As the media and literary theorist Matthew Kirschenbaum has suggested, many believe digital documents to be immaterial in the base sense of lacking material substance, even if they acknowledge the culture and political force that digital documents can exert. “Awareness of the Mechanism,” an exhibit featured at ETH Zurich in September 2021, aims to foster an awareness of how we are remaking our cultural inheritances by revealing the generative potentials, both positive and negative, of the digital technologies we use to reproduce them. Since to copy is to create, an awareness of the mechanisms we use to reproduce what we have received as culture enables us to think carefully about what we might wish to create with what we have inherited. If we are to take advantage of the promises present by digital technologies and avoid their dangers, an awareness of their mechanisms is crucial.

Given that we have so industriously begun our work, we can become more aware of the many mechanisms that aid and constrain our work. Recognizing this, we are positioned to consider the question of how we might wish to remake what we have received. To acknowledge the universal truth that we are busy reproducing the whole our cultural inheritances in digital forms is also to acknowledge that we are remaking those inheritances. But we gain much through our reproductive efforts-more efficient communication, a useful substitute for the rare book that must remain locked away for its own safety, and the joy of whispering into each other’s ears. The message at the information source is not the same as the message received at its destination, even in Claude Shannon’s famous mathematical theory of communication. The facsimile, no matter how meticulously made, is not the original. The phrase uttered by the first player is never the same as what is uttered to the last. We learn this lessen again later as bibliographers and computer scientists.

We learn through childhood games such as “telephone,” where the aim is to have short, whispered phrase repeated exactly from person to person gathered in a room, that repetition is paradoxically generative, creative. The process and procedures of reproduction also manifest the dangers that can be associated with attempting to reproduce what has been received. That we can repeat the cultural productions we have received in places and times both distant and near suggests the opportunities promised by our new technologies. The perils and opportunities presented by digital reproductions are suggested by the word reproduction-productions that are produced again. The whole of our cultural inheritance is being produced again as simulacra meant to stand for the people, objects, and ideas we care enough about to make available again. The textual scholar and literary critic Jerome McGann begins his most recent book with the following: “Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures.” McGann emphasizes the enormous consequences of this acknowledged truth.

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