A dead plant photographed in the rain through a window from afternoon to evening

There is this chalkboard at school in the room where one of my classes meets. Over the last semester, there has been something compelling (and occasionally coincidentally relevant) written on this chalkboard by a professor - Dominique Nahas - who uses the room the day before my class meets. This morning, I was greeted with some surprisingly relevant text:

“Aura” depends on two factors:

1. Presence of a tradition (stable framework of experience in which an object is embedded)
2. The continuous existence of a unique object across tradition

Okay - so it’s an art school, and it shouldn’t really be all that surprising to find notes on Benjamin’s writings there - that’s not actually coincidental at all. However, I was just thinking about the aura last night, and now have to reconsider my silly bottled water analogy.

Oh - and the video doesn’t have anything to do with anything (unless you count the fact that YouTube employs object and embed tags in the HTML they give their users for posting videos).