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| | Visual signs in the age of digital reproduction |
 | | By engendering ever new tokens, mechanical reproduction effectively reduces all tokens to their type, destroying the uniqueness of the characters of human history, and their infinitely ineffable creations, the nimbus of individual creation in its hic et nunc. |
 | | Yet mechanical reproduction presupposes there to be an individual object to reproduce in the first place: a chirographic or photographic original, a first token which creates the type from which further tokens are derived. |
 | | In verbal language, on the other hand, the type seemingly pre-exist to all its tokens, and this is also true, at least in some cases, of computer images: those which are combinations of standardised picture-elements, as well as those which are produced from mathematical algorithms. |
| www.arthist.lu.se /kultsem/sonesson/PhotoPost.html (3342 words) |
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