Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats is an essay that explores the close relation between practices of appropriation and the questioning of authorship, from the avantgardes to Post-Internet, going through Postmodernism, 70s-80s subcultural movements, net.art and the Surfing Club generation.
Written in Italian, the essay is made of thousands of text quotations mined from hundreds of papers, glued together in a sort of “crazy quilt” that nonetheless holds a linear narrative. The writing technique employed is usually referred to as patch-writing, here used to speak about appropriation through an act of appropriation, and to make a statement about the information overload era we have come to inhabit.