Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) published in Germany in 1935 and in a revised edition in 1939, was translated into English in 1968 in a collection of his essays entitled Illuminations, and edited by Hannah Arendt. The essay argues that with each new era of reproductive technologies (manual, mechanical, industrial), a new relationship between original and copy is born, and that the status and function of "originals" is progressively attenuated.

Articles

Jules Law, “Victorian Virtual Reality”