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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 ...

AI generated image Introduction When Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/36), he captured a decisive threshold in the history of culture: the moment when the artwork ceased to exist solely as a unique, auratic object and entered the domain of reproducibility. Photography and film did not merely multiply artworks; they transformed the very conditions of art, undermining the singularity of the original. Benjamin’s account has since become canonical, a touchstone for thinking about technology, aesthetics, and politics. Yet the story did not end where Benjamin left it. In our own time, the rise of intelligent software and generative AI suggests a new epochal shift—one in which reproduction mutates into generativity: a production of “copies without originals.” The Genealogy of Reproduction For the Greeks, reproducibility was constrained: casting in bronze or terra cotta, stamping coins. Most artworks—paintings, sculptures—remained irr...