![]() This is not the authenticity and aura of Benjamin, but a machined authenticity, a synthetic aura. Algorithms and digital platforms are increasingly personal (echo chambers with a sacred connection to the church where one is alone with God), making it possible to mass-reproduce authenticity and aura. The digital reproduction of artworks with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) or synthetic media turns Benjamin's idea of mechanical reproduction and the loss of the aura of a work of art on its head. ![]() Of course, a work of art could be transported, but it never physically appeared in two or more places at once. To what extent is the unique "aura" of a work of art preserved in a plastic potato sack? For Benjamin, the "aura" of a work of art captivated us with its sublimity, with its unique here-and-now moment that was tied to a particular location, such as the Basilica of St. Yesterday, for example, I went down to the market to buy some potatoes and vegetables with a plastic bag that carried the image of Jan Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (Meisje met de parel, 1665). Film and photography were created with reproduction in mind. While the political ideas of this text are by now outdated, Benjamin predicted that film and photography will see mass-reproduced works of art lose their relationship to the original. In 1935, Walter Benjamin published his best-known essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), which was mainly driven by a political agenda: the introduction of new serial mass technologies was seen as a democratic and communist advancement. The paradox lies in the fact that as humans, we are expected to authenticate ourselves to systems and machines designed to produce copies and clones. ![]() For example, through biometric mechanisms, such as facial recognition, captchas like "I'm not a robot" or "I'm a person", electronic identification applications, etc. Paradoxically, however, we live in a culture in which people are increasingly expected to prove their authenticity and origin to machines. It is hard to find institutions and individuals who care more about the authenticity and origin of art objects than art museums, insurance companies and art collectors. Everyone can dream, and must have dreamed his whole life, of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams, and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real." – Jean Baudrillard 1Īrt history is one of few fields that has treated copies as forgeries. "…the imaginary power and wealth of the double – the one in which the strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to itself are played out (heimlich/unheimlich) – rests on its immateriality, on the fact that it is and remains a phantasm. Stefan Peetri's essay on artificial intelligence and deepfakes in contemporary visual culture.
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