“The meaning of life doesn’t seem to shine like that screen.”
This week’s #artsunday is the song Movies by Weyes Blood.
Rising ethereal, bridging to crescendo, it’s a love song for our manufactured perceptions of self. Weyes contrasts the aspiration behind these personal narratives with a skepticism towards the manufactured nature of reality.
There is something deeply complicated about the relationship between cinema (or video content), reality, and our evolving perceptions of self. Most interesting to me are the parallels with Walter Benjamin’s “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. What do we stand to lose of ourselves in the replicate image?
Benjamin wouldn’t be interested in what content is produced, but how, at what scale, and to what effect. Reproducibility changes art, and how art changes us.
How do AI generated videos change our perceptions of self, how do they change the nature of us versus them against a backdrop of the individualistic and international body politic?
How does our relationship to narrative art forms change when they’re increasingly alienated from (or alien to) humanity in their reproduction?