Kenny Schachter has always existed at the intersection of art, technology, and critique. With his latest exhibition, Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction, now on view at Jupiter gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, the boundary-blurring provocateur engages in a full-throttle exploration of creativity in an era dominated by automation, artificial intelligence, and digital duplication. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Schachter turns theory into tangible, often tactile, visual commentary.
Benjamin’s essay warned of what happens when art becomes infinitely reproducible—that its “aura,” its unique presence in time and space, begins to erode. Decades later, Schachter takes that concept and places it under a contemporary microscope, examining how AI-generated content, 3D printing, and digital tools have shifted the conversation around authorship, originality, and what it means to “create.”
A Modern Reflection on a Timeless Concern
Schachter doesn’t just cite Benjamin—he wrestles with his predictions, measuring them against a digital world where NFTs, AI art generators, and algorithmically curated content have normalized the reproduction of ideas and images at a dizzying pace. If Benjamin found the mechanical printing press troubling, one can only imagine his reaction to the torrent of generative imagery flooding today’s internet.
Yet Schachter isn’t anti-technology. He’s deeply engaged with it—both conceptually and in practice. Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction isn’t a lamentation of artistic death; it’s a messy, colorful, and layered interrogation of where the soul of creativity now lives. Through paintings, sculpture, and hybrid digital-physical forms, he invites viewers to reconsider how much value lies in the “hand of the artist” when machines can mimic that hand with uncanny precision.
Robo Cubes: Nostalgia Meets the Digital Present
One of the show’s centerpieces is Schachter’s series of Robo Cubes—playful, toy-like sculptures that fuse mid-century aesthetics with contemporary process. At first glance, they evoke the charm of 1950s-era action figures or vintage collectibles, but their creation speaks to a duality of tradition and tech. Rather than relying solely on 3D printers, Schachter begins with digital files but insists on translating them through traditional mold-making and casting techniques.
This decision is not just about process—it’s a statement. In rejecting the uniform, plastic-like finishes of 3D-printed objects, Schachter brings materiality and imperfection back into the frame. His Robo Cubes become layered artifacts: digitally conceived, but physically labored over. They resist the clinical sheen of automation and instead offer a reminder that making—even with machines—can still be deeply human when choice, error, and material intervention are involved.
Painting with a Keyboard: When Tools Blur Intention
Perhaps the most compelling tension in the exhibition lies within Schachter’s paintings, which blur digital creation with tactile craftsmanship. Developed using a computer keyboard as his initial interface, these works are a kind of hybrid translation. While their compositions originate digitally—through text, manipulated images, and computer-generated abstractions—they are ultimately rendered into high-quality oil paintings in collaboration with Matr Labs.
The results are paintings that feel simultaneously familiar and strange. Their brushwork mimics tradition, but their content and process push viewers to question where creation begins and ends. Is it in the first key pressed? The algorithm interpreting it? Or in the hands that eventually bring it to life on canvas?
What makes this process significant isn’t just the novelty—it’s the challenge it poses to the long-standing hierarchy of mediums. Oil painting, long regarded as a symbol of technical mastery, here becomes a conduit for digitally spawned ideas. Schachter isn’t replacing skill with code; he’s asking what new kinds of skills matter when code is part of the canvas.
Technology as Medium, Subject, and Provocation
Schachter’s relationship with technology is layered and critical. He doesn’t approach AI or automation as tools to simply exploit, nor as enemies to resist. Instead, he treats them as provocations—catalysts that expose the shifting values in today’s art world. He’s quick to call out the plasticity and superficiality of machine-fabricated “tchotchkes,” yet also embraces digital workflows that question the sanctity of the handmade.
His commentary isn’t confined to the walls of the gallery either. Through essays, lectures, and social media dialogue, Schachter has long stirred up debates around the future of creative labor. Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction is another step in that evolving discourse—grounded not in theory alone, but in objects that complicate and challenge the very systems they arise from.
A Show for Our Artificially Intelligent Era
For anyone curious about where art is headed amid the rise of AI, machine learning, and creative automation, this exhibition offers more than surface-level spectacle. It asks hard questions—about authorship, about originality, and about the increasingly blurred lines between artist and apparatus.
And in a moment when so much of digital art feels ephemeral, Schachter’s decision to anchor his work in physical form carries its own weight. Whether it’s the heft of a sculpted cube or the texture of a painting that began in code, each piece in Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction demands time, scrutiny, and dialogue.
The exhibition is currently on view at Jupiter, an emerging hub for contemporary art located in New York’s Lower East Side, known for supporting artists who push conceptual boundaries and disrupt norms.
Kenny Schachter continues to prove he’s more than just a commentator—he’s an artist deeply embedded in the very questions he poses. Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction isn’t just a nod to the past or a critique of the present. It’s a layered exploration of what happens when human intention meets machine execution, and what’s at stake when creativity becomes both digitized and decentralized.
Whether you’re a digital art skeptic or a tech-obsessed creative, this show will leave you with something to unpack—and maybe a new understanding of what art looks like when it lives between hands and hardware.
Jesse James
Read original article in the StupidDope website
Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction: New Works by Kenny Schachter
March 13–April 26, 2025
Jupiter
55 Delancey Street New York, NY 10002
(786) 238-7299
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 11 am – 6 pm
www.jupiterarms.com