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War as Spectacle. AI art Introduction In the early twentieth century, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism, a movement that exalted speed, machinery, and violence as sources of artistic inspiration. A fervent nationalist and later an open supporter of Mussolini, Marinetti gave cultural expression to fascist ideology by fusing aesthetics with warfare. His Manifesto of the Colonial War in Ethiopia (1935) exemplifies this tendency: it glorified Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia as both a civilizing mission and a technological adventure. Around the same time, Walter Benjamin was formulating his critique of modern art and politics. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1935–36), he warned that fascism transforms political life into spectacle, channeling collective energies into the destructive theater of war. These texts, though written from opposing standpoints, share a common concern with the relation between art, technology, and human d...