterogeneous topology. In this sense, the Net makes an original out of every file, which perhaps at one time was a multiple copy. The Net performs a (re)orginalization of the copy by assigning it an Internet address. In this way, each file obtains a history, because it is dependent on the material conditions of its location. You see, in the Internet, the file is essentially dependent on the quality of the respective hardware, the server, the software, the browser, and so on. When these material conditions are transferred to other locations, individual files may be distorted, interpreted differently, or even made unreadable. They may also be attacked by certain computer viruses, accidentally deleted, or simply age and perish.

In this way, files in the Internet obtain their own story, which, like any story, is primarily one of possible or real loss. Indeed, such stories are told constantly: how certain files can no longer be read, how certain Web sites disappear, and so on. We are therefore already experiencing a return of the original and its story in the Internet, as it was described by Benjamin. The introduction of the Internet may be interpreted as a reaction to the unobstructed, virtual dissemination of copies, which was halted or even reversed through the territorialization of these copies in the Net.

What has been said applies even more so to film and video installations. Because the distinction between original and copy is solely topological and situative, this means that all of the objects placed into a museum are actually originals–also and especially when they otherwise circulate as copies. The installation makes copying reversible: it transforms a copy into an original. But all of modernity is actually organizing a complicated game of delocations and (re)locations, or deterritorializations and reterritorializations, or deauratizations and reauratizations. What distinguishes modernity from old times is not the loss of the aura, but solely the fact that in modernity, the originality of a work is not determined by way of its material quality, but through its aura, its context, its place in history. This becomes particularly apparent in the age of the digitalization of images is that today, we are not dealing with copies, but exclusively with originals, including the original presentation of the same image files, because, the space of the circulation of images is not homogenous, but heterogeneous–and so each new contextualization of the image is its originalization, its reinvention.

The presentation of images is the work of the curator–or of the artist, inasmuch as he or she is in charge of the curatorial activity and, for instance, assembles an installation. In comparison with the traditional painted image, but also with analog photography, the curator–at least apparently–played a subordinate role. It is modernity's conviction that an image has to speak for itself; the silent viewing of the image alone has to convince the viewer of its value. The exhibition context has to be reduced to a white wall and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative talk has to cease. Even the affirmative discourse on, or the advantageous presentation of an image are an insult. The curator's task was considered to be to make individual works of art look their best. In other words, the best curating was considered to be non-curating. From this perspective, the best solution was the suggestion to leave the work of art alone so that the viewer could confront it directly. By the way, not even the famous White Cube appears to be suited for this. The viewer is recommended to internally remove him- or herself fully from the spatial surroundings of the work of art and to submerge him- or herself in contemplation, completely losing oneself to the world. Now then, this means that the encounter with the work of art appears to be authentic and genuinely enpropriate beyond curation.

Now, all of this can obviously not apply to an image file. If an image file is not presented as an image, is not exhibited, then it also does not exist as an image. Digitalization manifests the general conditions of perceiving an image which would otherwise remain hidden and be overlooked. In his latest book, Profanations,Giorgio Agamben writes the following: "The image is a reality whose essence is appearance, visibility, surface."2 Unfortunately, this definition of an image's essence is not sufficient to actually guarantee the visibility of a concrete image, because a work of art cannot make itself present by virtue of its own definition and force the viewer to look at it. The work of art lacks the vitality, energy, and health to do so. The work of art initially appears to be ill, helpless–one has to lead the visitor to it like the visitor in a hospital is led to a patient's sickbed by a nurse. It is no coincidence that the word curator is etymologically related to the word cure. Curating is curing. Curating cures the helplessness of the image, its inability to show itself, its lack of visibility, which becomes particularly obvious through digitalization, as the image exists as an image file, but only in the state of its invisibility–in a state outside its essence, in a state of non-identity. The work of art always requires help from outside; it needs an exhibition, an act of showing, presentation; it needs a curator to get on its feet. The exhibition practice is the medicine that makes the image, which was originally ill, healthy, i.e., makes it present, easily visible.

Thus the effect of digitalization on the image is one that one could, in the spirit of Derrida, call 'pharmakon,' in that it both cures the image as well as makes it ill. Digitalization, i.e., the writing down, the transcription of the image, helps it to become reproducible, to circulate freely, to distribute itself. It is therefore medicine that cures the image of its inherent immovability. But at the same time, the image is infected with non-identity–with the necessity of presenting the image time and again and always dissimilar to itself, which means that supplementary curing, i.e., curating, is unavoidable. And it also becomes unavoidable to again ask the question of whether and how one can preserve an image in its original form, which in this case really no longer exists, or present it in a radically new way–and if new, then in which sense, and so on. Thus a space for reflection is opened up that is admittedly too vast to even begin to be able to describe here.