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The Art Of Reproduction Highlights The Pitfalls Of Digital Reproduction

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas seek to highlight the equivocality of the web by showing how reproductions of famous artworks create disparities.

In this age of digital reproductions where an artwork is just a Google away, a few fingers’ taps can bring us virtual versions of humanity’s vast artistic heritage. While this is an obvious benefit for students and art lovers in general, it also fosters more than a hint of Baudrillardian confusion. Let’s say a photo that is itself a copy of a physical object is copied again as an image and put on the web as code and then digitally reproduced. What it begets is a headache-inducing Escherian simulacra inside a virtual house of mirrors. Or something. Of course, this is similar for the printed form of a photo or painting, but the web allows for endless copying just from a right (or ctrl) click. It’s a good thing for bloggers, but as data-artists Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, who run the site HINT.FM, point out, if you type a famous artwork into the Google image search you’ll get a variety of different results, with a vast range of differing palettes.

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To investigate these discrepancies further and turn those disparities into works of art themselves, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas have created The Art Of Reproduction. The project is an application that takes the copies of famous artworks found on the web and, with “a nod to David Hockney,” creates a mosaic by reconstructing them using custom software into a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy—the result forms “a tapestry of beautiful half-truths.” In the slideshow above are some of the compilations they created—fragmentary pieces that show the ambiguity that the endless sea of information that the web churns up can create, where the truth might occasionally wash up but we can’t be sure of it when we see it.

If there was ever a case for why the web could never replace the experience of seeing works of art in person, this is definitely it, as the creators of the project smartly articulate on their blog. For as much as the web is democratizing access to the arts, at the end of the day, it’s still just a meager stand-in for the real deal.

Images courtesy of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas