In 1935, Walter Benjamin described how technological reproduction transforms the aura of the artwork, altering its conditions of presence, authorship, and reception within a rapidly shifting political landscape. What he articulated in relation to photography and film finds renewed urgency in the context of machine learning, where reproduction is no longer mechanical but generative, statistical, and trained on vast cultural archives.

Contemporary artificial intelligence does not simply replicate images; it produces them through pattern recognition and probabilistic synthesis, unsettling questions of originality, authorship, and ownership. In this condition, the artwork is no longer situated outside systems of reproduction; it is continuously entangled within them.

Unfixed Conditions invites artists to consider how human creativity operates within this shifted terrain, not by treating artificial intelligence as subject matter to be affirmed or rejected, but by examining the transformation of image-making and meaning under computational systems that increasingly structure multiple dimensions of life.

These conditions are not abstract. Image production and circulation increasingly operate through systems in which verification, authorship, and stability are no longer assured. Images can detach from fixed referents, giving rise to synthetic presences, unstable relations to truth, and new configurations of visibility and belief. At the same time, bodies and identities already exposed to systemic vulnerability are subject to unconsented reconfiguration and circulation, shifting questions of image rights and representation beyond the artistic field into legal, social, and institutional domains.

The inquiry extends Benjamin’s concern with technological mediation into a field where human intention, cultural memory, and machine learning are structurally interwoven. These systems are embedded within infrastructures of data extraction, surveillance, control, and asymmetrical power, and are grounded in environmental processes including resource extraction and intensive water and energy use. They shape how images, bodies, and behaviours are recorded, circulated, and owned, while also structuring economies of attention and affect that condition perception, desire, and collective experience.

Questions of labour extend across visible and invisible domains, from the distributed human work of annotation and training that drives machine systems, to artistic practices grounded in embodied making that exist in tension with computational generation. Cultural memory and archival materials are also absorbed, reorganised, and recirculated within these systems, often without consent or attribution, reshaping cultural inheritance

Artists are invited to respond through reflective, conceptual, material, or speculative means, engaging this condition as both site and question.

Unfixed Conditions holds the tension between human curiosity and machine systems not as binary opposition, but as a field of entanglement in which resistance, reflection, and new forms of embodied making and collective seeing may yet emerge.