Contempo advances in digital engineering science have some art-lovers on edge. Now that we have the ability to digitally scan and 3D-print works of fine art, will we be compelled to abandon our interest in originals, occupying ourselves with cheaper and more than abundant replicas instead?

Examples of this angst are arable. In a recent Wall Street Journal article about museums supplying donors with digital replicas of their former works, Julian Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, reassures readers worried about copies creeping into museum collections: 'We still believe in the aura of artists' works,' he said. 'People who come here need to meet the originals.' In line with this concern, Noah Charney insists that digital replicas cannot share in the 'aura' of the original. He fears that if digital replicas become too common, nosotros 'risk the loss of the most important thing to those who truly know and love art and history: the soul.' And in response to contempo discussions about using digital technology to reproduce the ruins at Palmyra, Jonathan Jones urges that Palmyra 'must not be turned into a imitation replica of its old glory.'

Withal, although advocates of the artwork'southward aura are heavy on handwringing near our future in the digital wasteland, they tend to offer trivial statement for their concerns. Charney'due south considerations against digital replicas tend to just beg the question. For example, he worries that replicas might erode interest in original artworks, merely it wouldn't obviously be worrisome if replicas detracted from our interest in originals unless originals have a special aura. Thus, independently of whether there is in fact something special virtually originals, critics who take this line presuppose what they mean to establish.

So long every bit we continue to talk of replicas in the aforementioned breath equally forgeries and copies, we misconstrue their potential function. Granted, Charney, for one, is quick to distinguish digital replicas from the skillful forgeries of art history, such as van Meegeren'due south Vermeers, but he does so only to emphasise that these forgeries were bully works in their own right, whereas digital replicas are non. Still, his emphasis remains on telling the replica apart from the original. He claims that 'experts and passionate amateurs' can 'just feel' the difference between originals and replicas, through an 'innate' process that appears to be akin to magic. I suppose those of us who didn't receive our owl-post admitting us to Hogwart's School of Artistic Pretension are doomed to our soulless replicas.

Artists working on a replica of Lascaux. Photo: © D Nidos-Département

Just maybe replicas can do something besides bring about the end of civilization. The ability of digital replicas becomes clear when we acknowledge what they can exercise beyond merely stand in for originals. Rather than thinking of replicas as knock-offs, we could conceive of them every bit 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 stop to be useful (retrieve of the map of the empire described in Borges'south 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.

A map allows you to plot a route through the mountains. A model allows you to see the cruciform of the church. Digital replicas offering the hope of allowing usa to interact with art in new ways. As art criminal offense specialist Erin Thompson has recently discussed, one advantage of digital replicas is that interested art enthusiasts can touch them, a privilege unremarkably off limits to a typical museum patron. She is especially interested in the office that digital replicas can play in curbing antiquities annexation, but the interest in touching fine art and artefacts certainly extends beyond the collectors who help drive the market place in illicit antiquities. Digital replicas tin thus serve as models offering a new form of access to famous artworks: the sense of touch.

The possibilities don't finish there. Digital technology has allowed us to better envision what painted classical antiquities might have looked like, an effect that could be further enhanced by 3D press. By modulating scale, material, and other features, digital models open up upwards a range of new avenues for exploring and understanding art. As I take recently argued, together with moral and political considerations, these methods could be utilised to help restore our human relationship with history. The possibilities for engagement provided by digital replicas could very well increase our interest in originals, prompting us to compare our experiences of models with their source.

The worry that replicas will lead united states to lose interest in originals is simply speculation, and it's not articulate what supports it. It's not every bit if the ubiquity of reproductions of the Mona Lisa has decreased the size of the throng in the Louvre clamouring to take their own digital photographs. Indeed, this seemingly bizarre practice might indicate something of import about digital replicas and their human relationship to originals.

The philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer has argued that an interest in touch (fifty-fifty if but 'implicit' affect through proximity) helps to explicate our obsession with genuine art and artefacts. Korsmeyer suggests that the feel of 18-carat items has a distinctive phenomenology, though it is 1 that is available to anyone, not just connoisseurs. As she puts it, experiences of genuine historical artefacts 'evoke an impression that gaps of fourth dimension take been momentarily bridged, bringing the past into the present.' While this can be a wondrous feel, there is nothing magical about it. Historically pregnant objects are real-world time-travellers: they simply move forward in fourth dimension, like the rest of us, but their age gives united states a kind of transitive admission to times that are beyond reach for beings bound by physical laws. It's a real connection: historical artefacts were really there, and thus put u.s.a. in touch with the past in a non-metaphorical sense.

It may seem as if I have only identified a specific way in which digital replicas are lacking: contra Thompson's contention, replicas cannot put us in touch with the past, because they actually weren't there. To some extent, I think this is truthful, though it just confirms my original claim that replicas are not meant to be replacements for originals to begin with. Only the behavior of the Louvre photographers also suggest that this determination may be too hasty. They don't want simply any digital photo of the Mona Lisa (some re-create of a copy of a copy): they want the one they took themselves, at the source. One way of explaining this is by noting that information technology decreases the levels of removal between the digital reproduction and the original. It suggests that fifty-fifty where digital reproductions are concerned, people still care about the proximity of the replica, and themselves, to the genuine article.

There are still many difficult and interesting questions posed by digital reproduction of art and artefacts. Who should produce them? Who should ain them (if anyone)? Should they be open admission? What should exist reproduced? But once nosotros acknowledge that the power of digital replicas goes beyond some misconceived attempt to replace originals, we tin can run into that they have the power to raise our date with art in new and exciting means. We should not preclude on that possibility before we have even begun to fully realise its potential.