AI Art After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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The above image was created with stable diffusion using the prompt 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' which is the title of Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 essay. I'm not sure what Benjamin would say about the recent emergence of AI art. My guess is that he'd claim it robbed commoners of something crucial and served the politics of the elite. Then again, had he lived in our era, maybe Benjamin would have seen things differently.

In my mind, technology and art have always been inseparable. The word technology itself comes from the Greek techne and logos. The term techne means art, while the term logos means word or expression. So a basic definition of technology could be simply an expression of art. But this is so broad as to be nearly meaningless, and it doesn't really seem to apply to most of the ways technology is talked about.

Considering logos more carefully, it becomes clear that it's all about systems. A word is nothing without a system of language. An expression expresses nothing outside of a system of interpretations. So communicating an art implies first translating the art into a system of common meanings. For this reason, I see technology as the systematization of an art for the purpose of understanding.

Of course, technology isn't merely this systematization. It's also the products and practices that embody the systematized art. That means that technology encompasses everything from ancient techniques of flint knapping to code running on smart phones. It also implies that those who oppose technology in general are woefully misguided, because our species has been interwoven with its tech since the very beginning.

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Learning traditional oil painting involved studying techniques and practices that, if correctly applied, could create a work of art that would last 500 years. The image above above is a closeup from a larger painting, done in oil on linen. This artwork took me several weeks to complete and will almost certainly outlive me. It's worth a couple thousand bucks and once I sell it, I'll never see another penny from it.

In contrast, generating a piece of stunning AI art takes a few minutes and the results can be immediately minted into an NFT listed on global markets. If someone buys one of my NFTs and resells it, I receive a percentage of that sale and all future sales of the work. And theoretically, a piece of digital art stored on computer systems could last just as long or longer as its traditionally painted counterpart.

I don't pretend to understand what all of this means. But my own art has become increasingly digital in recent years, and there are good reasons for that. First among these is exposure. Far more people look at art online than go to physical galleries. And galleries themselves seem to be on the decline, along with the traditional art world in general.

As the tech continues to advance, deepfakes will become startlingly convincing and images made by computer programs will saturate the web's visual space. That much is obvious, though its implications are anything but. At this point, the whole idea of mechanical reproduction seems quaint in the face of digital technologies. Can you even imagine arguing about the politics of lithography, as Benjamin did? Today's arguments about AI art will probably seem comparably irrelevant in a hundred years.

Read my novels:

See my NFTs:

  • Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
  • History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
  • Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
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It would be interesting to hear what Walter Benjamin would say about the aura of AI art. And what an awesome AI art image you've created here.

For this reason, I see technology as the systematization of an art for the purpose of understanding.

You got me thinking with this one.

There are a lot of conversations about the pros and cons of AI art. Another interesting conversation is on how AI art can expand the definition of what art even means, as society and culture evolve?

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For sure. I guess I see AI as a fundamentally new artistic medium. One that can produce incredible things from a very small number of creative choices.

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