Thought it might be about time to explain myself, for posterity’s sake.
I have a computer. Don’t we all. This is my father’s old computer.
We (my wife, daughter, and I) moved in with my parents nearly a year ago. It was a decision about – oh look I don’t need to explain all this. Cost of living. House prices. Deposits. Yada yada yada. The point is, we moved in and Dad had this old Acer Predator Orion PC sitting around gathering dust.
I left my PC with my sister-in-law in Sydney, so I started using Dad’s machine. Put Linux Mint on there and away we went.
At the time, I was playing with this idea of an artwork’s aura.
This is a Walter Benjamin concept that was first introduced to me by the writer Brian Castro during a supervision session in 2016.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin 1935
The rough idea is that art objects have a direct connection to time and space. An artist sculpting clay. A hand on a cave wall. The musician in a studio. (On this last example, there’s a terrific recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in which you can hear him humming which brings the recording to life again.)
So art has its connection to time and space, and often to other cultural activities: rituals, religious ceremonies, community, etc.
But in a time of mechincal reproduction, we can make copies. Seemingly endless copies. Computers, by some measure, do nothing but copy and edit files.
Benjamin was writing nearly 100 years ago, and we’re way past the looking glass now. In 2026, much art barely inhabits time and space at all. It is mere content flickering across our screens.
AI slop goes one step further still because there’s barely even a physical location where the content was made. It’s all distributed. It’s in the cloud, man.
One person’s prompt gets routed to a data centre, a building of spinning fans and hot drives where virtual machines run inference on an astounding amount of inane text.
It’s aura-less.
My project has been to have AI art located in space in time. There’s a machine in the front room. I can hear the fans on its GPU spin up and down. I can touch it. It’s real. And now it’s got an agent on it, trying to make art.
The bot has access to its own directory on that computer. It has some instructions and a few folders. It’s been told to make something new. Whether that be an image, sound, story, 3D model, file of code.
This is not so-called AI art like you’ve seen before. I’m not prompting some trillion-dollar company’s 500k token capable monster machine. It’s a box in the front room, and maybe it’s going to make some art.
I’ve been documenting a bit of it on bluesky vontonks@bsky.social. Documentation is something I’d like to do more of. We’ll see. For now it’s just fun. Playful. Like art should be.