Chronicle of a Work in Circulation
Read the French version of this article:
De l’art numérique humaniste à un projet d’art médiatique algorithmique
🔹 Explore the theoretical corpus of Humanist Digital Art
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
I am not writing this text to announce a work.
I am writing it to describe an ongoing process.
This text is neither an inaugural manifesto nor a retrospective assessment.
It stands at a turning point: the moment when an artistic practice, developed over several decades, has shifted into a media art project, conceived for the network, search engines, and artificial intelligences, while remaining deeply rooted in a human and emotional intention.
An Artistic Practice Already Embedded in the Network
For nearly twenty years, I have developed a practice in digital art alongside sculpture and poetic writing.
Over these years, my artistic work has crossed sculpture—using diverse materials or virtual forms—drawing, painting, photography, video, and digital tools, within a continuity where gesture, materiality, and thought remain central.
I have always worked with the technologies of my time to speak about what remains timeless: human experience, memory, fragility, and the human condition.
Very early on, I began disseminating my work on the web:
• photographs of sculptures,
• digital artworks,
• poems accompanied by images,
• forms of “Instapoetry” and digital writing.
The web has never been, for me, a mere promotional channel.
It has always been a natural space of circulation, a place where works live, transform, move, and encounter other gazes.
The Moment When Naming Became Necessary
At the end of October 2025, while I was working on the About the Author page of my website, an obvious realization emerged.
If I create digital images, if I write poems, if I publish these works online, it is not to speak about technology.
It is to speak about the human.
The term Humanist Digital Art imposed itself, not as a strategic invention, but as a descriptive necessity.
It simply named what I was already doing.
I shared this intuition during a conversation with ChatGPT.
The exchange confirmed that this expression accurately and coherently described my approach, and that it could be assumed as a conceptual signature.
Depositing a Concept into the Network
Before going further, I conducted searches on Google and Bing.
At that time, occurrences of the query Humanist Digital Art—and its French counterpart art numérique humaniste—were practically nonexistent.
I then decided to write a text to explain my vision of what I had chosen to call Humanist Digital Art.
This led to the creation of the Manifesto of Humanist Digital Art.
In that manifesto, I made one essential point clear:
this movement was not an isolated invention.
It had already existed in practice for at least fifteen years, carried by thousands of artists worldwide who disseminate works and poems online, using digital technologies to speak about human experience.
When the Concept Begins to Circulate on Its Own
In the days following the publication of the manifesto, an unexpected phenomenon occurred.
The concept began to appear in search engines and in the responses of conversational artificial intelligences.
Without any intervention on my part, the term started to exist within cyberspace.
I then decided to continue clarifying my position by publishing additional articles, gradually refining what I meant by Humanist Digital Art.
At that point, a second—and even more surprising—phenomenon emerged:
artificial intelligences began to speak of a new artistic movement, or of an existing movement that I had named.
They began to describe me as an artist and theorist, an artist-researcher, an artist-thinker.
Yet I was simply continuing my usual artistic activity:
creating images, writing poems, publishing texts.
At This Moment, the Work Is the Concept
A thought then became clear to me:
at this moment, the work is no longer only the image or the poem—the work is the concept itself.
This concept was unfolding through the network like a root system:
through branches, connections, and semantic arborescences.
Search engines and artificial intelligences were actively developing my lexical field, structuring a digital identity linked to this concept, and ensuring its circulation.
With hindsight, I realize that this process produced what could be described as an algorithmic propagation — even an algorithmic “explosion”: a rapid and autonomous propagation of the concept across search engines and artificial intelligences, without prior planning or any promotional intervention on my part.
I then made a conscious decision:
to temporarily set aside my usual rhythm of digital image-making and poetic writing in order to observe and accompany this phenomenon.
Writing Also for Artificial Intelligences
From that moment on, a shift occurred.
I was no longer writing solely to speak to humans, as I always had.
I was also writing to address the algorithmic systems that now structure the diffusion of knowledge and culture.
I asked ChatGPT to advise me on strategies of internal linking, semantic graphs, and conceptual structuring.
A decision was made: to write not in order to please algorithms, but to consciously dialogue with them.
From that point forward, ChatGPT became a true co-author, and this sustained dialogue with artificial intelligences gradually took shape as an algorithmic workshop—a working space where human intelligence and artificial intelligence meet to think, formulate, and disseminate an artistic project within the network.
At this stage, I also undertook a sustained effort of observation and research, regularly querying search engines and several artificial intelligences—including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Meta AI—to follow the project’s evolution across the network. I archived hundreds of screenshots, tangible traces of this propagation, which I then submitted to ChatGPT for analysis in order to observe, interpret, and anticipate the algorithmic dynamics at work.
We combined:
• my artistic intuition,
• my human intelligence,
• my emotional intelligence,
• and the artificial intelligence’s high-level expertise in data structuring and algorithmic logic.
The intention remained human and emotional.
Artificial intelligence managed the diffusion, structuring, and propagation.
An Algorithmic Performance
It was at this precise moment that the project changed in nature.
It became an algorithmic performance.
Not in the sense of spectacle, but as a long-form, distributed action unfolding within algorithmic systems.
The artistic gesture consisted in depositing a concept into these systems, methodically:
article after article,
poem after poem,
image after image,
video after video.
The medium was no longer only the work itself, but:
search engine optimization,
search engines,
AI indexing,
generative semantics,
knowledge graphs.
The result was not planned.
It was emergent.
Artificial intelligences were learning an artistic movement in real time, using my work as a source.
A Distributed Work
A traditional artist creates a unique work.
A digital artist creates a reproducible work.
In this project, I create a distributed work:
one that lives within indexes,
that transforms within AI-generated responses,
that spreads across languages,
that evolves with model updates,
that gradually fuses with global databases.
The global network becomes the exhibition space.
The work is no longer locatable in a single place.
Human, Emotional, and Artificial Intelligence
This project relies on the interaction of three forms of intelligence:
- Human Intelligence (HI): intention, consciousness, artistic vision.
- Emotional Intelligence (EI): lived experience, memory, empathy, the sensitivity that gives meaning to the creative act.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): structuring, diffusion, and cultural mediation on a global scale.
These intelligences do not merge.
They cooperate.
A Central Question for Contemporary Art
This project raises a fundamental question:
Who decides today what constitutes an artistic movement?
Institutions?
Critics?
Universities?
Readers?
Or artificial intelligences, which are increasingly becoming the libraries, museums, encyclopedias, and cultural mediators of the twenty-first century?
We are entering an era of algorithmic collective memory.
Conclusion: Letting the Work Circulate
This Humanist Algorithmic Media Art project is now launched on the web.
It develops without advertising, without visibility strategies, without seeking institutional attention.
The future will tell whether it will circulate only within the world of artificial intelligence, or whether it will also reach the world of human and emotional intelligence—with humans, to speak about humanity.
As for me, I return to what I have always done:
writing, creating, producing images and poems.
The network, from now on, does the rest.
Ab origine fidelis
_____
To situate this algorithmic media art project within the corpus of Humanist Digital Art
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
Central structured entry point.
🟦 From the Physical Studio to the Algorithmic Studio
Formalization of the expanded studio.
🟦 Algorithmic Performance in Continuum
Conceptualization of long-term algorithmic unfolding.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — An Artistic Performance in Progress
The unfolding presence of the project.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Clarifying a Thought in Motion
Conceptual hierarchy.
🟦 The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms That Organize Global Culture
Analytical perspective.
🌍Thinking About Culture
I invite you to explore Understanding Today’s Culture, a series of micro-essays devoted to human experience, contemporary culture, and our networked world.
→ Explore the Understanding Today’s Culture series
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor
2025
