Analog in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Audiophilia, Semiaura and the Cultural Memory of the Phonograph
Anthony Curtis Adler · Knowledge Commons (Lakehead University) · 2012
"analyses the spectral presence of the phonograph within a digital omnipresence: its afterlife as a material echo of the past... Analyzing audiophilia--- basically a desire for material presence --- in the apparently disembodied age of the digital, Adler shows how the former is as it were animated as aura by the effects of the latter (infinite simulation). New media do not merely refashion or repurpose but in fact produce old media... As Adler argues, analog mediation (vinyl) becomes auratic in the Benjaminian sense of the term due to its dysfunctionality: its very limitations and imperfections that render it sens(i)bly material. This dysfunctionality only comes to the fore as a trace of a materiality in relation to the allegedly disembodied recordings and archivings on the net." From "Introduction," Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, p. 11-12.