The Liberation of the Doorknob
Recently, I encountered Walter Benjamin 's essay on technology and representation . Benjamin is trying to reconcile ideas of mass representation (as well as mass production) with notions about 'aura.' For Benjamin, aura is something that is present at the moment of creation within a piece of art and is intrinsically and inherently tied to it for the rest of its life. The issue that he sees in an age of mass reproduction and representation is that our mechanized and instantaneous media for remediation upon a piece of art subtracts from its value. Thus he sees that modern modes of representation play a dichotomous role within the work of art: our interaction with the newly remediated representation of art stands distinct from the aura of the original work of art. I start with this as a departure point from which I think architectural salvage is connected. As I was sorting through bins of hardware the other day, I found at the bottom of a rusted bucket of ball-tip hinges a s...