Notes
The △2 written response reads the △1 material against Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” ([1935] 1969). It is organised through the three positions of the publication: the body’s position (repeating Geminus’s selection by cutting), the image’s position (an online archive of 39 comparisons) and the editor’s position (Benjamin’s account of film editing set against Geminus’s plates).
Benjamin measures the copy by what it lacks. By that measure my material was lost from the start: every page I cut was a print of a library scan of one copy of a printed edition. The question therefore becomes which relations are carried into a new situation, which are left behind, and who decides.
The writing ends by exposing a weakness in my own method: cutting, collage and archiving did not observe recontextualisation; they performed it again. It proposes a narrower case through the Design Museum’s display of Adrian Frutiger’s OCR-B (1968), where the museum label tells a linear story that Frutiger’s own account (1967) does not.
Key references
- Benjamin, W. ([1935] 1969) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Arendt, H. (ed.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 219–253.
- Frutiger, A. (1967) ‘OCR-B: A Standardized Character for Optical Recognition’, The Journal of Typographic Research, 1(2), pp. 137–146.
- Geminus, T. (1545) Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio. London.
- Vesalius, A. (1543) De humani corporis fabrica libri septem. Basel: Johannes Oporinus.