[Leica] Re:digital transformation

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

> Somewhere, somebody always wanta an original.

In 1978 I was visiting the British Museum. Waiting in line for lunch in the 
little cafeteria there, I looked in the glass case that they had 
thoughtfully placed to help us line-waiters forget about the delays. The 
case contained, primarily, original manuscripts of famous books, including a 
section of the King James Bible, Henry Miller's The Turn of the Screw, an 
Edgar Allen Poe story, and a few more that I don't remember.

I was in London taking a break from writing my doctoral dissertation, which 
was on computerized word processing and document production. At that time I 
knew that in 25 to 50 years there would no longer be such a thing as an 
"original" in the world of publication. I daydreamed about what they might 
have in that showcase in the year 2003, some 25 years in the future. A 
floppy disk holding a draft of some great book? Laser printer output of a 
draft of a poem?

The showcase is gone. They couldn't figure out what to put in it, either. By 
and large the world of printed books has learned to live without the concept 
of "original manuscript". My guess is that the world of photography will 
eventually learn it too.

One of the most difficult characteristics of the digital world is that a 
copy of a digital artifact is indistinguishable from the original. This 
dilemma has kept Microsoft and Adobe busy for years engineering schemes for 
sofware activation, so that it's not enough to have a copy of the software, 
you must also receive electronic permission to use it. That's how they 
implement the notion of "original".

Since the "original" of a digital image is a bunch of bits, and all visual 
renderings of it are copies, collectors will have to spend their money on 
something else. Me, I want Kyle Cassidy to autograph a big print of a 
portrait of Colleen. She's an original, and his signature would be an 
original; to heck with the provenance of the print.