G.J. Jerry <[log in to unmask]> writes:
 
>        Semanticly speaking, all "originals" are copies of the artist's
>conscious conception.  The original is therefore, an encoding, if you will,
>of the art inspired within the artist's consciousness, which in itself is
>an encoding, at least in part, of the artist's unconscious mind.
>
>        The perception of the original is itself a copy of the original.
>The observer encodes and decodes the original in the process of perception
>thus creating third and fourth generations of the art "original".
 
I would agree with this kind of analysis up to a point at least, perhaps
preferring to use the Peircean notion of the sign with representamen,
object and the interpretant as three basic aspects of any sign. Any
artifact, say a work of art (or put even more generally: a "text") will be
made up of multiple signs that interplay with one another and which all
may be interpreted or given meaning by various "interpreters", or
"readers" of these texts. (The text itself may of course within this kind
of paradigm also be interpreted as a sign in its own right.)
The interpretant of a sign (the particular effect the sign process
produces at any given time in an interpreter) will vary considerably
according to who this interpreter is, their prior knowledge and experiences
etc at the time of their "reading" of the text. These interpretants will
always be at variance in some way or another in relation to whatever kind
of interpretant the artist, artisan or whoever produced the text MIGHT have
forseen or hoped for in an "implicit reader" during their own production of
the text. It is also probably important to note that the producer of the
text will constantly change their own understanding of the meaning of the
text both during the process of production, and later on when they again
look at what they have created in the light of new experiences that they
have had after finishing the text.
 
In this kind of context any good reproduction will most likely contain a
quite large number of the most "salient" signs present in the physical
original, but probably lack a large number of the more implicit or
nuanced signs that will be present in any kind of context where one
experiences an original object. Here I am thinking especially of such
possible interpretants as the "sense of being in the same room as X",
special smells and tastes associated with the age of X, the observed or
experienced position, or relation of X in relation to some other present
objects or artifacts etc etc.
 
>        The "original" contains much information that can not be completely
>copied unless said "original" is digital.  Scholars must have art originals
>to advance scholarship.  Nevertheless, copies have their place as
>instructional aids for the appreciation of the original.  It's a matter
>of economy in a finite space-time universe.
 
Again, I suppose it all boils down to a question of what one wants to
achieve with any reproduction. Sometimes a good "cleaned" (ie "simplified"
reproduction may be more useful to a student or a researcher than a
dirty original for example.
 
pat coppock
the university of trondheim
faculty of arts and science
department of applied linguistics
the multimedia lab
n-7055 dragvoll
norway
 
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