
Read this article in French:
Pourquoi continuer de faire de l’art dans un monde numérique ?
An Everyday Scene:
You log on.
You ask a search engine to show you some artistic creations.
It presents you with photographs, paintings, poems, films, sculptures, digital works, and sound art.
And you wonder: in a world where technology can produce images, texts, sounds, and videos in a matter of seconds, why do human beings still devote time to creating?
Surely, creating is not just producing.
For a human being, creating is an experience. It means searching, choosing, hesitating, feeling, starting over, sometimes abandoning one idea to follow another. The work is the result of this process, but the experience of creating matters too.
Humans have always created to express what they feel, tell stories about what they experience, understand what is happening to them, imagine what does not yet exist, or share their way of seeing the world. They give form to their experience: a text, an image, a piece of music, a movement, an object, a film, a digital work. From the age of cave art to our age of generative art, humans still feel the need to give form to their experience and share it.
Whether it is seen by millions of people or only a few, a creation can have meaning for the person who brought it into being. Because before a work can circulate, be discovered, transmitted, or recognized, someone first had to feel the need to create it.
Technology has always transformed the means of creation. Photography, cinema, computers, the Internet, and now artificial intelligence have opened up new possibilities.
The question, then, is not about choosing between humans and technology. A human being can create with a pencil, a camera, a video camera, a computer, or algorithmic tools. The tools change. The forms change. The way we create changes too.
But human experience continues.
We continue to love, lose, hope, doubt, observe, remember, and imagine. And as long as we feel the need to give form to that experience, we will create.
We will continue making art.
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This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.
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Explore Further
🟦Why I Continue to Write and Publish in a World Saturated with Technology
🟦Art, Culture, and Humanity in the Algorithmic Age of Artificial Intelligence
🟦Humanist Digital Art: A Global, Poetic and Digital Artistic Practice
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor












