In Defense of Digital Replicas

An article in defense of the much maligned digital replica. The author argues that we should think of digital copies of art and objects as independent entities from the originals. “The power of digital replicas becomes clear when we acknowledge what they can do beyond merely stand in for originals. Rather than thinking of replicas as knock-offs, we could conceive of them as akin to maps or models. Maps and models are obviously not replacements for the things that they represent; if they were precisely the same as the places or objects that they modelled, they would cease to be useful (think of the map of the empire described in Borges’s brief story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ which is itself the size of the empire). Rather, they offer us a vantage point that is often otherwise unavailable.”

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