Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism

Abstract

This paper explores the immersive character of digital media art in relation to aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It asks what contribution Benjamin and Adorno have to offer media art criticism. In particular, it seeks to understand how their different approaches enable us to critique the “virtual” experience of an interactive digital installation. Benjamin is famous for his complex, non-deterministic relation to technological media. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), he offers what has become the twentieth-century’s most influential interpretation of both the threats and opportunities posed by the mechanical media of film and photography. Theorists of digital media have seized Benjamin’s ideas, such as the notion that the work of art comes to look more and more like the work of art meant for reproduction. In contrast to Benjamin’s ambiguous embrace of the spectator’s new critical agency brought about by mechanical media, Adorno held a more antagonistic relationship to technology, and a more redemptive role for art. Adorno understood art as a reservoir of critique – ascribing to art a capacity to challenge the instrumental rationality and repressive authority of capitalism.

In this paper I am interested in locating Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ideas in relation to the experience of immersion characteristic of digital media installations. While immersion has a long history in Western aesthetics (as traced by Oliver Grau), in the face of new media artworks that require the active involvement of the viewer – in which the work is constantly updating and transforming itself – we are left with the “interface” in place of the art object. For example, photo-based art in the digital era increasingly becomes a spatialised interface for embodied viewer interaction. Its “flexible data set” (Mark Hansen) may be contrasted to the traditional photographic image’s static inscription of a moment in time. The temporal experience of new media art also involves a process of spatialisation that challenges the tradition of aesthetic distance. As Oliver Grau points out in his book Virtual Art, “in certain seemingly living virtual environments a fragile, central element of art comes under threat: the recipient’s act of distancing, which is essential for producing the “aesthetic image space” and enabling critical reflection.

In an unusual turn of phrase in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: “Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. . . . Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. . . . This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are” (175–6, emphasis added). Adorno’s notion of “contemplative immersion” appears paradoxical, suggesting both a distance and a nearness. In this paper I explore Adorno’s paradoxical phrase in light of Benjamin’s understanding of aura, distraction and the spectator’s critical agency. At a time when art criticism is widely held to be in crisis – even without reference to the changes of production, transmission and reception that media art bring – this paper examines the unrealised potential of Benjamin and Adorno to media art criticism.