If I were in one of those awkward ritual oral exams that English departments inflict upon their graduate students, I might say that you haven't yet entered the Symbolic Order. Personally I find humor in the grotesque image of a grown man-sized fetus floating in a sac of amniotic fluid.
Thanks. I like the feel of low-res footage. For Walter Benjamin, the aura of traditional works of art is a function of their inaccessibility. The easier it is to see or otherwise experience them, the more the aura dissipates. I think that formulation can be transposed rather productively to the realm of digital photography and video, where something like Benjamin's aura manifests itself through the occlusion of information. That is, the less detail an image preserves from what it purports to capture, the more that it consists of visual data that derives from a failure to capture -- like the strange boxy units in the darker portions of this altered cell phone photograph -- the more it acquires an auratic quality. Except the inaccessibility in this latter case pertains, not to the work of art, but to its signified.
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Hmmmmm.
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(And I'm stupid to keep posting comments from my "teaching" LJ, when I mean to do so from my personal one.)
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