Mick Jongeling
A generation of humans are now so-called “Digital Natives”, growing up in the Internet age, with the ability to navigate the virtual space as well as the physical being almost second nature to them. The modern generation’s lives are documented digitally, starting on their parents’ digital maps and continuing in their own archives. These archives are carefully curated to
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represent the user as a persona; mirroring or eliminating several aspects from the reality of physical life. Once the representation is transcoded and uploaded to the non-space of the Internet, the persona is lifted from materiality and the corresponding decay of its physicality. It is this promise that entices humans to digitise their material selves and preserve their image and memory in the form of bytes. Their representation may be saved from the linear timeline of materiality and its corresponding decay, however it becomes exposed to the nature of the digital.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Everything that is digital is by definition interactive. The evolution of post-production applications allow the user to adjust previously static images freely, working with adjustment layers, resulting in copies of the original in the folk-archives on the Internet. The Internet offers quantity, aiming to serve every user equally and providing them with the information they request,
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going through the myriad options within the physical infrastructure to deliver information. Within the network, the image compression algorithms of the Internet freely reproduce and distribute data and store the reproductions at multiple servers. This process is called ‘deduplication’. Each reproduction is unique: the compression has rendered an exact replication with independent data.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
The Internet transfers these replecations to the user’s hardware, adapting to the resolution of the software and being presented as an adaptation to the user. Deduplication happens within milliseconds and gives users no indication of the complexity of the sequence of actions that was needed to deliver the reproduction to their screen.
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The evolution of cookie-based browsing, where the apparatus predicts the prefered images that the audience would like to see, has turned the cyberspace into a continuously transforming non-space. Ominous images travel through the entire infrastructure of the Internet, going through reading software, all altering data and deduplicating the image.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
This process is systematic and controlled as an algorithm is written to follow a predetermined command and it will never produce more copies that it is commanded to. However, with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence it can be questioned what the future of image storage will mean for our personal data if the apparatus will be given more freedom to predict, create and reproduce files and images.
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On today’s web, Artificial Intelligence is not implemented enough to realize this future. However, there is already a very active intelligence within the Internet that intervenes with the system: the human user.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Every user that has access to the Internet automatically becomes a disruptor in the apparatus. The user navigates a hypermedia and jumps from one page to another, with offline influences adding to the unpredictability of this behaviour. An hour spent on the Internet by a single user can result in thousands of files being transferred from one datacenter to another.
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Users can create new pages or add content to an existing platform. Their individual input is the instigator for the growth of the information on the Internet. It is the latter that has resulted in the emergence of social media platforms, a predefined system that holds and displays the input of its users in an uniform style. The invitation to share information has resulted in a development of how much information is incessantly being added; humans in contemporary society have used social media to create as much information every two days as was created since the beginning of mankind until 2003. Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Social media pages and user-generated websites are carefully ‘curated’, resulting in a new archetype: the Ego-Commercialist. By distributing and decontextualizing previously created work, the intention of this archetype is to attract the Internet’s majority of flâneurs to their platform, being with capitalistic intentions or enlarging their digital identity.
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By transcending their own cyberspace and transferring into the ones occupied by others, the Ego-Commercialist aims to ripple through the Internet. The Ego-Commercialist uses the promise of user connectivity to infiltrate the digital space of other users, something that in the early days of computing was seen as a potential threat. The computer virus, a scripted code that would infect other computers, caused the development of virtual walls, protecting users from each other and at the same time, giving users the experience that they have control over their own virtual territory. Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Virality is breaking through these walls; infiltrating media, platforms and systems has become a signal of success for the Ego-Commercialist. With every piece of information uploaded on the Internet becoming an potential marketing opportunity, the audience is working as producer of content and viewer of content.
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They have become an essential tool in the curation of the archive that will define our age and inform future generations that will study our society. Together with the seemingly immortality of digital profiles, it has lead to a psychological effect on human life: never before has mankind been so obsessed with our own mortality.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
One of the traditional occupations of human life was to transcend the mortality of this life, to offer future generations genuineness to study and learn from. What makes us genuine, authentic, is what has shaped and defined us from our creation that can be handed down to the historical witness; it is what makes us feel unique, what makes us feel as a singular individual. This genuineness, together with our context, gives us the allure of singularity: The feeling that we are all unique and therefore, able to create experiences like none other. Walter Benjamin defines this allure as ‘Aura’. The Aura belonging to a singularity is what draws spectators, but only with the right context. Classical Greek statues of the Gods are objects of worship in their respective time, only to be seen as a threat and a false idol in the Dark ages.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
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To offer a house of context that breaks free of the historical and cultural context that rule the place it inhabits, museum institutions were founded. The institutionalized preservation of the museum promises a neutral space where the work of art is freed from any negative connotations. The curator, a designated employee within the museum, plays a
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dubious role in this: Their main task is to conserve the work of art and to create an exhibition that enriches the audience of the work of art’s context; however, the curator also has authority over the relevance and importance of the works of art to the greater public.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism, together with other artists and writers of the avant-garde, questioned the museum: Why are certain things privileged? Why does society care about them and invest money in their conservation and restoration, while other things are delivered to the destructive power of time and nobody cares about their eventual dissolution and disappearance?
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This question has empowered artists to move to internet based work, moving away from traditional display stages as a museum, and choosing to solely publish their work on a digital platform, where their work will be shared by the Ego-Commercialists. However, the Internet as a display space is also feared by artists: How would their legacy get attention and keep being circulated among the massive amounts of information generated every day?
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Once a work of art has been accepted in a museum’s collection, the Aura will be preserved. Its Aura will be celebrated, maintained and respected. Artists fear that the Internet poses a great danger to their work of art and their legacy. The Greek philosopher Socrates believed that speech becomes an orphan when written down, when it is revealed to the greater
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public whom may have no understanding of its original meaning, leaving it vulnerable to abuse. The same can be said about digital content: It can be sampled, modified and appropriated. This leads to an effect called ‘conceptual transfer’, where the original work of art is detached from its context and is used by other users to communicate a different message. The work of art is not plagiarised, but is ‘memed’; it is appropriated by another concept. Conceptual transfer poses a threat the legacy of the artists and the work of art, nothing can be prevented of being reinterpreted and falsely conserved. Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Leonardo Da Vinci’s most famous work: the Mona Lisa, has been subjected to innumerable conceptual transfer, parodies and deduplication. One might assume that this would lead to the loss of its Aura, but the iconification of the Mona Lisa has made the work transcend its own materiality. It is one of the most circulated art works ever created and yet, millions of people have witnessed it while visiting the Louvre in Paris, the house of context it was not intended for, annually. The Mona Lisa’s subjection to the public has made the public crave for the authentic. Art historians will have differing opinions about the place of the Mona Lisa in art history. The Mona Lisa may not be the highlight of techniques within creation of the work of art, nor possess the strongest concept but its virality is undeniable.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
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The circulation of the work of art’s Aura has also empowered the Aura of the artist. The artists from the Renaissance are arguably the first who are as famous as their works of art. The amount of work made about the artist Leonardo Da Vinci exceeds the total collection of his work. In present times, the artist and his identity are now equal to their works of art,
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developments within the artistic practices lead to an era of mass artistic production. The audience became exposed to a large majority of new art and new artists, eventually being succeeded by the era of mass consumption. This era led to the theory of the society of spectacle, where art is not made merely for the elite, but for the masses. This global audience has led to the development of artistic identity. The moniker ‘Artist’ is nothing more than a persona, transforming everyone participating in artistic practices into an Ego-Commercialist.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons and Hirst who became known for their conceptual practices rather than the works of art they produced, flourish because of this. Mass consumption has a new purpose in contemporary culture. Visiting a museum is not merely to experience the Aura of art and its aesthetic. The visitors have become gateways for other people, mechanically reproduce and distribute the works of art, adding to the persona of the Ego.The audience has transcended and is now a hybrid between art consumer and art producer. Social media profiles that have a following are becoming an institution in themselves, surpassing the established ways of art distribution. Social media has led to a new way of curating art: In the era of mass distribution, the audience individually chooses which works of art are eligible to be shared with their following, ignoring the institutional context of the museum, being exhibited in a digital space.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
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Snippets of exhibitions are shown to us, decontextualizing the message of the curator, museum and artist. This practice does not preserve the Aura, but deforms it. This is not a negative effect: the work of art is freed from a material and partial context; contemporary exhibitions run on average for 4 months, until they are disbanded, never to be composite in the same formula again.
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The destination for this collage of experiences, differs from our own timeline. The material timeline is linear, with every loop of a year we come further to our demise and our death.The Internet is a time traveling machine, one can go back in time and relive past memories, all by the click of a button. The singularity, or the original, of the work of art can always be found back in the archives of the Internet and the Aura remains preserved. Hypermedia offers an unique promise to artists. The experience of their legacy can be relieved at any moment on the medium from documentation of their work, being it written or photographic.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
Hypermedia, and its corresponding challenges of using the computer not merely for the production, but also for the distribution and public exhibition of the work has attracted various various artists choosing to produce and exhibit work solely on the Internet, becoming the first Net-Artists. These artists work with lines of code and create a new aesthetic based on the digital language that is used to communicate with the algorithms.
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It has taken the museum institutions too long to grasp the significance of Net-Art, the most iconic works are already known to the audience before the museum has a chance to exhibit them. With this evolution, the artist has created a path to achieve immortality, avoiding the authoritarian institutions and curators and publishing their work directly in digital public space, attracting other Ego-Commercialists who want to be the first to distribute it.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
This construct of distribution does not destroy the Aura, and does more than preserving; it enhances the Aura. The evolution of distributing our persona and archiving our age has resulted in the rise of Hyper Aura, a myriad of interactive reproductions of a singularity that achieve virality on the Internet.
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The Hyper Aura of the work of art honours the traditional intention for art, being accessible to future scholars, artists and audiences. Just like art, information on the Internet should be exposed to the interaction, deduplication and abbreviation that defines the evolution of culture. However, the Internet is also used for communication: corporate, public and intimate. Ongoing cyber wars in virtual space have the goal of unraveling the secret on the web.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
This fear of information being involuntarily exposed has led to a paradox: There is an opposition to institutional surveillance that infiltrates individuals’ privacy and exposes their contemporary singularity, yet individuals thrive to exhibit their Aura to a voyeuristic and immortal audience greater than our own materiality. This condition is threatening the age of mass-encryption (converting volumes of data into a string of code that only can be accessed by an authorized reader). Mass-encryption poses a danger to the curation of information and with it, the preservation of the legacy of a generation of humans. While encrypted digital data is removed from interactivity and is not exposed to materialization, the reading technology used for de-encryption does. Developing in rapid succession, one only has to look back a decade to see data storage hardware from the plastic decades, only in the present, these have become obsolete, irrelevant and unreadable. Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
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The problem with encryption is leaving the ability to retrieve the information to material things. Contemporary society is the first to live with the invention of the Internet, the contemporary men has to solve the contradictory philosophy about information on the Internet. Should it be accessible to all, like it has always been with the intention of art,
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public, and cultural property, allowing everyone to witness and experience it? Or has the individual intellect become part of the Internet and should we continue to thrive for equal preservation? The desire of contemporary individuals to transcend their own mortality and the individual aspirations have created the Ego-Commercialist who, using the Hyper Aura, engages in a battle of dominance for historical relevance online.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
The Hyper Aura is the allure of our time, reaching immortality by displaying itself to the audience on the Internet. It withstands human interaction by allowing interaction to add to its allure, achieving an iconic status in the process. With the addition of the Ego-Commercialist and the desire to be seen, the Hyper Aura is present within all information on the Internet and presented to every user of
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the Internet and will continue to define our present information age as well as determine the legacy of our singularities and our generation. The occupation of a generation to publish individual information to receive the gaze of the immortal audience has subjected our information to the interaction of a systematic, controlled apparatus that reproduces this information to provide the unpredictable, equal audience in the network of a quantity of information.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
As a result, the Aura of the work of art has evolved in the Hyper Aura, an enhanced evolution of singularity. This Hyper Aura has the nature to evade any attempt of selective curation, thus partially answering Marinetti’s question to the institutions before the Internet. The Hyper Aura, if allowed to travel and
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evolve freely, will exclude any attempt of selective authoritarian curation and the corresponding decay and with it, surpasses the selection of privileged information that defines our contemporary life and culture and enriches the future generations beyond our singular lives.
Mick Jongeling
HyperAura
www.hyperaura.online [ www.mickjongeling.com ]