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New Media. AI image Introduction When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie , where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure. This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nin...

Non-Places. AI generated image Introduction Marc Augé ends Non-Places with a gesture that is easy to overlook. After pages devoted to airports, highways, supermarkets, hotels, refugee camps, and images, he concludes by calling for what appears, at first sight, to be a contradiction: “an ethnology of solitude” (Augé, 1995). This formulation does not merely summarize the book’s argument; it displaces it. Whereas the earlier chapters focus on spaces and systems, the epilogue reorients attention toward the form of individual existence produced by them. The question is no longer simply what non-places are, but what kind of human presence they make possible, habitual, and perhaps unavoidable. This article proposes to take that final suggestion seriously. Rather than updating the description of non-places, it asks how solitude becomes a central anthropological object in conditions of generalized mobility, mediation, and circulation. Reading the epilogue today allows us to see that Augé w...