This project re-presents Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction through the stylistic framework of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.

By rewriting Benjamin’s argument in multiple everyday genres, it performs the very process Benjamin describes: repetition transforming meaning. Each restyling erodes the “aura” of the original text while generating new value through variation, asking whether intellectual originality, like artistic authenticity, can survive the age of endless reproduction.

References:

Benjamin, W. (1986) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. Translated by H. Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 219–253.

Queneau, R. (1998) Exercises in Style. London: John Calder, pp. 9–16, 19–26.