This AI-generated experimental film resurrects Walter Benjamin’s 1931 text through contemporary machine learning technologies, creating a haunting dialogue between past and future. The film reanimates Benjamin himself—his voice deep-cloned from a rare recording, his image brought to life from historical photographs, and his writing style AI-mimicked from his notebooks to generate the film’s subtitles. Each sentence of the original essay serves as a prompt for AI-generated imagery, sound, and motion, transforming Benjamin’s philosophical fragments into a complex audiovisual composition.
The project frames artificial intelligence as the very destructive character Benjamin theorized—an entity that “sees ways everywhere” and embodies capital’s creative-destructive force. By channeling Benjamin’s spectre through AI systems, the film reveals how his prescient critique of progress haunts our technological present. The work operates as both a prophetic transmission from the past and a hyperstitional artifact from the future, where the very computational systems enacting the film manifest Benjamin’s core insights about technological reproduction in a paradoxical gesture that at once preserves and transmutes the authentic traces of Benjamin himself.
Through this meta-narrative approach, the project explores how AI technologies simultaneously embody and interpret Benjamin’s text, creating a recursive loop where AI becomes both the subject and the means of its own philosophical investigation. The result is a hauntological meditation on progress, destruction, and the accelerating forces of capital as they materialize through artificial intelligence.