Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI
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Paperback with flap
12.5 x 19.5 cm,
96 pages
ISBN 978-1-917651-34-9
Published by MACK, October 2025
Victor Burgin
17,00€
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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Victor Burgin gained prominence in the late 1960s as a conceptual artist, noted at the time as a political photographer of the left, and was later nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986. His interest in both concept and material has led to a unique and innovative approach to photography, manifested through photo-text works, prints, digital video and 3D modelling. Each form becomes a vehicle for an enquiry into the materiality of the medium itself. Following his work as a political photographer, he began focusing on the interplay between images and text in the 1970s, turning to digital means in the 1990s to further extend his investigations into politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Burgin was born in Sheffield, England and currently lives and works in Paris, France. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London in 1965 and later received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. Solo exhibitions have been held at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2016); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2014); Museo di Fotografia Contemporane, Milan (2008); and MAK Foundation, Los Angeles (2007), with participation in numerous group exhibitions including 'Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979,' Tate Britain, London (2016); 'Trapping Lions in the Scottish Highlights,' Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2013); 'Spirits of Internationalism: 6 European Collections, 1956–1986,' Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2012), amongst several others. His work is included in the collections of MoMA, the Tate, the Walker Art Center and the British Council Art Collection.
