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Troubadours by the Bonfire. AI image Introduction For centuries, the figure of the author has stood as a cornerstone of Western literary tradition. From antiquity to modernity, the creator has often been imagined as an isolated genius, capable of shaping entire worlds through sheer inspiration. Yet this romantic conception proves problematic when history is examined more closely. From the songs attributed to Homer to the theses of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, a different picture emerges: literature as a collective network, a web of voices and memories in which the individual subject dissolves. This essay traces that trajectory, showing how the “author” is less the origin of the text than a cultural construction designed to guarantee unity where multiplicity prevails. The Greeks and the Homeric Question Few figures embody the paradox of authorship better than Homer. Two of the most influential epics of world literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey —are traditionally attribute...

The Flipbook of Today. AI art Introduction Great inventions rarely appear overnight. More often, they pass through a period of incubation, during which preliminary techniques or embryonic devices announce what is to come. Like in pregnancy, humanity experiences cultural “labor pains” before giving birth to a new technological era. A child turning the pages of a folioscope and laughing at a dog that seems to walk cannot imagine that he is handling the seed of cinema. In the same way, someone using Word’s predictive text or Google’s search suggestions twenty years ago could not have foreseen that this simple principle would eventually underpin today’s LLMs. This essay examines such early moments—cinema, artificial intelligence, the printing press—frames them within a broader theoretical perspective, and asks: what are the flipbooks of our own time? From Flipbook to Cinema: The Seed of Movement The flipbook, or “thumb cinema,” is a humble toy: a stack of drawings that, when flipped ...

The status of signs. AI art Introduction The problem of how signs relate to reality has haunted philosophy since antiquity. In the twentieth century, Jean Baudrillard formulated one of the most radical diagnoses of this issue. In Simulacra and Simulation (1994), he proposed that images no longer reflect the world but instead generate their own reality through circulation. Friedrich Nietzsche, more than a century earlier, had already undermined the security of both language and art. In The Birth of Tragedy (1993), he showed how illusion saves humanity from destructive truths, while in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1999), he revealed that language consists of forgotten metaphors without any anchor in essences. Although Baudrillard often presents his theory as a historical transition from representation to simulation, the logic of illusion that Nietzsche described anticipates this shift and destabilizes any firm chronology. Their dialogue discloses both the necessity and dan...

Vanessa Beecroft´s tableaux vivants. AI art Introduction The gaze has long preoccupied philosophy and aesthetics as a force that does more than merely register the visible. To be looked at is not a neutral act but one that shapes, disturbs, and even constitutes subjectivity. Jean-Paul Sartre famously described how the presence of another’s eyes destabilizes the self, while Jacques Lacan identified the gaze as a rupture in the visual field that reveals our condition as objects for others. For women, the implications are particularly acute: the gaze has historically positioned them as passive spectacles rather than autonomous subjects. Against this backdrop, Vanessa Beecroft’s performance installations offer a provocative intervention. By instructing her female performers to withhold acknowledgment of their spectators, she stages a refusal of recognition that unsettles the traditional dynamics of the nude and the aesthetic act of looking. The Gaze and the Making of the Subject ...

Actors and Streamers. AI art Introduction In his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility , Walter Benjamin described how modern technologies were transforming art and representation. One of his most insightful observations was the difference between the theatrical actor, who presents himself physically before an audience, and the film actor, whose words and gestures are fragmented by the camera and then reassembled. Half a century later, Jean Baudrillard deepened this analysis in Simulacra and Simulation (1981/1994), arguing that images no longer represent reality but generate it. Both thinkers offer key insights for understanding the new figures of the digital age—YouTubers, TikTokers, and streamers—who operate in a realm where performance is both intimate and mediated, spontaneous and staged. Stage and Screen Benjamin considered the stage as the place of presence. The theatrical actor addresses the audience directly, and this unique encounter...