RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE ORIGINAL IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CULTURAL PRACTICES: A PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT

Abstract

The article carries out a philosophical reconceptualization of the concept of the original in the era of digital cultural practices. In contrast to the classical reduction of the status of the original to a technical or purely aesthetic problem, the article considers it more as an ontological and existential one, because it is with this approach that the very structure of the experience of a person meeting an image in an environment within which reproduction, simulacrum or generative content exist on the same screen with the same ontological weight changes. The author demonstrates the radical difference of the new experience from that analyzed by V. Benjamin in his essay on the technical reproducibility of art. Abstracting from the approach in which the original appears as a unique material object endowed with an aura of distance and tradition, in the light of the authorial approach, it acquires the features of eventfulness, becoming a relational node in a network of interactions between users, algorithms and contexts. The original reaches the act of differentiation in a series of repetitions and verification processes on the body of technological infrastructure. Digital cultural practices clearly demonstrate that the new authenticity requires active hermeneutic engagement, ethical responsibility and shared mechanisms of verification. In the context of the present, such reconceptualization acquires an ethical and political dimension. Digital technologies, which act as an important tool for preserving cultural heritage and counteracting manipulation, can at the same time make cultural memory vulnerable to erasure or counterfeiting. Thus, originality in the digital age is transformed from a property of a thing into a living practice of continuous definition.