Technical reproduction has been changing the relationship between an artwork and its original. Photography and film detached the work from a particular place and made it possible to circulate the same image over and over. Digital technology accelerated this process further. A digital image is hard to distinguish from its copy, and its quality is not degraded in the course of reproduction.

Generative artificial intelligence goes one step further. It does not merely reproduce images that already exist; it continuously produces new ones. The images it produces do not necessarily presuppose a particular original. Even from the same prompt, different results are generated, and a given form or style can be varied almost without limit.

As a result, the supply of images increases rapidly. In the past, producing a high-quality image required skill, time, and labor. These conditions lent the image a certain scarcity. But once the cost of generation falls, visual complexity or finish is no longer a sufficient basis for scarcity.

The ability to realize a particular expression likewise becomes a weaker point of distinction than before. There was a time when a distinctive style or a particular technique was an important criterion for telling one artist from another. But once a generative system can quickly learn and reproduce a wide range of forms, style becomes readily copyable information.

This does not mean the disappearance of artistic value. It means a shift in where value is located. The more the scarcity of the image itself declines, the more the conditions in which the image is placed come to matter. Where the work exists, what size and weight it has, what materials it is made of, from what distance the viewer encounters it — these become part of the work. Conditions that had been stripped away inside the digital file return to the foreground.

These conditions might generally be called materiality. But materiality alone is not enough, because physical objects too can be mass-produced and reproduced. A printed image, a sculpture in the form of a manufactured good, a standardized display apparatus — none of these possesses irreplaceability in itself.

What matters is not matter itself but presence.

Presence means the fact that some object actually exists at a particular time and place. It includes not only matter but space, time, the body, and situation. That the viewer must travel in order to experience the work, that the work and the viewer occupy the same space, that the experience occurs only at a particular moment — these constitute presence.

A digital image has no place. More precisely, because it can be displayed anywhere, its relationship to any particular place is weak. The same image can appear repeatedly on a phone, a monitor, a display board, a printout. The content of the image is preserved, but the conditions in which it appears are easily swapped out.

A present work, by contrast, is hard to separate from its conditions. If the size of the space, the direction of the light, the surface of the material, or the viewer’s path changes, the work changes too. The work is less an independent object than an event fused with its surrounding conditions.

At this point aura can reappear. In the traditional sense, aura was bound up with the uniqueness of the original, historical continuity, and a mode of existence rooted in a particular place. Technical reproduction weakened this relationship. But the aura after generative artificial intelligence will not simply return to the old notion of originality.

A generated image does not necessarily have a first original. Even if one traces the image’s genealogy, it is a composite result of data, models, and stochastic processes. So the aura to come may be shaped less by who first made the image than by the conditions under which it actually appeared.

The aura of presence is not simply stored inside the image of the work. It arises when the work, the place, the viewer, and time come together. A photograph or video that documents an exhibition conveys only part of that combination. The outward appearance of the work can be recorded, but the space it occupied and its bodily relation to the viewer cannot be fully reproduced.

In this respect, installation, performance, and site-specific work can take on new meaning in the age of generative images. Such forms are organized around the conditions of their occurrence rather than a finished visual result. The work is realized within the process of the viewer visiting, staying, and moving.

This does not mean that all art migrates into physical form. Digital work too can constitute presence. A system that changes in real time, an event that appears only under a particular network condition, a work that responds to the viewer’s intervention — these have a mode of existence different from a fixed file. What matters here is not whether the material is physical or digital, but how much the experience depends on conditions.

A work that cannot be repeated in exactly the same state approaches the condition of an event. The viewer does not consume the content of the work but participates in the conditions under which the work occurs. In this case the core of the work lies not in the resulting object but in the arrangement of relations.

The role of the artist can change too. Once the technology of image production becomes universal, an artist’s distinctiveness can no longer be explained by the ability to produce images directly. What matters instead is which place is chosen, which materials are used, and which rules and relations are composed. The artist becomes less someone who makes images than someone who designs the conditions under which images occur.

This change brings the material basis of art back into view. A work has always depended on space, labor, transport, installation, conservation, and institutional sanction. For a while, digital technology made these conditions seem to have vanished. Works circulated as files and could be accessed instantly on a screen.

But the physical conditions were not eliminated; they only moved out of sight. Servers, data centers, power grids, and display devices are material infrastructure too. A digital image is not immaterial. It is only that its material conditions are not directly exposed to the viewer.

In the age of presence, these conditions can return to the surface of the work. Power consumption, the size of the equipment, the ownership of space, the routes along which data travels can be presented as part of the work. A work can, at the same time as it shows an image, reveal the material system that makes the image possible.

Yet as the value of presence rises, a new imbalance also emerges. Producing and exhibiting a physical work requires resources. A large space, specialized equipment, rare materials, and expert labor are not given equally to everyone. The capacity to produce presence at scale is concentrated in capital and institutions.

The production of images may be democratized, but the capacity to endow images with physical scale and social visibility is not. Anyone can make an image, but not anyone can use a museum. Anyone can design a virtual space, but not anyone can occupy a particular place in a city.

In this respect the aura of presence is not a purely aesthetic concept. It is tied to the economic questions of access, ownership, and mobility. Which work can be present, where it can be present, and who can experience it are all determined by institutional conditions.

The return of aura is therefore also the return of power. The old aura was tied to religious authority, tradition, and the possession of the original. The aura of the age of presence can be shaped by the capacity to control space and infrastructure. The scarcity of a work arises not from the technique of its making but from the authority to place it in reality.

In this situation art can move in two directions. One is to intensify physical scale and rarity — producing irreproducibility through enormous installations, restricted places, and one-off events. The other is to treat the conditions of presence themselves critically — exposing the resources and institutions on which a work exists, and reconfiguring its accessibility.

In the latter case, presence is not merely an attribute of a luxury commodity. It becomes a way of creating a particular relationship between viewer and work. A small space, a temporary gathering, a shared act can also produce a strong presence. What matters is not scale but an irreplaceable relation.

Generative artificial intelligence will not remove images from art. On the contrary, it will make far more images than before. But the more images there are, the harder it becomes for an individual image to guarantee its own value. At that point the question of the work changes. What is seen matters less than where it occurs. Who made it matters less than who can experience it. How refined it is matters less than which conditions it cannot be separated from.

The age of the image is not ending. It is only that the image is no longer the whole of the work. The more that can be generated, the more the conditions that cannot be generated come into view. Place, time, the body, and relations are not copied like files. They can be repeated, but not reproduced identically.

The aura of the age of presence arises precisely from this difference. It is not nostalgia for the original but an awareness of the conditions that an infinitely reproducible image cannot reach. Works to come may find it is not enough merely to present a new image. A work must also present why this image must exist in this place, at this size, at this time. Aura does not reside inside the work. It forms on the surface where the work makes contact with reality.