Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI
Published on 1. November 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
978-1-917651-34-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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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Person
Victor Burgin is an artist and writer. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s through his contributions to the first museum shows of 'conceptual art'. The next major exhibition of his work will take place at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2023. Burgin's first book on photography is the edited collection Thinking Photography (1982); more recently, he published The Camera: Essence and Apparatus (MACK 2018). His other theory books include The End of Art Theory (1986), In/Different Spaces (1996) and The Remembered Film (2004). His monographs and photo/text books include Between (1986/ MACK 2020), Components of a Practice (2008) and Afterlife (2019). Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz; Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London; and Professor of Visual Culture, Department of Art & Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.