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Plus le monde devient numérique, plus l’humain devient important

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You search the Web for an image of a man working on a sculpture.
Among the results, an old photograph appears showing a sculptor in his studio.
You see him working with the material.
This moment actually happened.

Then you ask an artificial intelligence to generate an image of a man working on a sculpture.
A few seconds later, another image appears.
It is convincing.
The gesture looks real.
So does the dust.

Yet something has changed.
In the first image, this moment was lived.
In the second, this moment was simulated.

In the first photograph, a human being was there. He touched the material and engaged in an act of creation. The photograph preserves a trace of that moment.

What we are looking at, then, is not simply an image of a man at work. Something of his experience reaches us.

Human beings have always passed their experiences on to one another in this way. Through stories, objects, works of art, letters, photographs, or films, we discover what others have seen, felt, imagined, or lived.

The digital world does not make these traces disappear. On the contrary, it can preserve them, circulate them, and allow us to encounter them.

But a new cultural and artistic environment is taking shape. Algorithmic systems can also produce images, texts, or music that seem to carry the trace of a human experience without a human being having lived what they represent.

In this environment, being anchored in human experience takes on particular importance.

Behind a photograph, a story, a work of art, or a testimony, we can encounter the experience of another human being. Through the trace they have left behind, something of that experience can travel through time, circulate in the digital world, and reach us.

Representations produced by algorithmic systems are not necessarily anchored in human experience in this way. They can move us, surprise us, or lead us to imagine an experience without necessarily being the trace of a real human experience.

The more digital the world becomes, the more important the human becomes.

📚All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 Why Continue Making Art in a Digital World?

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Philosophy of the Human in the Technological Age

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© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor