Arts & Culture

An image can now be born in a few seconds, without any hand ever having drawn a line, without any eye ever having observed anything of the world in order to produce it, thought nothing. A piece of music can be composed without anyone ever having felt anything while writing it, thought nothing. Is the instantaneous creation of artificial intelligence comparable to artistic creation?

The philosopher Walter Benjamin called aura that which belongs to a work born of a real gesture, thought, and anchored in a precise place and instant, born of a hand that chose, groped, began again. He believed this aura threatened by technical reproduction, photography, cinema. He could not yet imagine a machine that would no longer reproduce an existing work, but would produce new ones, without any aura ever having had the chance to be born.

Aura is born of thought, of the creative will; it is born of man and of his imperfection. What the generated image lacks, however technically just it may be, is that imperfection, that authenticity, and the complexity that follows from them. What did the author of this work mean to transmit to us? What inner path led it to this creation? What is its motive, what is its why? So many questions that recall the great complexity of artistic creation. A complexity sometimes disarming, frustrating… Why do I love? Why do I find this beautiful? So many questions that recall our vast ignorance. So many questions that, perhaps, define artistic creation.

Perhaps that is what aura is, then: a beauty born of human creation, of imperfection, but impossible to reason, impossible to reproduce by artificial intelligence.

This text, imperfect, perhaps cloudy, translates, perhaps, artistic creation. Perhaps you had been carried, perhaps you had understood, acquiesced, despite the great imperfection of this text, a mark of authenticity, a mark of humanity.

This domain welcomes every artistic project carried by that aura — that ineffable beauty, emanating from the imperfect transcription of a thought. A beauty that could not be resolved by artificial intelligence.