The digital is juxtaposed with the analogue in a world whose essential characteristic is that it does not exist. At least, this is what Friedrich Kittler argued in the early 1990s, when discussions were focused on whether software was a saleable product.[1] Nowadays, software is sold in all kinds of forms, yet Kittler’s conclusion remains radically at odds with the genesis of value in historical artefacts, regardless of the market-based development of software. Since the advent of NFTs, the digital has been able to simulate a form of uniqueness or authenticity, but the fundamental dimension of its determinacy continues to take place in the constitution of purely epistemic units that ultimately elude the ontological status of the analogue world.

The digital is the counter-world of the analogue and it is only composed of realities insofar as these can represent different, clearly distinguishable, and thus readable states. The reality of the microscopic cells, whose states — “on” or “off” (“1” or “0”) — form their basis, is that which goes beyond their essence as the digital, because these states are known exclusively as units of a pure and residue-free legibility. In this sense, the real therefore only emerges in the digital world where such reading (and writing) fails — as a disturbance and obstacle. Instead, all purposefulness of the state cells is based on the fact that their change of state is readable in a way in which there is nothing that points to a previous or subsequent state. There are no traces of causality that take place in the sphere of reality, but which originate from a world that in its absolute definiteness is alien to the analogue. In the world of the digital, there is no coincidence and no dirt that is not simulated with the deliberate intention of creating it. We are increasingly realizing that these parts of reality are valuable to us. The jubilation over a world purified of the indeterminacy of the analogue, which is exclusively controlled by us, is followed by the counter-movement in which we miss the real and recognize it as something which has always been beyond our control. Noise, imperfection and error become crucial aspects of digital simulation in computer generated imagery and music, because otherwise we perceive them as sterile and lacking credibility. They are part of our idea of reality and one that we are becoming increasingly sensitized to.

In the following, we will address the question of how the real, which by its very nature remains outside the digital, can be dealt with in the increasingly digitizing museum contexts. To this end, we will first explore the notion of realness based on Walter Benjamin's concept of aura, and then use a few examples to present our approach to analogue museum objects in the digital realm.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the term “aura” is once again becoming virulent; it has just been voted the youth word of the year 2024 in Germany. In art studies, it was decisively coined by Walter Benjamin, who used it in the 1930s to qualify the traditional value of art before the advent of mass reproduction techniques. For Benjamin, the aura is something that stands for an idea of the value of art that had to be updated in the face of identical reproducibility through contemporary media technology. Of course, this primarily affects art that is produced with technology that is inherently characterized by its identical reproducibility and thus the indistinguishability of its products. Just as for reproduction, which is inherent in such production, it is equally true of the simulations of the digital world that their value cannot be based on Walter Benjamin's concept of aura.

In a formulation that has since become famous, Benjamin describes the aura as the “appearance of a proximity, however distant it may be.”[2]  Proximity is granted through the encounter with the object in analogue reality and because this reality is understood as the same spatiotemporal constitution within which previous encounters have taken place, these are brought into correlation with the current encounter as being distant. Millions of people have stood in front of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (fig. 1) and looked at it, just as we may be doing now. These included Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and, of course, Augustus III, who brought the painting to Dresden in 1754. It was hidden at Königstein Fortress in the 18th century and brought to Moscow by the Soviets in the 20th century, and in 2022, activists of the “Last Generation” glued themselves to its frame. Earlier than all that, Raphael himself once stood in front of it and saw what we see now. He placed his brush in the exact spot where we can now trace it. All these previous encounters are brought into the “here and now” of our confrontation with the object, because the object is the same and because the space of the encounter — the real world — is the same.

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514, oil on canvas, 265 cm × 196 cm (104 in × 77 in), Gal.-Nr.: 93 © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photograph by: Estel/Klut

 

However, it is by no means only the stories that are told, but rather an infinite network of possible narratives in which the Sistine Madonna is integrated, some of which are known, some vague and uncertain, some perhaps only made up, that make up its aura. For the aura of the work of art is not exhausted in the formulation of narratives but rather characterized by the potential of an indeterminable number of possible narratives about the distant that it brings close to us, including legends whose truthfulness may be rather doubtful. The aura is therefore not a sum of narratives, but always goes beyond what can be said — something it has in common with the real. The encounter with the auratic work of art is therefore by no means a mere pleasure in its sensual perception, but a pleasure in recognizing oneself as part of a larger whole, at the center of which the artefact is located. While the individual stories do not constitute the aura as summable components, it does help to recount them to evoke awareness of the infinite narrative potential of the whole.

In the case of reproductive works of art, one might argue against Benjamin that they too can achieve this once they are out in the real world. For even if the aura may go far beyond what is sensually apparent in the object, traces of its real existence manifest themselves in the object, in which the distance that characterizes its aura can be sensed. An old photograph may turn pale, bend and I can leave my fingerprint on it, so that its historicity can also gain a sensually perceptible dimension, which can once again inscribe the uniqueness that was supposedly abolished by the reproduction technology at the beginning of its existence. In the digital, however, this is completely impossible. Because it does not exist but is only ever temporarily constituted as an identical state of readability of arbitrary binary cells, it is impossible that anything real could leave a mark on it. But what does this mean for our digital handling of auratic objects, as we find them in our collections at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden?

First, it means that the digital cannot take anything away from them. The question must therefore be, what can it add? Benjamin also asks himself this question. When he speaks of the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, by “technique” he does not mean the processes of its creation, as the ancient Greeks did, but rather its apparative autonomization, a kind of outsourcing or dehumanization. In extreme cases, human involvement is reduced to the press of a button, which merely sets the reproduction process in motion, in the creation of which the human being is no longer involved in any manual way, such as when taking a photo.

For Benjamin, this is associated with radical changes that did not apply to earlier methods of reproduction and which, as he writes, concern the “here and now” of the work of art and the relationship between original and reproduction. Technical reproducibility not only changes the process of reproduction into an independent entity, but also the relationship of the human being to the object. For not only does it release people from the process of production in terms of craftsmanship, but also in terms of sensuality. Marshall McLuhan expressed a similar observation with his famous phrase “The medium is the message.”[3] It is not the human sense that determines the selection of what is decisive about a thing, but the medium with which it is recorded or (re)presented, and so it also formally shapes — this is what McLuhan and Benjamin are getting at — the way we relate to things and imagine the world.

A classic example of this is the series of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge (fig 2.), who at the end of the 19th century, using a series of cameras triggered by taut threads, was able to clarify the question of whether there is a moment during a horse's gallop when all hooves are off the ground. This question could not have been answered by using non-apparative means, i.e. the naked eye. In the whirl of the horse's legs at a gallop, it was impossible to determine whether the legs were all off the ground because we could not concentrate on all four hooves at the same time. The camera apparatus can do this, and so subjective concentration is replaced by the idea of technical objectivity, which enables a doubling of reality (in this case the postures during a horse's gallop) and provides evidence of the reproduced reality by means of technical reproduction.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657-59, oil on canvas, 83 cm × 64.5 cm (33 in × 25.4 in), Gal.-Nr.: 1336 © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photograph by: Kreische

 

Similarly, the consequence of our relationship with the digital is not that our notion of an analogue reality cannot be absorbed in the digital and would therefore be considered unreal but that we reshape our notion of reality so that the digital can concern the analogue.  In many places their distinction is losing its meaning. Historic artefacts evoke one of the few relationships that can stubbornly withstand this, because simulation never allows us to recognize ourselves as part of the greater whole in the same way an auratic object does.

For museums with classic collections, such as ours, this is good news, because it means that people visit museums to have experiences that they would otherwise not be able to have. However, this does not mean that we cannot and should not use the digital as an instrument for describing the analogue, because it can provide us with approaches to the analogue that would otherwise elude us.

First, in a similar way to Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, this applies to analytical procedures that are analogically impossible. As with Muybridge, of course, this always involves a twofold access: one in which the data is collected (in Muybridge's case the experimental setup with the series of cameras), and a second in which the results of such investigations can be viewed and analyzed. For example, the digital allows for paintings to be captured on a microscopic level (fig 3-4.) and for these details to be presented in high-resolution digital copies not only to researchers but also to the public.

Johannes Vermeer, Detail from HiRox-Scan of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657-59, Oil on canvas, 83 cm × 64.5 cm (33 in × 25.4 in), © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photograph by: HIROX Europe

There are countless digital art technology methods that we cannot all name here. The variability of digital media allows us to use them to create a visualization that, for example, allows different views of the same part of an object. A popular example is the curtain viewer, which can show before-and-after images of restorations or juxtapose X-ray images with surface images, as we have done with a series of paintings by Oscar Zwintscher (fig. 5). A key factor here is the ability to leave it up to the users themselves to decide which part they want to study. This freedom is a specific feature of the digital world that should always be considered, as it activates the users and their interests, so that they can pursue them by themselves. It is accompanied by an effect of self-perception that is evoked in a different way in the analogue experience of the aura that we have been ignoring up to now. For in the encounter with the unique object, the uniqueness of the object is not only effective insofar as it guarantees the link between the proximate and the distant, but also the uniqueness of what encounters the object in the proximate and the distant. Thus, in the face of the auratic object, one always also recognizes oneself as unique, so the mechanism of self-knowledge through the means of interactivity in the digital can, in this respect, be regarded as a substitute for one dimension of the auratic effect.

 

Curtain Viewer for: Oskar Zwintscher, The Artist’s Wife as a Young Girl, 1894, oil on canvas, 68 x 52 cm, Gal.-Nr.: 2022/16 © Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photograph by: Estel/Klut, X-Ray by: Kreische

 

In the field of 3D graphics, computer tomography (CT) is a common digital technology for looking beneath the surfaces of three-dimensional objects. We are currently developing a 3D viewer to combine CT with photogrammetric digitized images of two Benin bronzes, currently on view in the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig. We have captured these once under normal light and once under UV light so that contamination and other damages can be made visible. In a single program, it should thus be possible to combine two perspectives on the surface with the sectional images of the CT, a form of presentation that would be impossible in the analogue.

 

CT-Scan of Gedenkkopf (uhunmwun-elao) aus Udo, brass casting, 23,5 x 16,2 x 16,8 cm, Inv.-Nr.: 26228 © Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, CT by Fraunhofer IIS Fürth

 

Photogram of Gedenkkopf (uhunmwun-elao) aus Udo, brass casting, 23,5 x 16,2 x 16,8 cm, Inv.-Nr.: 26228 © Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photogram by: Franke

 

Photogram under UV-Light of Gedenkkopf (uhunmwun-elao) aus Udo, brass casting, 23,5 x 16,2 x 16,8 cm, Inv.-Nr.: 26228 © Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photogram by: Franke

 

We have so far ignored what is probably the most obvious advantage of the digital, but it should be mentioned here, even though it is probably quite obvious. After all, digital views can be sent anywhere without loss via the magical channels of the internet. This is a considerable benefit for researchers, and since the interest of the museum public is often related to the popularity of the artefacts, the dissemination of digital copies is an essential tool for attracting people to the analogue museum. Because in an interesting feedback mechanism, the viral spread of reproductions and digital copies leads to a strengthened awareness of the aura of the original. The crowds that gather around the Mona Lisa every day do not come to see the image, because they have long been familiar with it (and you can’t really see it anyway, because you can’t get close enough). What attracts them instead is the experience of its aura. It is therefore evidently beneficial for museums to disseminate reproductions and digital copies.

A decisive role is also played by the narratives that lead us to understand the fascination with the auratic potential as the whole that transcends them. In contrast to the clearly limited and quickly overloaded walls of an exhibition, the paraverse is a place of unlimited spatial dimensions, so while we can’t experience the magic of the auratic potential's infinity, we have lots of space to give to some of these narratives, which we do in our online collection and multimedia guide. In the digital realm, space can be flexibly extended, one click can open a window with new layers of depth, in which further materials and even more layers of depth can be gathered. We can accommodate rabbit holes of various sizes in a single display device. We tried something along these lines for the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich. Wo alles begann (2024-2025) with a special format. As we were fortunate to draw on the fact that many of the sketches that Friedrich made on his travels and later reused and recombined in paintings can be found in the Dresden area, we were able to locate them in analogue reality and thus visualize part of their creation process. The participation of Frank Richter, to whom the localization and cataloguing are largely owed, was decisive for this. Together with him and other Friedrich experts, we filmed short videos on location in which Friedrich's motifs can be recognized and brief information on their creation process is provided (fig. 9-10).

The format, which we have called “Friedrich's Landscapes,” has been very well received, which is probably not least due to the fact that it links the aura of art with the aura of nature.[4] For the mountainscape (or rock or ruin) is thus identified as the mountainscape from the Friedrich painting and a similar awareness of its historicity arises in its encounter as when looking at the painting. Once again, we are enabled to find ourselves as part of a whole, at the center of which this time is not Friedrich's painting, but the mountains, which we can view in the same world in which Friedrich saw and sketched them.

 

Caspar David Friedrich, Bohemian Landscape with Milešovka mountain, 1808, oil on canvas, 71 x 104,5 cm, Gal.-Nr.: 2197 E © Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photography by: Estel/Klut

 

Frank Richter near Teplice in front of Milešovka mountain, 2024, Screenshot from a film for the Friedrich’s Landscapes map © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Film by: Franke

 

However, it is not only space that is limited to museums, but also visitors' time. It makes little sense to present the museum audience with a long text or film within an exhibition because they will hardly take the time to watch it. After all, visiting time is finite, and given the vast number of potentially accessible exhibits, admission is associated with a desire — certainly sometimes unfavorable — not to have missed anything important in the end. It is different in the digital world. Here, I can decide for myself when I want to engage with the material available, without having to pay attention to closing times or my cognitive load, and I can interrupt and return at any time. The public can thus continue their visit to the exhibition on the way home, on the train, on the streetcar, or over Sunday coffee and trace Friedrich's landscapes or watch a film on the creation and reception of the play Raiders of the Lost Mind whose puppets it may have seen two weeks ago. I will still be able to do this, long after the exhibition has been dismantled and the space has been filled with a new one. So, the release from the spatiotemporal coherences on which the effect of the aura is based also has its advantages, which are not only of a documentary nature, but also make it possible to extend my engagement with the object. However, in this sphere they compete with a disproportionately higher number of offers vying for attention.

The place occupied by the receptive quality of the auratic experience in the analogue is ideally filled by something else in the digital world, because the reception of the digitized material does not have the same magic as the encounter with the artefact, as we have pointed out. In accordance with the variability of the medium, it is ideally a form of interactivity in which the changeable states can be manipulated by the users themselves. This is not mandatory, but the media-specific potential of the digital ultimately lies in the variability of its states, so it would be a wasted opportunity to remove its manipulation from the user. Just as museum visitors can choose the artefact they look at and the duration of their viewing in the analogue exhibition and pursue their own interests, they should be allowed to do so to the greatest possible extent in the digital realm.

The mechanisms that give the viewer this freedom can be very simple — as with the curtain viewer, for example. Even if I am watching a film on my home device or smartphone, I can skip back or forward and gain a certain degree of freedom that I do not have in analogue cinemas, for instance. Another increasingly popular example is 3D viewers, in which visitors can turn and rotate objects as they please. This may seem trivial at first, but there are various cases in which such turning and rotating can show something that would otherwise remain hidden from the museum visitor because it is logistically challenging and sometimes simply impossible to show in analogue. If we think of sculptures or objects in the porcelain collection, for example, a type of presentation in which they all stand within the room and can be viewed from all sides is not feasible due to the spatial conditions. Not to mention the fact that such a presentation would require far more effort in terms of appropriate lighting, and that escape routes would also be an issue. In the case of porcelain in particular, relevant information can be found in places that are not usually visible, namely on the underside. The manufacturer's mark and the historical inventory number are inscribed here, exactly on the surface on which the object is usually placed. In addition, most 3D viewers make it possible to annotate certain points of interest, giving us one of those layers of depth that we would otherwise have to remove from the view of the object or its digitized version by using catalogs or wall texts.

View of the northern East Asia gallery © Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photography by: Lösel

 

However, the possibilities of interaction go far beyond such mechanisms. After all, many of the objects in our collections were not produced solely for the sake of their reception, but at some point, fulfilled purposes that went beyond their mere display. The historical apparatuses of the Mathematical-Physical Salon, for example, may also be spectacular to look at, but their genius goes far beyond that. They not only represent the power of baroque sovereigns to empower themselves with the principles of nature, but at some point, they really did function as measuring instruments in a way that today, for conservation reasons, we can only talk about. In the digital world, however, it is possible to recreate their functionality and, for example, to make the complex mechanisms of historical clockworks work again. Although this requires considerable effort, the potential is clearly there. The Mathematical-Physical Salon has made an initial foray with its Behind the Stars app (fig. 12), which illustrates both the historical instruments and the underlying principles of some of their astronomical devices.

BEHIND THE STARS: Impressions of the Nocturnal, Sundial and Celestial Globe from within the app © Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

 

The same applies to the Puppentheatersammlung, whose puppets no longer do the very thing for which they were once made: They are no longer operated. However, since the digital is freed from the threat of wear and tear, there is the possibility of at least bringing their virtual doppelgangers back to life. This is a simple and obvious idea, but the way to achieve it is a complex and lengthy process that involves enormous effort, especially when the puppets and their possible movements are complex, as the challenge of digitizing them grows with the complexity of the objects. However, the Puppentheatersammlung has also made an initial foray in this direction and has chosen the Theatrum Mundi for this purpose (fig. 13). This is a form of puppet-theater in which planar figures are moved along rails so that their motion follows fixed paths. The stages also consist of staggered layers so that digitalization is much easier than trying to capture a marionette with the textiles following its motions and bring it to life.

 

Screenshot of the digitized “Theatrum Mundi” © Puppentheatersammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

 

It does not take much imagination to envision that in the future we could view stars in virtual worlds through the telescopes of the Mathematical-Physical Salon or attend puppet shows on historical stages, at least digitally. However, this will have to be preceded by considerable financial and time expenditure. Like the reality of the state cells of the underlying hardware, the analogue in the digital appears primarily where it proves to be disturbing and obstructive. As we have pointed out, there are more basic options for the digital to enable museum visitors and researchers to do what they cannot do in the analogue world. Creating such opportunities, and to unlock the digital as a sphere of extension of the engagement with the analogue, is what our efforts in the digital are aiming for. At the same time these efforts need to be holding true to the fact that the analogue object is a compression of a lot more than the digital ever could provide. The digital can thus enrich and promote the experience of the auratic by creating a periphery of narratives, perspectives and activities, but in order to have this experience, the auratic object must still be sought out in the space-time of the analogue world: at the museum.

Jacob Franke is digital curator at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden since 2021. After completing his studies in media studies, philosophy and art history at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, he worked as a research assistant for the Chair of History and Aesthetics of Media at the Laboratory of Enlightenment research center, and for the Chair of Film Studies with a focus on visual aesthetics at the same university. At the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, he is in charge of the platform voices, which aims at expanding exhibition and collection activities into the digital through a variety of formats.

Martin Zavesky studied media computer science at the Technische Universität Dresden from 2001 to 2007. After graduation, he worked as an assistant for the Chair of Media Design. In 2012 he finished his PhD on the perceptual realistic projection of anthropomorphic shapes (“Wahrnehmungsrealistische Projektion anthropomorpher Formen”). In 2015 he started working at the Research and Cooperation Department of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and in 2018 he became Digital Strategy Officer of the SKD. Consultation, project coordination and the development of digital projects within the museums are his main tasks.