DIGITAL ART FORUM

Some thoughts on the implications of 'ownership' and 'authorship' with regard to the construction of Digital Art.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
After all, what is Digital art, but art that is made using a machine as a tool to construct the ‘work of art’
If we refer back to Plato’s tale of the cave, the object was an ideal which existed only in the ‘ether’ and any object that was created / made in the real world, was only a pale imitation of the ideal. Therefore the maker of the object e.g. the carpenter who made the table was held in higher esteem as an artist who painted a representation of the table was only copying a copy. Where is the authorship here if a work of art is a re-presentation of something else?
I am quite convinced by the argument that “there is no such thing as an unmediated representation of reality”.
But, perhaps not all ‘art’ is a re-presentation of objects in the real world?
Digital art is produced by manipulating a machine. The machine operates by means of a series of coded instructions. These instructions are based on binaries: zeros and ones. These instructions are based on mathematical information which remains constant, finite, immutable and ultimately terminally definable. They are also infinitely reproducible without the possibility of change or decay.
This does not detract from the contribution of the ‘author’ as the code must have some point of origin and causation.
In a sense there are several authors in this scenario.
There is the person who constructs the machine [hardware]
There is the person who composes the code or its variations [software]
There is the person who applies / exploits the code to achieve a ‘work of art’.
At what point can we assign ‘ownership’ ?
Where is the artist located in this series of creations? Or , in Walter Bejamin’s phrase, where is the ‘aura’ of the artist? Does it exist in the ‘eye of the beholder?’