Jeffrey Stuker

The most prominent subject of Stuker’s work over the past decade is mimicry, which, as Walter Benjamin asserted in his 1933 essay “The Mimetic Faculty,” is at the basis of all human learning. Today, of course, we can add that it is also at the basis of non-human learning. To evoke a paranoid scenario, this is basically how our cellphones are acceding to take our place in the world. And vice-versa, technological mimicry of human behaviors alerts us to a machinic element that was always already at work within us and perhaps accounts for the drive of the human animal to blend with its environment, to “depersonalize by assimilation to space,” as Roger Caillois described it in his 1936 text “Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia.” If Stuker’s work has sought to trace this philosophical concept of mimicry, which emerges with critical force in the 1930s, it is in order to open its forms to the strange density of the synthetic nature of our era, with its preponderance of computational images.