The Dragonfly's Eye: My Virtual Camera (AI)

A late book by the German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge that takes AI image generation as a new kind of camera and asks what its pictures can and cannot show.

Kluge looks at the quirks of these images, where chance and error produce what the publisher calls subjunctive forms: open images that are hard to place. The 480-page pocket-format hardcover builds its stories around them, moving between cases as unlike as East German phantom pregnancies and present-day political figures. The AI works as a virtual camera that tells and re-imagines space through pictures. Spector Books issued it in 2024, with a separate German edition titled Der Konjunktiv der Bilder.

Kluge was born in Halberstadt in 1932 and died in 2026. He signed the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto and became a leading figure of New German Cinema, with Yesterday Girl (1966) winning a Silver Lion at Venice. From 1987 he produced television through his company dctp, and he wrote theory with Oskar Negt, including Public Sphere and Experience and History and Obstinacy. He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2003.