Étiquette : Artificial intelligence

Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , 12 commentaires
Black, white and gray typographic mosaic displaying the word “culture” in fifteen world languages, illustrating diversity, circulation and cultural recomposition within global networked culture.

Read this article in French:
La culture mondiale comme mosaïque mouvante

Fragments, Circulations and Cultural Recomposition in the Network

Culture has long been associated with territories, languages, traditions and institutions. Yet, in the contemporary world, an increasing part of our cultural experience now unfolds within an interconnected global environment where works, ideas, knowledge and memories constantly circulate through digital networks.

According to a widely accepted definition, culture can be understood as the set of knowledge, know-how, beliefs, customs and values shared by a society or a human group. For a long time, these elements were transmitted mainly within relatively stable geographical, linguistic and national frameworks. Today, they circulate on an unprecedented scale.

A song created in Seoul can be listened to a few minutes later in Montreal. A text written centuries ago in China can be instantly read in English thanks to contemporary translation tools. A visual artwork produced in an isolated studio can travel from one platform to another and be discovered on several continents.

In this context, contemporary global culture increasingly resembles a moving mosaic made up of circulating fragments that are constantly recomposed through human exchanges, digital networks, platforms, algorithms and artificial intelligence systems.

A Culture Made of Fragments

In digital environments, cultural works and content rarely circulate in their original and complete form.

They often appear as excerpts, quotations, summaries, comments, recommendations, translations or reinterpretations. A photograph becomes a thumbnail. A book becomes a shared quotation. A film becomes a sequence lasting only a few seconds. A visual artwork becomes an image reproduced by a search engine or a social network.

This fragmentation does not affect artworks alone. It also concerns the knowledge, know-how, beliefs, customs, values and memories that make up culture.

Individuals now build their cultural experience from a multitude of fragments originating from different regions of the world. Each trajectory becomes unique. Everyone gradually assembles their own cultural mosaic.

Cultural Circulations on a Global Scale

Circulation is probably one of the defining characteristics of contemporary culture.

Digital networks now allow cultural content to cross geographical, linguistic and institutional borders very rapidly. This capacity profoundly transforms the mechanisms of cultural transmission.

Automatic translation tools also contribute to this transformation. Although still imperfect, AI-assisted translations allow millions of people to access works, ideas and knowledge that were previously difficult to reach.

This new cultural accessibility represents one of the major transformations of our time. An immense quantity of knowledge, narratives and cultural heritage is progressively becoming available on a global scale.

For the first time in human history, a significant part of global culture can be explored almost instantaneously from a single digital environment.

This evolution reminds me of a personal experience that illustrates how our relationship with culture has changed. In the early 1970s, while I was a teenager, I had to prepare a school assignment about music. I went to my neighbourhood library, where I had to consult cardboard index cards, physically locate books and copy useful passages by hand.

A few decades later, search engines, digital libraries and artificial intelligences allow us to access knowledge from all over the world almost instantly. It is now possible to read, in English, texts written centuries ago in other languages and civilizations. In just a few decades, our relationship with access to culture has profoundly changed.

Accessibility, Visibility and Discoverability

However, being accessible does not necessarily mean being visible.

A work can be published online, properly indexed and technically accessible without ever finding its audience.

This is where the notion of cultural discoverability emerges.

Cultural accessibility refers to the possibility of accessing a work, an idea or a body of knowledge. Discoverability refers to its ability to be found, encountered or recommended within digital environments.

In today’s networked world, visibility depends on many factors: search engines, platforms, recommendation systems, algorithms, social networks, translations, search engine optimization and social circulation.

Some works benefit from exceptional visibility and circulate widely around the world. Others remain almost invisible despite their online presence.

Accessibility therefore does not guarantee circulation.

A work may be published, indexed and available online without ever reaching its audience. It remains present in the network while being absent from cultural circulations, as if suspended in digital limbo.

Recomposition and Hybridization

The global circulation of cultural fragments also generates constant processes of recomposition.

Influences intersect. References blend together. Works enter into dialogue with one another. Traditions meet. Languages mutually influence each other.

This dynamic contributes to the emergence of hybrid cultural forms that simultaneously draw from several worlds.

Users of digital networks are not merely consumers of culture. They actively participate in these recompositions. They comment, translate, select, share, associate and reinterpret the content they encounter.

Artificial intelligences now also participate in this dynamic by facilitating the organization, translation, recommendation and interpretation of immense quantities of cultural content.

The global mosaic is therefore never complete. It is constantly transforming itself.

A Global Cultural Ecosystem

The image of the moving mosaic allows us to understand contemporary global culture as a global cultural ecosystem.

In an ecosystem, elements are not isolated. They continuously interact with one another. Transformations affecting one part of the system influence the whole.

This image also allows us to adopt a systemic approach to contemporary global culture. Rather than observing works, platforms or technologies separately, it becomes possible to understand the multiple interactions that connect individuals, cultures, memories, institutions and digital environments.

The same applies to global culture in the network.

Works, creators, institutions, platforms, search engines, algorithms, translators, readers, viewers and artificial intelligences all participate in a vast set of interactions that shape contemporary cultural circulations.

This ecosystem creates extraordinary opportunities for access, encounters and transmission. It also raises new challenges related to visibility, cultural diversity, the preservation of memories and the balance between dominant and less visible cultures.

Inhabiting the Mosaic

For more than three decades, I have observed the evolution of the network, from the first search engines of the 1990s to global platforms, social networks, recommendation systems and contemporary artificial intelligences. For more than twenty years, I have published texts, images, poems and reflections that circulate through various digital spaces.

Within this moving mosaic composed of knowledge, know-how, beliefs, customs, values, works, narratives and memories in constant recomposition, my contribution remains modest: publishing artistic and reflective content in an attempt to understand and document the human experience in global networked culture in the age of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

To illustrate human presence within this global networked culture, I have used three complementary figures in previous articles: the Network Walker, the Network Witness and the Network Citizen.

The Network Walker is the human being who moves daily through the digital spaces of the contemporary world. The Network Witness observes the cultural transformations taking place there and preserves traces of them. The Network Citizen participates in this global culture by sharing, transmitting and using digital tools responsibly.

The Network Walker, the Network Witness and the Network Citizen now evolve within this global cultural environment where fragments travel, encounter one another and are continuously recomposed.

To inhabit the network today is also to learn how to inhabit this moving mosaic.

A mosaic that belongs to no one, to which everyone contributes, and within which we maintain a human presence.

🟦 Continue the Reflection

→ The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age

→ How Far Can a Publication Go?

→ The Horizon of Circulation

→ You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

→ Understanding Today’s Culture

→ Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World

→ Human Traces in Global Culture

→ Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

→ Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space

🌍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

Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 13 commentaires
Symbolic illustration of walkers moving through time and culture, featuring human silhouettes and clock-headed figures on a light background, evoking memory, transmission, and human presence in a networked world.

Read this article in French:
Habiter le réseau — Une nouvelle condition humaine dans la culture mondiale

When the Network Becomes a Place of Sharing, Memory, and Culture

For a long time, the Internet was regarded as a tool. A tool for communication, research, learning, and distribution. This view remains largely true. Yet over the decades, the network has become far more than a simple tool.

Today, an increasing part of human experience unfolds within the network. We learn there, exchange ideas there, create there, preserve memories there, share knowledge there, and meet people we may never encounter in person. Works of art, ideas, emotions, and human traces now circulate on a global scale.

The network is no longer merely a tool that we use from time to time. It has become a space that we inhabit.

The Network Walker

Every day, billions of people move through the network. They travel from a text to an image, from a photograph to a work of art, from a song to a scientific article, from a personal memory to a historical event. They journey through landscapes of knowledge, cultures, and memories.

I have previously used the expression “Network Walker” to describe this experience. It still seems relevant to me today.

The Network Walker explores. Discovers. Learns. Connects ideas that sometimes originate from different cultures, eras, or continents. They move through a vast environment whose boundaries can never be fully known.

There is a form of contemporary nomadism in this experience. We move from one work to another, from one body of knowledge to another, from one memory to another. We sometimes engage in a kind of cultural wandering through the texts, images, archives, stories, and conversations that make up the global network. Along this journey, we cross cultures, languages, and territories scattered across all continents. Without leaving our place of residence, we travel through a human memory that has become global. This proximity to works, stories, and sensibilities from elsewhere encourages a form of cultural blending on a worldwide scale.

As in any cultural environment, our journey is influenced by many factors. Search engines, platforms, recommendation systems, and algorithms all contribute to organizing the paths we follow. Yet we retain the ability to choose our directions, take detours, explore unexpected routes, and retrace our steps. We remain human beings capable of curiosity, judgment, and reflection.

The Network Witness

As we continue to move through the network, we also become witnesses. Women and men of all ages, living in different cultures and regions of the world, observe the transformations unfolding in our time.

We witness the emergence of new forms of creation, new ways of communicating, and new ways of transmitting human memory. We observe how works circulate, how ideas travel, and how technologies gradually transform cultural practices.

Over the years, I have witnessed many human transformations made visible through the network. I have seen people who struggled with writing push themselves to improve their literacy in order to participate in online exchanges. I have seen individuals break their isolation by taking part in social life through digital networks. I have seen hundreds of poets share their texts with readers scattered across several continents. I have seen thousands of artists publish drawings, paintings, photographs, and digital works. I have seen people discover cultural, social, and geopolitical realities to which they would probably never have been exposed before.

These experiences gradually convinced me that the network is more than a technical infrastructure. It has become a space of encounter, transmission, learning, and participation in an ever-evolving global culture.

For more than three decades, I have observed these transformations. I witnessed the first websites, the first search engines, the emergence of social networks, and later the arrival of algorithms and conversational artificial intelligences.

Over time, I came to understand that the network was no longer simply a tool for communication or distribution. It was gradually becoming a global cultural space where knowledge, works, memories, and human experiences intersect.

Like many others, I have been in turn a Network Walker, a Network Witness, and an inhabitant of the network, eventually becoming a citizen of the network.

Inhabiting the Network

Using a tool and inhabiting a place are two different experiences.

We use a tool to accomplish a task. We inhabit a place when it becomes part of our daily existence.

For a significant part of humanity, the network has become a place of sharing, memory, and culture. Friendships are born there. Communities develop there. Works circulate there. Knowledge is transmitted there. A portion of global collective memory is built there day after day.

For many people, the network has also become a place of encounter and belonging. Connections are formed between individuals who might never otherwise have met. Communities emerge around shared interests, passions, causes, and cultural practices. The network also provides access to a considerable part of global culture: works, knowledge, archives, testimonies, and creations now circulate on an unprecedented scale. This possibility of meeting, learning, and participating also contributes to making the network an inhabited space.

Inhabiting the network does not mean abandoning the physical world. It means recognizing that contemporary human experience now unfolds simultaneously in physical spaces and digital spaces.

The Citizen of the Network

If the network becomes an inhabited place, then a question naturally arises: how should we behave within it?

This is where the figure of the Citizen of the Network emerges.

I do not use this expression in a legal sense. There is no global government of the network and no universal digital passport. I use the concept in a cultural and ethical sense.

To be a Citizen of the Network is to recognize that we participate in a shared space and in a constantly evolving planetary culture.

It is choosing to transmit knowledge rather than simply consume information.

It is creating.

It is engaging in dialogue.

It is preserving a measure of humanity within digital spaces.

It is also using contemporary tools, including artificial intelligence, responsibly.

A New Human Condition

Humanity has already experienced major cultural transformations. Writing, the printing press, mass media, and the Internet profoundly changed the circulation of ideas and knowledge.

Today, a new stage is emerging.

The printing press enabled the dissemination of books on an unprecedented scale. Mass media accelerated the circulation of information and culture. The Internet made it possible to connect people, works, and knowledge across the globe. Today, artificial intelligence contributes in turn to this evolution by helping organize, interpret, and circulate the content that makes up our cultural environment.

Throughout my life, I have witnessed several of these transformations. I grew up in a world where culture circulated primarily through books, newspapers, libraries, museums, and face-to-face encounters. Later, I saw the emergence of computers, the Internet, search engines, social networks, and conversational artificial intelligences. This historical continuity reminds me that technologies change, but the human need to transmit, learn, create, and share remains.

What is changing is not only the way information circulates. Our relationships, our memory, our attention, and our experience of the world are changing as well.

We are gradually becoming the inhabitants of a global networked culture.

We are at once walkers who explore, witnesses who observe, inhabitants who live within this environment, and citizens who participate in its construction.

Inhabiting the network is not merely about using technologies. It is about learning to share, transmit, create, and preserve a human presence in an increasingly interconnected world.

We are the first conscious inhabitants of a global networked culture.

🔷 CONTINUE THE REFLECTION

→ Human Traces in Global Culture
Memory, transmission, and presence in a networked world.

→ You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

→ Understanding Today’s Culture
A cultural chronicle of micro-essays exploring human experience in a global networked culture.

→ The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age
Culture, knowledge, emotions, and human experience in a connected world.

→ Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture, and Everyday Life in a Networked World
Understanding how algorithms already participate in shaping our daily cultural environment.

→ From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site
A synthesis of the principal concepts developed throughout the theoretical corpus.

→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
An overview of the philosophical foundations of Humanist Digital Art.

→ Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

Illustration numérique représentant « Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker », une silhouette humaine avec une horloge en guise de tête, évoquant la traversée de la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique / Digital illustration representing “Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker,” a human silhouette with a clock as a head, evoking the traversal of global culture in the algorithmic age.

🌍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

Human Traces in Global Culture

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , , 15 commentaires

Memory, Transmission, and Presence in a Networked World

Graffiti displaying the word TRACES painted on a weathered and cracked urban wall, evoking memory, transmission, and the traces left by human beings across time.

Read this article in French:
Les traces humaines dans la culture mondiale

The Network Walker and the Network Witness

I have been observing the evolution of the web since the mid-1990s. I witnessed the first search engines, the beginnings of personal websites, discussion forums, social media platforms, recommendation algorithms and, more recently, conversational artificial intelligence systems.

Over the years, I have become both a Network Walker, moving through the cultural spaces of the web, and a Network Witness, observing the transformations of memory, transmission, and human presence within these constantly evolving environments.

Despite all the technological changes, one thing has always struck me: human beings continue to leave traces.

I have seen artists publish artworks, writers create books, musicians record albums, researchers share knowledge, and ordinary people tell their stories through photographs, texts, and videos. The tools change, but the desire to transmit something of oneself seems to remain.

Today, these traces take new forms, yet they belong to a much older history than digital technology itself.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have sought to transmit something of themselves across time.

The First Human Traces

Tens of thousands of years ago, human beings left their handprints on rock walls. Others painted animals, carved symbols into stone, or told stories around a fire.

Those traces still reach us today.

The earliest human traces take the form of imprints, cave paintings, petroglyphs, symbolic objects, and oral traditions. Long before writing, they already reveal a desire to communicate, transmit knowledge, share experiences, or simply mark one’s passage through the world.

Art is among the earliest manifestations of this desire for transmission. Cave paintings, prehistoric sculptures, and symbols engraved in stone all represent attempts to preserve a human presence beyond the moment in which it was lived.

Those first creators could never have imagined that their works would still be observed thousands of years later. Yet their traces continue to bear witness to their existence.

Traces, Memory, and Transmission

Human beings do not transmit information alone. They also transmit emotions, values, stories, worldviews, and lived experiences.

Traces become memory.

Memory enables transmission.

Transmission allows a human presence to travel through time.

A family photograph, a poem, a story told by a grandparent, or a song learned in childhood can sometimes cross several generations. Their value lies not only in the information they contain, but also in the human experience they carry.

The history of human culture can be read as a long succession of forms of memory. Some are material, others immaterial. Some take the form of objects, others of stories or cultural practices. All contribute to the construction of a collective memory that extends beyond individual lives.

Art and the Great Forms of Human Memory

Throughout my life, I have met many artists and spent time in artist-run centres. I have seen creators devote years, sometimes decades, to their work without knowing what might endure.

Some creations disappeared.

Others continue to be seen, read, heard, or shared.

Looking back, I believe this reality extends far beyond the world of art. It reveals something deeply human: the desire to transmit an experience, share a vision of the world, and leave a trace of one’s passage through life.

Art, literature, music, architecture, archives, and great cultural works represent different ways of transmitting part of the human experience to future generations.

Across centuries, societies have built libraries, preserved archives, told stories, composed songs, and created works that continue to testify to their existence long after their creators have disappeared.

These forms of transmission constitute an important part of what we call culture today.

A Global Networked Culture

Today, this dynamic is taking on a new dimension.

Through digital networks, a significant portion of human memory now circulates on a planetary scale. Works of art, texts, photographs, films, knowledge, and testimonies become accessible almost instantly from countless locations around the world.

Today I can consult works preserved in museums located on the other side of the planet, read texts written in distant countries, or discover artists whom I would never otherwise have encountered.

Global culture does not replace local cultures. Instead, it creates a new space of circulation where memories, stories, and experiences from different regions can encounter one another.

This worldwide circulation opens extraordinary possibilities, but it also raises important questions. How can we preserve the diversity of cultures, languages, and traditions within a widely shared digital space? How can we avoid situations where certain memories become dominant while others remain invisible?

Global networked culture is not a finished state.

It is a process in constant transformation.

Digital Traces

Websites, digital platforms, online libraries, collaborative encyclopedias, and digital archives constitute new forms of human traces.

The media change, but the impulse remains remarkably similar to that which animated the first creators of cave paintings.

To say:

“I was here.”

To share an experience.

To transmit knowledge.

To leave a trace.

For more than twenty years, I have published digital artworks, poems, photographs, and reflections on art, culture, and human experience on the web.

Over time, I came to understand that these publications also constitute traces.

Some may be forgotten.

Others may continue to circulate.

I have seen platforms disappear, technologies become obsolete, and content become difficult to find. I have also seen certain works and texts continue to travel through the network long after they were first published.

Like books, photographs, and artworks before them, these digital traces participate in their own way in the long history of human transmission.

Toward a Global Collective Memory?

This evolution raises a fascinating question.

Is humanity in the process of building a form of global collective memory?

Projects such as digital libraries, web archives, collaborative encyclopedias, and artificial intelligence systems provide access to an unprecedented quantity of knowledge in human history.

For the first time, a significant portion of the world’s knowledge, works, stories, and memories is becoming accessible on a planetary scale.

An increasing part of humanity’s cultural memory is becoming searchable, interconnected, and shareable.

This evolution is also accompanied by a form of cultural transnationalism. Works, stories, ideas, and human experiences now cross borders with unprecedented ease. A photograph published in one country can be viewed seconds later on another continent. A poem, an artwork, or a testimony can circulate across the globe. Without erasing local identities, this growing interconnectedness gradually contributes to the formation of a global cultural space where memories and human experiences meet beyond national boundaries.

This global collective memory does not replace local, family, or national memories. Instead, it connects them within a larger framework where knowledge, works, and experiences from very different contexts can coexist and interact.

Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of global collective memory.

Human Presence in the Network

Yet memory is not merely a question of storage.

Human memory cannot be reduced to the accumulation of information.

Algorithms can organize, classify, and distribute content. They can also influence what becomes visible, what circulates more widely, and sometimes what risks being forgotten.

Meaning, however, remains a human creation.

Memories, emotions, stories, and lived experiences continue to belong to the human experience.

Transmission is not simply the transfer of information.

It is also a relationship.

A presence.

A dialogue between people separated by time, distance, or even generations.

When someone today discovers an old photograph, a poem published decades ago, or the testimony of a stranger living on the other side of the world, something more than information is transmitted. One human experience enters into relationship with another.

Some people now imagine that their writings, archives, images, voices, or conversations might one day contribute to the creation of conversational avatars capable of transmitting part of their memory.

Whether such projects become reality may matter less than what they reveal: the profoundly human desire to continue transmitting a presence beyond one’s own existence.

Memory and Forgetting

Every memory remains fragile.

Languages disappear.

Works are lost.

Archives deteriorate.

Websites close.

Platforms cease to exist.

Forgetting always accompanies memory.

The cave paintings that have survived probably represent only a tiny fraction of those that were once created. Many libraries have disappeared throughout history. Even today, millions of web pages become inaccessible over time.

We often speak about the ability of digital technology to preserve traces. Yet the digital environment has its own fragility: obsolete formats, closed platforms, broken links, deleted content, or information simply lost within the immensity of the network.

Perhaps it is precisely this fragility that gives human traces their value.

Transmitting a Presence

From the first handprints left on rock walls to the digital traces circulating today through global networks, human beings have never ceased transmitting part of themselves through time.

Technologies change.

Media change.

Forms of transmission evolve.

Yet the human desire to leave a trace, share an experience, and transmit a presence remains.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest characteristics of our condition: the desire to extend a small part of our presence beyond the moment in which we live.

And within this long history of human traces, each of us participates, in our own way, in the memory of the world to come.

See Also

🟦 You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

🟦 The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age
A reflection on the human experience of global culture within contemporary digital networks.

🟦 Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture, and Everyday Life in a Networked World
How algorithmic systems already participate in the daily circulation of knowledge, stories, and culture.

🟦 From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site
A synthesis of the principal concepts developed within the Humanist Digital Art corpus.

🟦 Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space
A reflection on the website as a space of creation, memory, and cultural circulation.

🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Global, Poetic, and Digital Artistic Practice
How artworks, texts, and poems can circulate globally through the network.

🟦 Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

→ Understanding Today’s Culture
A cultural chronicle of micro-essays exploring human experience in a global networked culture.

Mot « TRACES » peint en noir dans un style graffiti sur fond blanc. / The word “TRACES” painted in black graffiti style on a white background.

🌍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

Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , , 14 commentaires

We Are Already Living in an Algorithmic Culture

Silhouette of a walker moving through an environment saturated with digital platforms, algorithms, and media flows in a contemporary dripping aesthetic.

Read this article in French:
Tout le monde utilise l’IA — Art, culture et vie quotidienne dans un monde en réseau

A Technology Already Integrated into Everyday Life

Since the arrival of conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, many people have the impression that artificial intelligence has suddenly entered our lives. Yet different forms of AI have already been present in our daily lives for many years.

We use AI when we search the Internet, follow a GPS route, when streaming platforms suggest films or music, or when social networks automatically organize the posts that appear in our news feeds. Online shopping platforms, voice assistants, automatic translation, recommendation systems, editing tools, and even many health applications already rely on forms of artificial intelligence.

AI is no longer a technology of the future.
It has gradually become an invisible infrastructure of contemporary everyday life.

A Gradual Evolution of the Web and Digital Platforms

I have been observing the evolution of the web and digital culture since the early days of the Internet in the 1990s. I witnessed the emergence of the first search engines, the beginnings of social networks, digital platforms and, gradually, the arrival of algorithmic systems that now organize a large part of global cultural circulation.

This shift did not happen suddenly. It developed slowly, almost silently, until it became an integrated part of contemporary daily life.

Today, this reality affects almost every area of society: work, education, communications, media, commerce, transportation, health, research, culture and the arts.

It is already changing the way many professions function on a daily basis. Teachers use writing and research assistance tools, cultural workers depend on digital platforms to distribute their content, companies automate certain administrative tasks, and creators use recommendation systems to reach their audiences.

Media, Journalism and Culture in the Algorithmic Environment

Even professions related to information, communication and media are now evolving within this digital environment where platforms, search engines and algorithmic systems occupy an increasingly important place.

We can also see this in journalism, where journalists already use writing assistance tools, automatic transcription systems, intelligent search engines and platforms that personalize the circulation of information. In newsrooms, algorithms now influence content visibility, the speed of dissemination and sometimes even the way topics reach the public.

Art and culture do not evolve outside the contemporary world. They are transforming within the same digital and algorithmic environment that is already reshaping our daily habits.

Today, digital platforms play a major role in our cultural experience. Recommendation systems help organize what we discover, watch, listen to and share. Search engines also influence the visibility of artworks, artists, articles and ideas.

The deepest role of AI may not simply be to produce images, texts or music. It also lies in its ability to silently organize global cultural circulation.

Visibility in Algorithmic Culture

We are already living in an algorithmic culture.

This does not mean that algorithms completely control our lives or that humanity is disappearing. But it does mean that many aspects of our experience of the world now pass through systems of calculation, recommendation, filtering and personalization.

This presence sometimes becomes almost invisible because it gradually integrates itself into our habits. Like the Internet before it, AI is slowly ceasing to be perceived as a spectacular novelty and is becoming a normalized everyday environment.

We may be entering a period comparable to the post-digital era: a moment when technology ceases to be exceptional because it has already become part of the ordinary cultural landscape.

For younger generations, digital platforms, automated recommendations and algorithmic systems no longer represent a technological novelty, but simply a normal part of the cultural environment in which they are growing up.

Today, even people who claim to distrust artificial intelligence often use, sometimes without fully realizing it, platforms, search engines, social networks and digital systems that already rely on various forms of algorithms and AI.

It is possible to reject certain uses of conversational AI or to question its development. But it becomes more difficult to claim that we live completely outside these technological environments, since digital platforms and algorithmic systems are now an integral part of contemporary everyday life.

This situation nevertheless raises several important questions. Algorithmic systems sometimes tend to favor content that generates rapid attention, strong emotional reactions or constant engagement. Personalized recommendations can also reduce certain forms of spontaneous discovery and encourage a gradual homogenization of cultural tastes.

In this context, visibility itself becomes a major cultural issue.

What is not recommended circulates less.
What circulates less sometimes becomes almost invisible.

Artists, writers, journalists, creators and cultural organizations must now evolve within environments where the circulation of content increasingly depends on digital platforms and algorithmic systems.

Human Presence in an Automated World

But this transformation is not only about technology. It also concerns the way we inhabit the contemporary world.

As systems become more automatic, more fluid and more integrated into everyday life, certain human dimensions seem to acquire a new value: real presence, attention, slowness (human time), critical thinking, human relationships, emotion, memory and lived experience.

Algorithmic systems did not appear on their own. They also reflect the choices, values and orientations of the societies that develop them.

The more algorithmic the world becomes, the more precious human presence becomes.

Artificial intelligence will probably continue to profoundly transform contemporary societies. The arts, media and culture will also continue to evolve within this networked environment where humans, platforms and algorithmic systems now permanently coexist.

But despite these transformations, one thing remains essential: behind screens, data and algorithms, there are still human beings who create, search, doubt, feel and try to give meaning to the world they are moving through.

The digital is not the subject.
The human being is.

It is humanity that created technologies, including artificial intelligence, to extend its capacities, share knowledge and continue transforming the world it inhabits.

🔷 SEE ALSO

→ You Already Use Artificial Intelligence

→ The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age

→ The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms Organizing Global Culture

→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments

→ About the Author

→ Human Traces in Global Culture

→ Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

→ Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

Illustration numérique représentant « Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker », une silhouette humaine avec une horloge en guise de tête, évoquant la traversée de la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique / Digital illustration representing “Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker,” a human silhouette with a clock as a head, evoking the traversal of global culture in the algorithmic age.

🌍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

The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age

Publié le Publié dans Art numérique humaniste, Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 14 commentaires

Culture, Transmission, Emotions and Human Experience in a Networked World

Digital illustration representing a network walker moving through an environment of global algorithmic culture composed of words such as ALGO, WEB, CULTURE, MEDIA, ARCHIVE, and DATA.

Read this article in French:
Le marcheur du réseau — Traverser la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique

A Global Networked Culture

We are already living within a global networked culture.

In the evening, somewhere in a house, an apartment or a bedroom, someone listens to music from another country while the glow of a screen softly lights the room. A few minutes later, that same person watches a Chinese film, discovers a photograph taken on the other side of the world, consults an old archive, reads a poem translated into another language, watches a video explaining an artistic technique or exchanges with an artificial intelligence.

All of this can now happen during a single ordinary evening.

Today, culture circulates through a vast global environment made up of archives, platforms, search engines, communities, videos, recommendations and systems of transmission that continuously connect artworks, knowledge, images, emotions and human memories.

The question is no longer technological.

It is human, cultural and civilizational.

We already inhabit this continuous global culture.

From a Culture of Places to a Culture of Circulation

For a long time, I knew another cultural reality.

To experience certain works, one had to travel to a museum, a gallery, a library or a cinema. Books circulated more slowly. Discoveries took time. Knowledge was often connected to physical places, institutions, teachers and clearly identifiable cultural mediators.

I have been observing this cultural transformation since the early days of the web in the 1990s. For more than twenty years, I have personally published images, artworks and texts within the network. Over time, I have watched global culture gradually become a continuous environment of circulation, transmission and learning.

Then, progressively, computing, the web, digital archives, search engines and networks transformed the circulation of culture on a global scale.

This transformation did not happen abruptly.

It slowly settled into our daily habits.

Today, millions of people learn music, drawing, photography, video editing, writing, philosophy or craft techniques directly through the network. Films, songs, texts, visual works and knowledge continuously cross borders, languages and generations.

Culture is no longer simply a place we visit.

It becomes an environment in which we live.

We are gradually entering a post-digital culture where networks, archives, systems of transmission and global cultural circulation have become part of everyday life.

The Network Walker

Within this new cultural condition, we gradually become Network Walkers.

We continuously move through global cultural flows.

We move from one work to another, from one language to another, from one memory to another. We discover unknown artists, forgotten archives, ancient music and images from elsewhere. We learn through videos, communities, exchanges and global systems of transmission that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few decades ago.

The Network Walker is not merely a user of technologies.

It is a human presence inhabiting a global cultural space in continuous circulation.

Memory and Visibility in Cultural Flows

This transformation profoundly changes our relationship to memory.

In the past, archives often remained difficult to access and tied to specific locations. Today, a vast part of human cultural memory circulates through networks. An old photograph suddenly reappears on a screen after years of oblivion. Forgotten films resurface. Music crosses decades. Texts continue to be read long after their original publication.

Memory becomes more accessible, but also more fragile.

What circulates remains visible.

What stops circulating risks slowly disappearing within the constant noise of global cultural flows.

We are therefore entering an era in which visibility directly influences cultural memory.

Learning Within a Continuous Global Culture

This global culture also transforms the way we learn.

Learning becomes increasingly horizontal, mobile and continuous.

Today, a person can learn a Japanese painting technique through a video produced in another country, listen to African music, discover a Québécois poet, watch a European documentary and speak with an artificial intelligence within the same day.

Knowledge now circulates at an unprecedented speed and scale.

But this abundance also creates new tensions.

We live in a world where access to works and knowledge has probably never been so vast, while at the same time confronting a permanent overload of information, images and stimuli.

Global culture brings people closer together while sometimes producing a strange form of solitude.

We are connected to immense flows, yet we continue searching for spaces of real presence, attention and depth.

Human Time Within Contemporary Flows

Within this continuous culture, human time itself becomes an important issue.

Networks accelerate cultural circulation, but human emotions remain slow.

Learning takes time.

Memory takes time.

Grief, creation, reflection and transmission take time.

Even in a world crossed by instantaneous flows, human experience continues moving at a rhythm profoundly different from that of the systems now organizing global cultural circulation.

This may be one of the most important tensions of our time.

A New Global Cultural Condition

Yet despite the risks of uniformity, saturation and permanent distraction, this global culture also opens an immense space for human encounters.

People living in different countries can now share works, learn together, transmit knowledge, discover common sensitivities and build new forms of cultural exchange.

Global culture therefore becomes not only a space of circulation, but also a space of transmission and human recognition.

The Network Walker continues its journey through this global cultural environment.

It moves through works, knowledge, emotions, archives, languages, memories and imaginaries continuously circulating around it.

It becomes at once:

• witness;
• learner;
• transmitter;
• human presence within contemporary cultural flows.

We may be entering a new global cultural condition where culture no longer exists merely as a collection of objects or institutions, but as a living environment progressively transforming the way we learn, transmit, feel, communicate and inhabit the world.

And the Network Walker continues moving forward, traveling, wandering and visiting.

Illustration numérique représentant « Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker », une silhouette humaine avec une horloge en guise de tête, évoquant la traversée de la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique / Digital illustration representing “Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker,” a human silhouette with a clock as a head, evoking the traversal of global culture in the algorithmic age.

🔷 CONTINUE THE JOURNEY

→ The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms Organizing Global Culture

→ From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site

→ Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space

→ Digital Poetry and Post-Digital Practice: Toward a Humanist Reading of Contemporary Forms

→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments

→ Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World

→ Human Traces in Global Culture

→ Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

→ Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

🌍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

The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms That Organize Global Culture

Publié le Publié dans Art numérique humaniste, Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , , 20 commentaires

From Generative AI to AI as a Global Artistic and Cultural Infrastructure

🟦 Lire cet article en Français:
L’utilisation de l’IA en art : au-delà de la création, les algorithmes qui organisent la culture mondiale

🔹 Explore the theoretical corpus of Humanist Digital Art
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments

Ink sketch exploring the relationship between AI and art, symbolizing a human-centered and cultural approach to artificial intelligence.

When we talk today about the use of artificial intelligence in art, the discussion almost always revolves around the same themes:
AI-assisted creation, image, music and text generation, prompts, aesthetics, authorship, copyright, and authenticity.

These approaches are legitimate. They address real and necessary issues.

👉 But they leave aside a fundamental aspect of AI’s real impact on art and culture: circulation.

This reflection is also presented in video form.

The video deepens this reflection on the use of AI in art and on the role of algorithms in shaping contemporary culture.

Beyond creation: the blind spot of the debate

Public discourse on AI in art largely focuses on what AI produces.
Yet the most profound transformation does not lie in what AI generates, but in how art circulates, becomes visible, is contextualized, archived, or forgotten.

AI does not only create images, sounds, texts, or videos.
It organizes the conditions under which works encounter audiences.

A global, automated, and selective circulation

Today, works circulate through systems governed by algorithms:

  • search engines,
  • social media platforms,
  • databases and archives,
  • recommendation systems,
  • conversational artificial intelligences.

This circulation is neither neutral nor always equitable.

Certain works benefit from massive visibility, while others remain marginal or invisible—often independently of their artistic value.

And paradoxically, artists themselves often have little control over these mechanisms:

  • they do not know how algorithms function,
  • they do not understand why a work circulates or not,
  • they cannot clearly identify what triggers visibility or invisibility,
  • they frequently navigate these systems blindly.

AI as algorithmic mediator

AI now acts as a form of automated cultural mediation at a planetary scale.

Where human mediators—critics, institutions, educators, curators, programmers—once played a central role, algorithmic systems increasingly orient access to works, references, and cultural narratives, often invisibly and without explicit explanation.

These systems select, prioritize, translate, summarize, recommend, and archive cultural content at a planetary scale.

A worldwide phenomenon

This algorithmic circulation now concerns all regions of the world.

Whether in India, China, Africa, the Americas, Europe, or Australia, artworks, images, narratives, and cultural forms enter the same digital infrastructures of diffusion, recommendation, and indexing.

However, while networks are global, conditions of visibility are not always equal.
Algorithms tend to favor certain languages, formats, and aesthetics, sometimes marginalizing artistic and cultural expressions that are nonetheless vibrant and alive.

The global circulation of art organized by AI thus raises critical issues of cultural diversity and representation that go far beyond national borders.

Cultural responsibility therefore remains human, even within algorithmic infrastructures.

AI as organizer of visibility and cultural memory

Beyond circulation, AI plays a growing role in shaping cultural memory.

What is indexed, cited, summarized, recommended, or reused contributes to defining what will be remembered, transmitted, and legitimized over time.

This transformation increasingly unfolds outside traditional institutions—galleries, museums, academies—within digital infrastructures whose criteria remain opaque.

The impact is profound: it reshapes how art is perceived, recognized, transmitted, and preserved in the 21st century.

A historical perspective

I have been using the web since the mid-1990s. At that time, artists were already questioning how to exist online: creating virtual galleries, sharing images of artworks, and exploring new forms of visibility and circulation.

Long before generative AI or conversational systems, algorithms were already shaping how culture circulated—through early search engines, indexing mechanisms, and later, recommendation systems.

For more than thirty years, algorithms have structured the circulation of culture:
from early search engines in the 1990s, to social media platforms, recommendation systems, and now large-scale AI models.

Generative AI is only the most visible layer of a much older infrastructure that has long organized access to culture.

The artist as an actor of circulation

In this context, the role of the artist evolves.

The artist is no longer only a creator of objects, texts, or concepts, but also:

  • an actor of circulation,
  • a witness to algorithmic mechanisms,
  • responsible for how their work enters the global network.

Publishing, linking, indexing, documenting, and observing the circulation of works becomes an artistic act in itself.

The artist becomes not only a creator, but also a conscious participant in algorithmic visibility systems.

A situated practice: humanist digital art

Within what I define as a humanist digital art approach, I create, publish, and observe works while fully acknowledging that they immediately enter algorithmic systems of diffusion, indexing, and interpretation.

These works are not conceived as isolated objects, but as presences that circulate, transform, and inscribe themselves within a shared digital memory.

The goal is not to submit to algorithms, nor to reject them, but to remain attentive to their effects and to reaffirm the centrality of human experience.

Beyond creation

We speak extensively about AI as a tool for creation.

But the most profound impact lies elsewhere:
in the way algorithms quietly organize the global circulation of art and culture.

As long as art and culture speak of humanity,
the human will remain at the heart of the digital world.

To situate this reflection on AI infrastructure within the corpus of Humanist Digital Art

🟦 You Already Use Artificial Intelligence

🟦 How Far Can a Publication Go?

🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
Central structured entry point.

🟦 From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site
Synthesis of the main concepts of Humanist Digital Art and opening toward global algorithmic culture.

🟦 Art, Culture, and Humanity in the Algorithmic Age of Artificial Intelligence
Macro-philosophical reflection.

🟦 Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space
Reflection on the website as a contemporary artistic environment within the post-digital network.

🟦 From Humanist Digital Art to an Algorithmic Media Art Project
Transformation into a media project.

🟦 Algorithmic Performance in Continuum
Living form of circulation.

🟦 From the Physical Studio to the Algorithmic Studio
Expanded studio.

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

🟦 The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age

🟦 Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World


🟦 Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

🌍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

An evolving Algorithmic Artwork-Site