The advances in digital technologies are changing the production and distribution systems of art. In the last years, digital arts, in the frame of art, science and technology, are questioning again concepts as authorship, originality, distribution, reproduction, etc..
This interactive media art installation, specifically created for ARCO06, questions its own presence, as digital artwork, in the art market. Using symbolic elements of the traditional arts, such a painted ceramics, recreated in a digital manner, we invite the public to act (or interact) and produce the final meaning of the installation, showing that there are no “unique digital artworks”, because the digital media can be reproduced infinite times without lose any information, and by the way without loosing the “aura” as referred by Walter Benjamin, or in other words spreading the “aura” in each one of the copies.
Each time that a new reproduction media has been developed, there has been a kind of “sock” for the art market that has been forced to change the way the art is commercialized. Even the software art has a place now in the art market, jumping far away of its own reproducible nature, and maybe (just maybe) in contradiction with the possibilities of distribution and sharing that new technologies bring us. Digital artworks, maybe forced by the art market, are trying to not lose the “aura”, the power of the original, the idea of “unique” and more valuable.
In this installation we present, by using augmented reality technology, an original digital vase that looks like a traditional Chinese ceramic. It is not a reproduction of an existing one because the decorative hand painting has been created using contemporary symbols as the Creative Commons logo. This digital vase is standing up in a pedestal, as many other artworks will be in ARCO06.
We can see the vase in a rear-projection screen that will show us the vase, the pedestal and our own image as it is captured by a camera located on top of the screen. The public that walk trough the gallery can see the vase and can approach themselves to the pedestal, but if they try to touch the vase, as it is very fragile, it will fall down and will broke in small pieces, making big noise. The first surprise will be follow by another one, when on the screen will appear another person bringing a new vase, exactly equal to the first one. And the process will start again…. As many times the vase will be broken, a new vase will replace the broken one.
