Art preservation isn’t exactly my bag.  I understand the great pains
museums go through to fight the agents of time.  But everything ages;
the art object, in effect, can never be construed as materially permanent. 
Right?

This article from earlier in the week started me thinking about the
possibility that DaVinci could have imagined transformational deteriorations in
his most famous painting, Mona Lisa.  So she’s warping; the wood is
bending, with it her expression, her "look": skew. Time has its way.  The
certainty of decay evades the most technologically zealous efforts to counteract
imminent physical forces.  What will Mona Lisa’s expression be in thirty
years?  three-hundred years?  three-thousand years? as she peers from
behind the Lourve’s sealed container and untold layers of varnish.

The material alteration–a warped original–is less concerning to me than the
unmentioned details about the numerous ways in which her image has, through
reproduction, been simulated and processed, pasted on t-shirts, etc. John Berger
touches on this in "Ways of Seeing"; Walter Benjamin, too, divides the cult
value from the exhibit value, differentiating between the object and its
original. The cult value is more interesting to me; perhaps the diminishing of
the exhibition value arouses the cult value, and, in turn, the cult value shifts
the exhibition value into a grotesque copy of itself, as a sort of popular
distortion. These value shifts underscore political revolution, too, I
suppose, turning Fascism on its head. (Yep.  I need to go back and brush through Benjamin’s

"Mechanical Reproduction."  And all of this–Berger included–is in the
Ways of Reading anthology, 6th ed.)

This brings me to a confusing mix of issues that I find fascinating. 
Where Benjamin discusses "unconscious optics,"  I wonder about the extent
to which conscious optics are akin to copyright infringement, to the
controls creeping counter to the CC movement and twinkles of liberated IP.  Technologies
are making mechanical reproduction–via fragmented pixelations as frequently as
film photography or film-based moving pictures–more popular and accessible than
ever before. I imagine conscious optics lining up with comp/rhet in
ways they seek for students to engage in the –graphy that is openly,
visually reproductive.  And this call for a mix of visual rhetoric, image
and design is not new, nor should it ever be entirely divorced from the
construction of meaning and its pal, hermeneutics.  That is, rather than leaving aesthetic making to
inaccessible technologies and their expert operators, we ought to engage students in
aesthetic reproductions tuned rhetorically, tuned textually. No doubt, this
approach to composition is catching on in a few exciting places.  

This turn is also playing out against IP tensions, intractable media
ownership issues, and Paleolithic systems for sharing (or not). It makes me
wonder whether the fight for Creative Commons can buck the fangs-sunk-in monster
of sole proprietorships in new media.  We have systems–albeit arcane–for
documenting text, attributing origins(!), and giving credit when we must. 
But systems for attribution in new media seem far less wieldy.  What are
they?  Do they come in the form of a Works Cited at the end of a flash
clip?  Consider this excerpt from

an article in the NY Times this week (link via

unmediated):

Mr. Routson’s work, which is not for sale, is the latest to find itself in
the murky zone between copyright infringement and artistic license, between
cultural property rights and cultural commentary. On Oct. 1 a new Maryland law
will make the unauthorized use of an audiovisual recording device in a movie
theater illegal. Last week two people were arrested in California for operating
camcorders in movie theaters. One was apprehended by an attendant wearing
night-vision goggles.

It’s not definitive (nor am I carefully read in these matters–sincere
apologies!), but there comes a convergence between mechanical reproduction,
media proprietorship, reproductive rights (as in copying media rather than
making babies), and this business of conscious optics.  I have
suspicions that as the gulf between technology and humans narrows, as assistive
devices help us see, hear, remember with tech-stimulated consciousness
(recorders, amplifiers, etc.), the boundaries between experience and mediation
will blur and with them, the battles over IP will flourish, perhaps even
crossing over into our minds (you can’t think it if you don’t have the rights!). 
Mona Lisa’s warp and laws against filming in a movie theater: pieces of a
fascinating series of media twists.