Benjamin's Buttons

One wonders what art may have looked like if modern technology had not existed. By modern technology I mean cameras, mobile phones, personal computers, and devices and softwares such as tablets and the Adobe Suite, which allow for the creation of digital art. Now, mobile phones have apps that can help record, edit and most importantly distribute [reproductions of] artwork (Instagram, anyone?). If these did not exist, would people be painting en plien air? Would the only way to paint portraits of someone be if the subject 'sat' for long hours for days, weeks, months, for the artist to emulate from life? Would art-making not have been as diverse and experimental, or would artists have found different ways of diversifying and innovating?

Since a couple of years, I have increasingly been using different forms of technology to create my works. From making video art and sound-pieces using Adobe Premiere Pro and Garageband/Audacity, to using a digital tablet to make illustrations, to using a condenser mic to make recordings, to using my DSLR camera to take high quality pictures, technology has opened a series of doors with infinite possibilities. 

                                                   Recording audio on Garageband that may be used in my artwork

And what of documentation? If digital and film cameras did not exist, would the aura of art be more intense and valuable than it is today, when it can be easily reproduced and seen both in print and digitally? Perhaps Walter Benjamin, in his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction says it best where he proposes that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art devalues the aura of the artefact's uniqueness as art.

In the 1930s, he was farsighted enough to state in his book:

For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

Regarding reproduced artworks, he stated :

...even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be"; and that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical [sphere]" of the reproduction of artworks.