Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI

Victor Burgin rereads Walter Benjamin’s classic text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in consideration of the relation of art to digital reproduction and artificial intelligence.

Walter Benjamin’s essay of cultural criticism ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has become a ‘classic’ text, one which resonated through the twentieth century and beyond. In it, Benjamin suggested the mediums of photography and film had dissolved the auratic quality of art. Today, digital technology has dissolved the very category of ‘medium’ itself.

In this pair of succinct and pointed essays, the artist and writer Victor Burgin rereads Benjamin’s 1935 text twice: first to consider the relation of art to digital reproduction, and second to reflect on the further implications of artificial intelligence. Completed by a conversation with media theorist Katrina Sluis, these texts offer a compelling engagement with the image today, arguing that the camera is now profoundly imbricated in that which is not visible.

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