Research Article

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Digital reproducibility in locative New Media Technologies
2023, Vol. 29(5) 1243–1261
media: Atatürk, his mother and © The Author(s) 2023

women’s rights monument, İzmir Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13548565231193122
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Yiğit İnan  and Ahenk Yılmaz 

Yaşar University, Turkey

Abstract
This research delves into the digital reproductions of a specific monument in locative media
employing Walter Benjamin’s conceptual framework presented in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
its Technological Reproducibility’. The monument in question, namely, the recently reconstructed
and rescaled Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Right Monument in İzmir, Turkey serves as an
exemplary case for examining the reproducibility of monuments within both physical and digital
environments. Its significance lies not only in the ongoing political and scholarly debate revolving
around the decision of local municipality to undertake its reconstruction, but also in its growing
popularity in social media as a consequence of this debate. The analyses of digital reproductions of
the monument in the paper are twofold: The first gives insights into the effects of digital re-
productions on the aura and authenticity of the monument in locative media. The second focuses on
how the local municipality and individual users instrumentalize these productions to perform official
and mundane rituals and aestheticize not only their own political agendas but also their everyday life.

Keywords
Aestheticization, aura, authenticity, digital reproduction, Instagram, locative media, monument,
social media, Walter Benjamin

Introduction
Situated on the coastline of Karşıyaka, an upper-income district of İzmir, which is the third biggest
and acclaimed ‘the most Western city’ of Turkey, Atatürk, Annesi ve Kadın Hakları Anıtı [Atatürk,
His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument] often sets the usual background of public events
organized and promoted by the local municipality on its official Instagram account. In most of these
images, the monument is reproduced more than once because its shared photographs are ac-
companied by its graphically redesigned image as the logo of Karşıyaka Municipality (see Figure 1).

Corresponding author:
Yiğit İnan, Graduate School, Yaşar University, Universite Cad. No. 37-39, Agacli Yol, Izmir, Turkey.
Email: ygtinan@gmail.com
1244 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

What makes these digital reproductions even more interesting is that the monument situated on the
site today is a reproduction of its precedent per se. The first monument stood at the center of the
Constitution Square for more than four decades, until the local municipality decided to demolish and
reproduce it despite the majority of adverse public opinions. This highly debated process boosted
the popularity of the monument on social media. It increased the number of geotagged images that
combine the context of the monument with the content produced by the visitors through hashtags,
comments, descriptions, and images of their own, their vehicles, daily practices, and alike. What we
see today in the posts geotagged at the monument are the digital reproductions of the physical,
which is itself already a reproduction par excellence, reminding us of Walter Benjamin’s seminal
work ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (Benjamin, 2010).
Therefore, this paper aims to revisit the key concepts delineated in this essay in order to get insight
into the new layers of information produced in the hybrid space of digital and physical through
shared content geotagged at the digital location of Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights
Monument on Instagram.
In ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’ (1964), French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry claims that
‘electronic signal’ has the potential to close the distance between the user and things. Moreover, he
argues that ‘just as water, gas, and electricity’ that ‘are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy
our needs’, we are likely to ‘be supplied with visual- or auditorily images, which will appear and
disappear at a simple movement of the hand’ (Valéry, 1964). Echoing Valéry’s description of ‘simple
movement of the hand’, locative media today offers access to layers of information in the forms of
images, videos, texts, and alike. Within the interface of locative media, geotagging attaches digital
material to information of physical location, although the medium itself is ubiquitous (Humphreys
and Liao, 2011: 409; Thielmann, 2010: 1).
What happens presently with the advances in digital technologies highly resembles the effects of
the revolutions on reproduction techniques at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. While the
dictionary meaning of reproduction ‘is a copy of a work of art, especially a print or photograph of a
painting’ (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2021b), Walter Benjamin’s thesis on ‘technological

Figure 1. Digital reproductions of the monument and its silhouette. Source: Screenshot of a post on the
official Instagram account of the Municipality of Karşıyaka.
İnan and Yılmaz 1245

reproducibility’ folded new meanings to the word itself. Scholars from various fields use the term
‘digital reproduction’ to carry Benjamin’s theses to their reception on digitalization (Davis, 1995).
The scope of these studies ranges from printing technologies (Grishko et al., 2020), photography
(Sassoon, 1998; Whyte, 2009; Romanato, 2017; Josephy, 2020), video (Van Dijck, 2005), film and
cinema productions (Mattock 2010), digital mobile media (Agista and Handajani, 2019), material
culture, archive and digital history (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015; Robinson, 2016; Choi, 2018;
Goulding and Derbaix, 2019), art and criticism (Hall, 1999; Latham, 2004; Burns, 2010; Frischer,
2011; Emison, 2021), music (Adler, 2012; Green, 2017), literature (Stroud, 2003; Bury, 2019) to
theology (Gedicks and Hendrix, 2005), politics (Breckenridge, 2014), and education (Peim, 2007).
There is also scholarly research that revolves predominantly around Walter Benjamin’s own theses
and concepts such as ‘thought image’ (Tschofen, 2016), ‘storyteller’ (Gratch and Crick, 2015),
‘aura’ (Akin and Kipcak, 2016; Betancourt, 2015; Humphries, 2020), and ‘technological repro-
duction’ (Sigurdsson, 2001; Bruce, 2000), as well as the ones that focus on the effects of digital
technologies on spatial reproductions (Bolter et al., 2006; Brillembourg et al., 2016; Schweibenz,
2018; Kane, 2020).
Despite the presence of this vast research, none of these studies concentrated on the effects of
locative media technologies on a digitally reproduced urban element. In order to bridge this gap, this
paper focuses on digital content geotagged at Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument
on Instagram through the basic concepts instrumentalized by Benjamin in his essay: aura, au-
thenticity, rituals, and aestheticization of politics. With its location tag feature, Instagram filters an
excessive amount of content created by diverse groups of users according to the locational in-
formation embedded in geotags. Today, the location tag of Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights
Monument on Instagram contains more than four thousand eight hundred accessible digital re-
productions. With this aspect, it serves as an open digital library of imagery and textual information
about the monument to any user. Moreover, without the necessity of being physically there at all
times, it allows one to virtually witness how the municipality and individuals use the monument and
space around it. Therefore, this study utilizes the monument’s location tag on Instagram to analyze
the digital reproductions of Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument.

The monument
In May 1967, an association dedicated to the six principles of Atatürk, the founder of the modern
Republic of Turkey, initiated a competition to build a monument to be opened on the 50th an-
niversary of the Republic. Sculptor Tamer Başoğlu and architect Erkal Güngören’s design proposal
won the competition (see Figure 2). After 2 years of construction, the monument was opened with a
public ceremony in 26 October 1973. Named after Atatürk’s contributions to women’s rights in
social, cultural, and political life, the monument consisted of three main parts; seven white vertical
plaques that emerge from the landscape as a symbol of the rise of a nation, a bronze belt with women
figures and a radially organized landscape around the vertical plaques (Mimarlar Odası İzmir Şubesi
Yönetim Kurulu, 2017).
After its opening in 1973, the monument was embraced by the community and started to be the
stage for national celebrations on the local scale. Over time, it has turned into a symbol whose
silhouette started to appear on display windows of local shopkeepers and became the municipality’s
logo (Güngören, 2015). However, due to its location near the seashore, which makes its materiality
vulnerable to corrosion, it took heavy damage over time that made its structural integrity debatable
(Mimarlar Odası İzmir Şubesi Yönetim Kurulu, 2017). To overcome this vulnerability and structural
weakness, local architects and associations proposed conducting a comprehensive restoration
1246 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

Figure 2. Early years of Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument. Source: Salt Research,
Güngören Family Archive.

process (Pasin, 2017). Despite the contradictory voices and especially objections from the İzmir
Branch of the Chamber of Architects in Turkey, underlying the monument’s value as a modern
architectural heritage, the municipality abruptly demolished it in 2017 and promptly reconstructed a
new one in 2018 (Güngören, 2018). The mayor of Karşıyaka, Hüseyin Mutlu Akpınar, who is a
representative of the main opposition party in Turkey, which Atatürk himself founded during the
early republican era, announced this destruction and reconstruction process as follows:

The meaning of the monument that roses in Karşıyaka is deeper today. By renovating, raising, illu-
minating, enlarging the landscape, and increasing its function, we will draw attention to one of the
biggest scars (violence against women, fundamental rights, and freedoms) in Turkey… Our aim is, while
raising the monument, to increase and improve women’s rights (Demirci, 2015).

Even though the words above appear politically correct in terms of the struggles that women have
to face on a daily basis in the country, and also the monument was reproduced according to the same
design layout except for the scale and the addition of a museum, the demolishment and reproduction
heated up a political and scholarly discussion. Being the tallest commemorative structure arrayed
along the coastline of İzmir with its doubled scale, turned the monument into the focus of public
attention, especially on social media. As a ‘new interfaces of everyday life’ (Farman, 2013b: 86–87)
social media allows its users to create ‘transmedia stories’ that ‘blur the line between story world and
physical world’ (Ritchie, 2013: 53) to ‘give meaning to their location history as an active force in
their everyday life’ (Frith and Kalin, 2016: 46). As a favorite backdrop for the shared contents, the
location tag of the monument has turned into one of these places where transmedia stories are
İnan and Yılmaz 1247

written through digital reproductions of not only essential moments of official ceremonies or
national holidays but also individuals’ mundane use as a new interface of everyday life.

Locative media in the age of digital reproducibility

When Paul Valéry forecasted ‘conquest of ubiquity’ with the utilization of the ‘electronic signal’ in
1928, he asserted that ‘at first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of work of art will
be affected’ (Valéry, 1964). Almost a century after Valéry’s essay, from most mundane things to
high-end artistic productions, society and everyday life practices have become inseparable from
mediated experience and the ubiquity of the electronic signal (Kane, 2020: 99). Moreover,
‘contemporary senses of space and time’ have become ‘inextricable from a media-saturated en-
vironment’ (Kane, 2020: 100). Our ‘simple movement of the hand’ in Valéry’s vision does not only
bring ‘amazing changes’ to works of art but also to our very notion of space (Kane, 2020: 101).
Quoting Valéry’s words, Walter Benjamin (1969: 218) in his artwork essay claims that it took ‘more
than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in conditions of production’.
Unquestionably, the change to what Benjamin refers is the invention of new ways of communi-
cation, like photography, that ‘challenged prior modes of perception’, and especially film, which
‘changed reality’ (Zeller, 2012: 75). Even though Benjamin acknowledges the dangers of these
drastic changes regarding the aestheticization of war and politics, his approach to technology and
technological reproducibility was constructive and optimistic. Since, he considers the new notion of
art that emerged by the age of technological reproducibility as a counterforce to the aestheticization
of politics and technology (Benjamin, 2010: 36).
Indeed, the practice of reproduction for artworks was not new even when Benjamin wrote his
essay. In antique civilizations, statues and busts had been reproduced through hand craftsmanship to
send and use at different places. As Benjamin (2010: 12) points out, manual labored ‘replicas were
made by pupils in practicing for their craft, by masters in disseminating their works, and, finally, by
third parties in the pursuit of profit’. In early to mid-19th Century, museums across the world started
to manufacture copies of monuments made of plaster and poured into casts to exhibit them out of
their contexts (Lending, 2018). However, the ability to mechanically reproduce works of art ac-
curately in the early 20th Century, ‘had reached a level that made it virtually impossible to dis-
tinguish between the original and its copy’ (Groys, 2003; as cited in Zeller, 2012: 71). According to
Benjamin, speed and acceleration were two main characteristics that differ mechanical reproduction
from the manual reproduction, underlining the difference between reproducibility by hand and by
technology in terms of authenticity. To him, ‘the authentic work retains its full authority in the face
of a reproduction made by hand, which it generally brands a forgery, this is not the case with
technological reproduction’. Because firstly, technological reproducibility can make some infor-
mation in the original that are normally impossible to perceive or recognize for an individual,
perceptible (Benjamin, 2010: 14). Secondly, decontextualization from time and space provides a
reproduction with a potential of accessibility to a larger audience. Nevertheless, Benjamin (1969:
220) underlines that these new opportunities do not change the fact that ‘even the most perfect
reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space’. Moreover, the
detachment from time and space certainly ‘withers’ the aura of the artwork (Benjamin, 1969: 221).
Due to this decontextualization, however, ‘occurrences and things that before only be perceived
by a limited number of physically present individuals’ become accessible ‘in a different time and
space’ and ‘presented to an entirely different audience’ (Sigurdsson, 2001: 55); their ‘unique
existence’ is replaced with the ‘mass existence’ through numerous perceptions (Benjamin, 2010:
14). With their ‘mass existence’, reproductions change ‘the relations between audience and image,
1248 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

which in turn, alters the nature of auratic experience’ (Humphries, 2018: 159). In his own words,
Benjamin (2010: 29) defines this new mode of perception as ‘simultaneous collective perception’,
which is an experience that painting has never provided, but film does. For example, a painting that
is unique and partly mobile ‘could now be experienced at the cinema or on a postcard’; moreover, its
each reproduction alters ‘the future experience of the original’ (Bruce, 2000: 67). Benjamin
elaborates on these new experiences as follows:

Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed
to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the
split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. With
the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended (2010: 30).

Referring to these new experiences, Benjamin underlines that just like ‘the mode of existence’,
the ‘mode of perception’ of individuals constantly alters during societal transformations. Aligning
with this fact, advances in technological reproducibility at the end of the nineteenth century also
resulted in drastic changes in the perception of masses (Benjamin, 2010: 15). Contrary to the
previous changes, ‘mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical de-
pendence on ritual’, which had always been the ‘total function of work of art’. In this process, the
‘cult value’ of the artwork has been replaced with ‘exhibition value’ to mesmerize the masses
(Benjamin, 1969: 224). The decontextualization in reproduction transcends to a higher level with
digital reproducibility, especially with the never-before-experienced extent of the ubiquity of digital
media. As a result, while detached from their context, works of art become observable anytime,
anywhere (Schweibenz, 2018).
With the proliferation of locative media, not only works of art, but digital reproductions of urban
elements become ubiquitously experienceable as well. These digital reproductions ‘offer people
new ways to interact with and through urban space’ (Humphreys and Liao, 2011: 407), and they are
‘charged with powerful social and psychological implications’ (Davis, 1995: 382). Because, with its
‘ubiquitous and pervasive’ nature (Galloway and Ward, 2006: 3; Lemos, 2009: 91), locative media
‘fundamentally mediate the everyday practices of urban life, subtly shaping senses of place as
particular interpretations of events and locations foregrounded or side-landed’. This not only alters
the embodied space but ‘the cultural objects we are producing and interacting with are also being
transformed’ (Farman, 2013b: 17).
As the layers of digital information geotagged at one place become accessible ubiquitously to
everyone anytime, the perception of place per se changes. According to Lemos (2009), ‘[w]hat we
are seeing now are several examples of integrated, mixed process that merge electronic and physical
territories, creating new forms and new senses of place’. As Bareither argues, on certain locations,
digital image ‘changes the way in which the place is perceived by others, potentially on a global
scale’ (2021: 588). Similarly, Farman describes how his perception is affected by locative media as
‘I see the landscape around me differently’ (Farman, 2013a: 12). This new digital reproducibility
depends on not only the detachment from the unique spatial condition but also from a temporal one.
Graham et al. (2013: 497) describe it as ‘timeless power’, as locative media flattens time, thus
dissolves ‘temporal meaning within augmentations’. This augmentation in digital technologies
transforms, if not revolutionizes, acts of reproducing space. Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı (2021: 208)
claims that ‘the convergence of physical and digital space through locational data at particular
geotags on social media’ provided individuals with more opportunities to reproduce spaces with
their own “images and symbols.”’
İnan and Yılmaz 1249

Instagram ‘amplifies the reproduction process’ with its ability to instantly reproduce an unlimited
number of contents, which changed ‘the traffic of photos, videos, and stories distribution’ (Agista
and Handajani 2019). While this ‘traffic of photos’ occurs between followers who may know each
other, features such as hashtags and location tags add one more layer of network to the visibility of
images in the algorithm. Though what has been produced through digital reproduction is fun-
damentally decontextualized from the physical, such features tie digitally reproduced content within
the context. This is similar to what happened to plaster monuments of the 19th Century. Lending
(2018) describes plaster monuments at museums as decontextualized, dismembered imitations that
often come with rewritten context. In a similar fashion, reproductions of the Warsaw Ghetto
Monument were built in New York and Jerusalem with different goals and messages than the
original. For those reproductions, James E. Young (1989: 98) states that ‘in its many echoes and
reproductions, the Ghetto Monument’s image has become a kind of memorial currency, an all-
purpose iconographic tender whose value fluctuates in every new time and place’. In this per-
spective, the digitally reproduced images of the monument on social media can be considered as a
‘monument currency’ whose value fluctuates with its ever-changing meaning at its converged
physical and digital location. What follows is the reading of these fluctuations in digital repro-
ductions geotagged at Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument on Instagram through
the concepts of aura, authenticity, rituals, and aestheticization of politics.

Aura and authenticity of digitally reproduced monument

While dictionary meaning of aura is ‘the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround
and be generated by a person, thing, or place’ (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2021a), in ‘Little
History of Photography’, Benjamin (1999a) describes it as a halo that encompasses the person who
poses for a portrait in early black and white photography. In the ‘Artwork Essay’, Benjamin (2010:
15) re-introduces the concept as ‘a strange tissue of space and time’ which he elaborates as a ‘unique
appearance of a distance, however near it may be’. He also depicts it as, ‘if while resting on a
summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which
casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch’ (Benjamin,
1969: 222–3). In his other writings, the aura is mentioned as ‘a form of perception that…endows a
phenomenon’ (Hansen, 2008: 339) that has the ‘ability to look back at us’ (Benjamin, 2006: 338) as
the ‘distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 314).
In the age of digital reproduction, being ‘supple and elastic’, aura ‘has stretched far beyond the
boundaries of Benjamin’s prophecy into the rich realm of reproduction itself’ (Davis, 1995: 381).
However, ‘the aura’ aforesaid here refers not to the ‘aura of the physical’ but to the ‘aura of
information’ existing in the digital realm, in other words, the ‘digital aura’ (Betancourt, 2015: 57).
Indeed, each geotagged digital reproduction proliferates and spreads the information regarding the
monument across locative media users even far from its physical location as the term ‘reproduction’
does not solely refer to uploading content but also the ability to recall it virtually on a device’s screen
ubiquitously, through scrolling, clicking, or tapping. Therefore, the information reproduced in
locative media breaks through the limit of the monument’s locale in the form of ubiquitous data to be
experienced by a larger and diversified audience. Thus, unlike the aura of the physical, aura of
information does not decay when a digital object is reproduced; on the contrary, it spreads. As
Betancourt claims, in digital media, technological reproducibility becomes ‘the source and vehicle
for a work’s aura’ as ‘the more fully a work is disseminated, the greater the aura’ (Betancourt, 2015:
57).
1250 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

Figure 3. A sample of thumbnails of Instagram posts geotagged as ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’. Source: Screenshots of
thumbnails of open access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’ on Instagram.

When locational tags are combined with specific popular hashtags, not only the targeted users but
also haphazard ones become potential digital visitors. According to Shirvanee, (2006: 2), ‘there is a
viscosity of space that forms between strangers with locative media, creating landscapes charged
with traces of others that have inhabited the same space’. If the density of the media geotagged at
location increases, the viscosity between users causes the interaction of two or more strangers.
Consequently, with the increased interaction, locative media becomes a medium that allows ‘si-
multaneous collective perception’ of the monument’s digital aura, which is loaded with the ability to
alter the future experiences of the physical one. Due to this sprawling visibility and ‘simultaneous
collective perception’, the flow of the geotag accumulates a high number of digital reproductions
that reflects the everyday life practices or transmedia stories of a wide variety of user profiles from
local vendors, shopkeepers to daily visitors (see Figure 3).
Benjamin (1969: 221) asserts that ‘the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of
authenticity’, and the authenticity of a work of art is ‘the essence of all that transmissible from its
beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has ex-
perienced’. According to this framework, it is possible to argue that authenticity comes into question
İnan and Yılmaz 1251

Figure 4. Digital reproductions of the monument from its pre-destruction, destruction, construction, and
post-reconstruction state. Source: Screenshots of open access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka
Anıt’ on Instagram.

when an artwork is reproduced not only manually or mechanically but also digitally. The au-
thenticity of the monument vanished with its demolition and the one stands there is not authentic
anymore. Moreover, with the ‘timeless power’ of digital reproductions, this authenticity is tangled
even more in the digital realm. Because through the location tag, a user may encounter with the
images of the monument taken in different time periods, from its original form in pre-destruction
period, to post-reconstruction (see Figure 4). Since the new monument erected right on the same
spot, with the same name and almost the same form, due to various optical illusions, misinformative
texts, and deceptive hashtags, geotagged digital reproductions blur the distinctness and solitude of
both the old and new into a coalesced and hybrid image. Therefore, in hybrid space of physical and
digital domains, the authenticity of the monument, which roots in the ‘unique existence’, is replaced
with the ‘mass existence’ of its digital reproductions.
With the user’s ability to ‘upload, download or modify iconic contents’, through digital re-
productions, an image can develop ‘an independent story’ (Romanato, 2017: 1, 7). Moreover, such
images ‘can highlight only the certain aspects of its original object, distort it through the use of
special lenses, or cut up and paste together disconnected parts…through photomontage’
(Sigurdsson, 2001: 56). New meanings occur, as the users ‘adjust the image size and the resolution,
to focus in on minute details, to extract portions of an image, to combine one image with another,
and surround the image with a new textual or visual content’ (Bruce, 2000: 68). With the con-
venience of reproducing ‘an infinite number of any digital work’ (Betancourt, 2015: 41) and endless
possibilities of manipulations, digital content can be ‘reproduce[d] in this manner forever, millions
and millions of times’ (Davis, 1995: 382).
With such control over digital reproductions, the content generation processes of locative media
applications grant previously passive users new authorship, evoking what Benjamin observed in the
age of mechanical reproduction. Users gain agency through the location tag, which works as a
virtual panel open to everybody, democratizing the monument’s hybrid environment. While en-
hancing the users’ agency and making the site’s intangible social and cultural values visible, locative
media also opens up a vast potential for reproduction based on manipulation, questioning the
authenticity of the meaning and function of the monument. Through montages, users create posts
that reflect the monument’s significance from their point of view, or benefit from its monumentality
to send messages through locative media (see Figure 5).
1252 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

Figure 5. A collage of digital reproductions of the monument with montaged texts. Source: Screenshots of
the posts under the official Instagram account of the Municipality of Karşıyaka and the location tag of the
monument.

Moreover, the name attributed to its geotag on Instagram, which is ‘Karşıyaka Monument’,
excludes its function to commemorate Atatürk’s mother and women’s rights, even Atatürk himself.
Instead, the name of the district is montaged into the name of geotag. In addition to this, some of the
digital reproductions also montage their contexts to the monument’s image. For instance, fans of
Karşıyaka Sports Club utilize it to reflect their clubs’ colors, combining green and red from the
environment with the monument in different compositions (see Figure 6).
In all these reproductions, the authenticity of the real object, the function, and the very reason
behind the construction of the monument at its physical location, totally vanishes. Its ‘cult value’ as
a cultural heritage, based on its commemorative function, which Benjamin attributed as a condition
in which ‘the cult of remembrance’ finds its ‘the last refuge’ (Benjamin, 2010: 19), turns into
‘exhibition value’. The original objective behind the construction of the monument, which is to
memorialize Atatürk, his mother and women rights hardly becomes the topic of the posts on locative
media. The authenticity of the original monument has long since vanished with its demolition and
has been embedded in digital media’s location tag.

Rituals and aestheticization of politics in locative media

The utilization of ‘fascist propaganda films in the 1930s’ and the mass media technologies as part of
the political entertainment industry culminate in Benjamin’s thesis of ‘aestheticization of politics’
(Kang, 2010: 11). In his essay, Benjamin describes the aestheticization of politics as ‘uses of art in
ceremonies, political speeches, on the staging and communication of political events through mass
media channels’ to mesmerize the public (Kurylo, 2020: 631). With the technological reproduction,
the ‘quantity has been transmuted into quality’, and the ‘greatly increased mass of participants has
procured a change in the mode of participation’ (Benjamin, 1969: 239). Since, as Kang (2010: 11–12)
İnan and Yılmaz 1253

Figure 6. Instagram posts that montage the colors of the local sports club to the monument’s surface. Source:
Screenshots of open access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’ on Instagram.

states, ‘mass reproduction relates to the emergence and transformation of the masses themselves’.
Jay (1992: 45) describes this as ‘the victory of the spectacle over the public sphere’. Rituals become
especially prominent in this process of mesmerizing the public through spectacle.
While the dictionary meaning of the ritual is ‘a series of actions or type of behavior regularly and
invariably followed’ (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2021c), in his artwork essay, Benjamin
(1969: 224) described it as ‘original use value’. The running event held in the monument’s vicinity
on the 10th of November, Atatürk’s annual commemoration of his passing is one of the examples of
the ‘use value’ of monuments described by Riegl. Use value of the monuments comprise of ongoing
rituals of groups and individuals, ‘as long as the monument’s existence is not threatened’ (Riegl,
1996: 79). The event starts at Constitution Square, where the monument is situated, and ends at the
grave of Zübeyde Hanım, Atatürk’s mother. Once a year, digital reproductions of this running event
shared on locative media by the attendees to perpetuate their respect for Atatürk and Zübeyde Hanım
by means of images with the addition of hashtags, descriptions, and comments. On other important
days, like the Foundation of the Republic of Turkey, Victory Day, or during local and national
protests, individuals in the crowd also take selfies or give poses for others’ photographs to share
them online (see Figure 7).
The mayor, who decided to replicate the monument at its current location with a doubled size and
an addition with a museum, states in his autobiography that he made his decision during one of the
national celebrations, when he realized the monument’s terrible physical condition, announcing to
his officers ‘[w]e demolish, and rebuild a new one, even more magnificently’ (Akpınar, 2017: 202).
The loss of the original monument’s aura and authenticity in this magnified replica does not refrain
the local municipality to utilize its ritualistic function. The official posts of Karşıyaka Municipality
that contain the monument on Instagram to reproduce national rituals surely address the masses in
line with its political agenda. For instance, via its official Instagram account, the municipality
regularly shares posts for important days such as celebrations of National Sovereignty and
Children’s Day, World Bicycle Day, and International Dance Day. In these posts, the monument is
included as a background object with its ‘magnificence’. Furthermore, its nighttime illumination is
utilized as an element of montage to the monument’s image as the monument is lit with colored
lighting according to the day the images were shared, with blue for getting attention on World
Autism Awareness Day, and purple on International Women’s Day.
Indeed, the colored silhouette of the monument has been featured as the logo of Karşıyaka
Municipality for a long time. Over the years, the logo incorporated every event, organization,
1254 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

Figure 7. A collage of digital reproductions of the gatherings around the monument. Source: Screenshots of
open access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’ on Instagram.

meeting, rally, aid, and field mission conducted by the municipality with the silhouette of the
monument. Therefore, each time when the municipality shares a post, the logo, thus the image of the
monument, is digitally reproduced regardless of whether the post’ content is related to the
monument (see Figure 8). Being repeated several times through social media posts, the image of the
monument becomes a ‘monument currency’ and aestheticization of politics turns into virality of
politics.
Photomontages done by the municipality’s official Instagram account amplifies this ‘monument
currency’ even more. For instance, on the eve of the new year celebrations of 2016, a post shared by
the Municipality, blends the image of the monument with the New Year tree by replacing its white
vertical plaques with the needle-leaved texture of the tree. In 2017, an image of the monument was
added to the inside of a snow globe with a Santa Claus hat positioned at the top, and in the post of
2018, again, parts of the New Year tree were wrapped around the image of the monument (see
Figure 9). Such posts neither memorialize nor signify anything about the monument. Instead, the
image of the monument is pulled away from its cult value and flowed within the daily life posts. The
virality of politics becomes an instrument of this new currency.
Notwithstanding the political role of these official rituals and self-organized rallies, the digital
reproductions also opened up a way to reflect the mundane use of the monument. As Kim (2017: 505)
İnan and Yılmaz 1255

Figure 8. Digital Reproductions of the Silhouette of the Monument. Source: Screenshots of the posts of the
official Instagram account of the Municipality of Karşıyaka.

Figure 9. New Year celebration posts with montaged images of the monument. Source: Screenshots of the
posts of the official Instagram account of the Municipality of Karşıyaka.

asserts, in the age of digital reproduction, with the enhanced accessibility and interaction of the
Internet, ‘people can create new stories’ and ‘set their own rituals through the interactions’ with
others. Unlike the digital reproductions of official rituals, these include everyday uses that represent
individuals’ interactions with the converged space as part of everyday life practices. They mostly
happen when their daily practices, like strolling, running, cycling, fishing, etc., are halted for a
moment around the monument and crowned with a photo filled with new stories. These digital
reproductions utilize both the physical monument and its location tag to endorse one’s presence in
locative media. As Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı (2021: 200) assert, ‘[m]anaging what to present on
social media, where to check in, and what to share about a space are new ways of identity practices’.
According to them, individuals carefully tailor the spatial aspects of their Instagram posts according
to the social norms of the groups that they prefer to be included (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2021:
208). The abundance of tailored content on the location tag shows that the converged space
produced around the monument is one of the spaces where individual users perform their ‘new ways
of identity practices’ and purposely become part of visitors’ selfies and distant poses (see Figure 10).
In these digital reproductions, with its exhibition value, the monument completes the background
as a landmark in visitors’ selfies and distant positions, and users who pose in front of the monument
create new stories, somewhat contradicting its original use value. This photographic composition of
digital copies can even be observed in shared posts with a variety of stories and ambitions. Bicycles
and motorcycles, for example, are used to montage users’ daily life actions to photographs placed at
the geotag. The way these posts are presented and vehicles are placed within the frame show that
locative media influences and sets a template for digital reproductions and everyday life practices of
visitors around the monument. As a more specific example, it is possible to witness that people’s
1256 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

Figure 10. A collage of selfies and distant poses of the visitors with the monument in the background. Source:
Screenshots of open access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’ on Instagram.

Figure 11. Pose of the users with the caught fish in front of the monument. Source: Screenshots of open
access posts under the location tag of ‘Karşıyaka Anıt’ on Instagram.
İnan and Yılmaz 1257

everyday fishing practices has evolved into a friendly rivalry among fishermen at the monument’s
location tag on Instagram (see Figure 11).
Holding the caught fish as a trophy and sharing the image of this moment on locative media as an
achievement seem to become a ritual as much important as the practice itself. In these posts, the
image of the monument is again utilized in the background albeit as a podium this time. In this way,
with proof of location, fishermen circulate their photographs to compete and even reach out the ones
outside of this competition. The majority of these digital reproductions of the monument spread via
locative media, resulting in a ‘simultaneous collective perception’ that is fully separated from its
‘original use value’, but laden with many new prosaic uses, even capable of influencing its future
physical use.

Conclusion
On Instagram, thousands of reproductions of Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Rights Monument
freely float, detached from the monument’s unique physical existence but highly bonded to its
location tag. Selfies, family, and group photos, or ads of the local vendors geotagged at the
monument suggests that the location, either being digital or physical, is more significant for these
posts rather than the original objective behind the monument’s construction. While doing so,
however, with their timeless power, they blur the monument’s authenticity into a ‘mass existence’.
The digital reproductions make some of the monument’s spatial aspects visible and accessible to a
diverse and larger audience within a digital aura. Searching for the authenticity of the monument in
these digital reproductions becomes futile because the users mostly manipulate the image of the
monument to reflect their own narratives upon it in locative media. In this process, the digital aura of
the monument is embodied through its location tag, which stands as the sole authentic aspect of the
digital reproductions.
Conversely, local municipality keeps the commemorative value of the monument alive by
organizing annual events and ceremonies on national holidays, posting snapshots of the crowd that
gathered to pay respects to struggles and hassles those experienced in achieving various rights in
modern republic to reveal theoretically eternally and ubiquitously through Instagram. In these posts,
the Municipality digitally reproduces the silhouette of the monument, which is extensively used to
set the background to address the masses and especially the local community. With this process, the
‘aestheticization of politics’ transforms into the virality of politics in locative media and digital
reproduction becomes an instrument to diffuse any political goal in a medium used by diverse users
in daily practice as a monument currency. However, what digital reproducibility differs from
technological reproducibility in terms of addressing the masses and the utilization of reproduction
for rituals unfolds especially in its use for daily rituals. The broad use of the silhouette of the
monument as a background in the images of unofficial fishing contests or motorbike activities
geotagged at the location of the monument are the acts of the aestheticization of everyday to address
particular groups with the ability to alter the future use of the physical monument.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1258 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 29(5)

ORCID iDs
Yiğit İnan  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2096-1266
Ahenk Yilmaz  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0163-135X

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Author Biographies
Yiğit İnan currently works as research assistant at the Department of Architecture of İzmir Institute
of Technology, Turkey. Inan graduated from Yaşar University, Department of Architecture in
2020 and continues his research and Master’s studies at the same university and department.
Ahenk Yılmaz currently works as associate professor at the Department of Architecture of Yaşar
University, Izmir, Turkey. Yılmaz graduated from DEU, Department of Architecture, then she
received her Master’s (2001) and PhD (2008) degrees in architecture from Izmir Institute of
Technology. In her Post-Doc studies, Yılmaz undertook a collaborative research project titled as
‘Memorialization of War’ at Brighton University, UK funded by TUBITAK and Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Arts of Yale University.