Étiquette : global networked culture

Do Our Choices Shape the Culture of Tomorrow?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , 2 commentaires
Digital composition by Gilles Vallée featuring four spheres with distinct designs: a symbolic eye, trees, geometric patterns, and a starry sky.

Read this article in French:
Nos choix façonnent-ils la culture de demain ?

A Scene from Everyday Life

You listen to a song performed by young musicians.
The melody sounds familiar.
You eventually recognize a song you have known for a long time.

The lyrics and melody have remained the same, but the musical arrangements have changed. The artists have chosen to give the song a new sound, bringing it up to date while preserving what makes it recognizable.

You enjoy this new interpretation and decide to share it with your friends on social media. Some discover the song for the first time, while others recognize it and share it in turn.

A song from the past thus finds a new place in the culture of another generation.

Our Choices Contribute to Cultural Evolution

Every day, we make cultural choices. We listen to certain kinds of music, watch videos, read texts, discover works of art, and overlook others. Sometimes we decide to share them, recommend them, or talk about them with people around us.

These individual actions take on a collective dimension when they are repeated around the world. They help certain works circulate, draw attention to artists, and give rise to new cultural trends.

Digital technologies amplify this phenomenon. Social media, streaming platforms, and their algorithms influence what we discover. Our choices about what to view, share, and publish also contribute to this circulation.

Through these many human practices, global networked culture continues to evolve. Cultural trends emerging from our collective choices can, in turn, influence the tastes and practices of future generations.

We do not know which works will still be appreciated in thirty or fifty years, or which cultural trends will emerge. But one thing deserves our attention: our cultural choices are not only about what we personally enjoy.

By choosing what we discover, appreciate, create, and share, we also help shape the culture of tomorrow.

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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

🟦 Daring to Publish: An Individual Act, a Global Cultural Phenomenon

🟦 You Already Choose Your Culture

🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Discovering Global Culture Through Conversations with AI

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , 2 commentaires

A New Way to Discover and Explore Culture

Figure in a black suit with a clock for a head, surrounded by words referring to art, culture, the Web, and archives.

Read this article in French:
Découvrir la culture mondiale en discutant avec une IA

A Scene from Everyday Life:

You connect to an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
You ask: “What does contemporary art mean?”
It gives you a definition.
Then it invites you to continue the conversation: “Would you like to explore its history, digital art practices, or its place in culture?”

A simple question has just opened up several paths of discovery.

This kind of exchange is not limited to contemporary art. It can also lead us to literature, poetry, music, cinema, traditions, and the many other expressions of human culture.

As the conversation unfolds, one answer may lead to another question, and then another. We can ask for clarification, compare works of art, discover artists, or make connections between different cultures. Little by little, a path of discovery takes shape, guided by our curiosity and the suggestions offered by AI.

With a search engine, we generally use keywords to find information and visit different web pages. With conversational AI, we can instead ask our questions directly. AI then becomes an intermediary that presents knowledge, makes connections, and suggests new directions for further exploration.

This way of exploring culture has a distinctive feature: we do not need to know exactly what we are looking for. A simple question sparked by curiosity can lead us to works of art, ideas, or traditions we did not know about. Conversation thus becomes another way to navigate the vast mosaic of global networked culture.

However, this exploration has its limits. AI systems do not know everything about human culture. Some works, languages, and traditions are less represented in the information available to them. Their responses may also contain errors. And discovering a work through conversation does not necessarily replace experiencing it directly.

AI systems are gradually becoming new tools, new guides, for exploring global networked culture. But it is still our curiosity, our questions, and our choices that give direction to this exploration.

Human culture remains a territory of discovery. We now have another way to explore it: conversations with AI.

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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

🟦 How Do Images and Videos Shape Global Culture?

🟦 We Already Live in a Global Networked Culture

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

🟦 Daring to Publish: An Individual Act, a Global Cultural Phenomenon

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

How Do Images and Videos Shape Global Culture?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , 2 commentaires

Our Cultural Habits Are Changing

Digital composition by Gilles Vallée featuring a woman's face surrounded by colorful clock faces, graphic fragments, and handwritten elements arranged within a sphere.

Read this article in French:
Comment les images et les vidéos façonnent-elles la culture mondiale ?

A scene from everyday life:

You go online.
You open a social media platform.
A photograph appears.
You look at it for a few seconds.
You scroll.
A video starts playing.
You watch part of it.
You scroll again.
Another image.
Another video.
An advertisement.
Another post.

In just a few minutes, you have encountered dozens of pieces of content.

But how many actually caught your attention?

This scene illustrates a transformation in our cultural habits.

In the digital world, images and videos play an increasingly prominent role. We move quickly from one piece of content to another, discovering information, events, artworks, and cultural practices, sometimes from the other side of the world.

The way we encounter culture is evolving.

In the past, discovering an artwork might have required visiting a gallery, a library, or a performance venue. Now, creations appear directly on our screens, even when we haven’t searched for them.

This circulation also changes our relationship with artworks.

A painting or sculpture can be discovered in seconds. A poem may appear between two videos. An artwork can appear alongside an advertisement or a news story. Algorithms often act as intermediaries, suggesting content to us.

In this flow, an artwork appears among many different kinds of content, sometimes without the information needed to place it in its artistic context. Our first impression is then formed in an environment different from the one for which it was created.

These changes also influence artistic practices.

Some artists take these habits into account when creating their works, exploring the possibilities of images, short videos, or combinations of text and images. Others focus instead on adapting how they present their creations to digital environments.

In this way, how we look at artworks can also influence how they are conceived and circulated.

But these transformations extend beyond individual practices.

An image or video can travel from one country to another, be shared, discussed, or reinterpreted. Some creations become shared cultural references, while others reach smaller communities.

Images and videos do more than change what we see. They also transform how we discover, create, and circulate global culture in all its diversity.

Our cultural habits are changing.

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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

🟦 What Is Culture For in a Digital Society?

🟦 We Already Live in a Global Networked Culture

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

🟦 Discovering Global Culture Through Conversations with AI

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Has the Web Become a Cultural Space in Its Own Right?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , 4 commentaires

An Environment for Humanity’s Culture

Digital composition in orange, red and yellow tones featuring a human face shifted by a glitch effect, geometric shapes and a clock.

Read this article in French:
Le Web est-il devenu un espace culturel en soi ?

A scene from everyday life:

You go online.
You publish a visual artwork on your website. Then you share a poem in a poetry group on a social network.

You have just introduced two creations into two different cultural spaces.

In the first, you decide how to present your artwork and how to connect it with your other creations. In the second, your poem joins those shared by others. It may be read, commented on, and spark conversations among poetry enthusiasts.

These two spaces have their own characteristics. Yet they belong to the same environment: the Web.

The Web allows us to communicate, search for information, and share content. But its role goes beyond that.

It is home to communities of readers, musicians, artists, and film enthusiasts. People come together around shared interests, share their creations and knowledge, develop practices, and exchange perspectives.

Some spaces extend artistic practices that existed long before the Internet, such as drawing and painting. Others welcome forms of creation that have developed with the Web, such as interactive artworks, collaborative projects, and certain forms of digital poetry.

What makes these places cultural spaces is not simply the presence of artworks or content. It is also what people do there: create, discover, exchange, interpret, and pass on knowledge and experiences.

This does not mean that the Web forms one large cultural community. It is home to a multitude of spaces, each with its own practices, references, and audiences.

These spaces are not necessarily isolated. A person can participate in communities located in different parts of the world. An idea born in one can find its way into another. A creation can be discovered or interpreted in different cultural contexts.

These digital spaces do not replace museums, libraries, performance venues, or other cultural places. They exist alongside them, allowing new relationships to develop between people, artworks, and cultural practices.

The Web is therefore not merely a way to access culture. It is also a space where we live part of our cultural lives.

The Web has thus become one of the environments in which world culture lives and evolves: the culture of humanity as a whole, in all its diversity.

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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

🟦 What Is Culture For in a Digital Society?

🟦 Has Publishing Their Work Become Part of an Artist’s Job?

🟦 We Already Live in a Global Networked Culture

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

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Has Publishing Their Work Become Part of an Artist’s Job?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , 4 commentaires

Creating, Publishing, and Sharing Artistic Work

Black-and-white digital composition featuring a figure, a red geometric form and the word ART against a dark background scattered with dots.

Read this article in French:
Publier ses œuvres fait-il désormais partie du travail de l’artiste ?

A Scene from Everyday Life:

You go online.
You publish a visual artwork you have created, accompanied by a poem you have written.
The image is an artistic creation. So is the poem.

But what about the act of publishing them?
Is that also part of your work as an artist?

For a long time, much of the responsibility for bringing artworks to the public rested with cultural intermediaries. Gallery owners presented the works of painters and sculptors. Publishing houses published the writings of poets and other writers. Other individuals and institutions helped make these creations known and connect them with audiences.

These forms of cultural mediation still exist. Artists have also always played a role, to varying degrees, in promoting and sharing their work. But with the development of the Web and self-publishing, the possibilities have multiplied.

Artists can now publish their work directly, without necessarily going through a gallery or publishing house. They can also create their own publishing spaces and manage part of how their work reaches the public.

Their work, then, is no longer limited to creating art.

They also wear a second hat: that of managing their presence and the dissemination of their work.

Organizing projects, building relationships, preparing publications, managing a website, and contributing to the circulation of their creations: all these activities can now occupy an important place in their artistic practice.

And a website can become much more than a promotional showcase. It can bring together artworks, texts, images, videos, and artistic collections. When their organization and the relationships between these creations reflect an artistic intention, the website itself can become a space for artistic creation: a website-as-artwork.

This reality also applies to cinema, music, dance, theatre, and other art forms, even though the means of dissemination vary across disciplines.

Artists do not necessarily have to choose between traditional cultural intermediaries and direct publishing. These paths can complement one another.

Creating artworks remains at the heart of an artist’s work. But actively participating in their dissemination is becoming increasingly important.

Whatever path they choose, the ultimate goal is to enable their creations to contribute to global culture.

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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 Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

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

🟦 Has the Web Become a Cultural Space in Its Own Right?

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Let’s Be Human with AI

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , 3 commentaires

Bringing Humanity into This Algorithmic World

Human figure integrated into an abstract digital composition with geometric forms, evoking human presence in an algorithmic world.

Read this article in French:
Soyons humains avec l’IA

An Everyday Scene

You want to share a photo you took of a landscape from your home region.

You write a few lines to accompany the image, then ask an artificial intelligence for its opinion. It slightly rephrases your text. It then suggests improving the appearance of the photo.

You eventually publish the revised image and text.

Is this still an authentic trace of your human experience, even though AI played a part in creating it?

You were there. The AI was not. It helped you give form to this trace, but the experience it conveys is yours.

Let’s take another example. A person can tell their life story to a biographer who turns it into a book. They could also record their story, publish it as a podcast, or ask an AI to help organize and write their autobiography. In all these cases, the experience being told remains that of a person who actually lived it.

An authentic trace does not come from the tool that was used. It comes from the human experience we inscribe in it.

And what about the future?

Artificial intelligence will probably become an increasingly ordinary part of our toolkit. We will use it to write, translate, search, create images, organize our ideas, or communicate.

The question, then, will not only be whether AI played a part in what we publish, but also what we brought to it.

Our memories, knowledge, encounters, emotions, observations, and creations can become authentic traces of human experience. In the arts, an artist can use AI or any other digital tool while still inscribing their experience, perspective, and artistic approach into their work.

Once published, these traces enter the network. They can circulate, be discovered, shared, preserved, and become part of global culture.

We do more than simply use the digital world. Through what we choose to create, publish, and circulate within it, we also participate in shaping what it becomes.

Tools will continue to change. Let us continue to bring authentic traces of human experience into the network.

Artificial intelligence can help us give them form and help them circulate.

Let’s be human with AI.

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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

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

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

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Why Continue Writing Poetry in a Digital World?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 4 commentaires

We Participate in the Evolution of the Digital World

Digital artwork by Gilles Vallée depicting a bicycle beside a staircase in a composition of cyan, purple and yellow tones.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi continuer d’écrire de la poésie dans un monde numérique ?

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You type into a search engine:
“poetry on the Web”

The answer comes back:
“Poetry on the Web transforms traditional writing into an interactive, visual and auditory experience accessible everywhere.”

That’s true. Digital technology is transforming the ways we write, publish and read poetry. Instapoetry, which emerged with social media, is one example.

But the movement also goes in the other direction.

Every poem we write and publish adds a few words to this immense digital space. Just a few words, but words that carry an image, an emotion, a human experience, a way of looking at the world.

We do more than simply inhabit the digital world. Through what we choose to publish there, we also participate in its evolution.

A single poem may seem tiny in the vastness of the Web, but we should not think only at the scale of one poem. Whether published in a book or on the Web, every poem joins other human traces that, together, participate in the evolution of global culture.

When a poem is published on the Web, it also enters this space of circulation that we build every day.

We constantly use words to communicate, search or explain. Poetry reminds us that words can also make us imagine, feel and see differently. Writing poetry means exploring this other possibility of language. A few words can be enough to evoke a mental image, an emotion, a memory or a question.

That is also why it matters to keep writing poetry and putting it into circulation. The digital world should not become merely a useful space for finding information, working, calculating or communicating. It should also carry the emotional, intuitive and imaginative dimensions of human experience.

Continuing to publish poetry there is one way of helping to ensure this human presence within the network.

The digital world will continue to evolve. What we choose to write and put into circulation will also help determine what it becomes. Poetry can continue to be part of it.

We have the opportunity to leave poetic traces in this algorithmic world, so let’s do it.

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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

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 Why I Continue to Write and Publish in a World Saturated with Technology

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Why Do We Still Need Artists?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 6 commentaires
Artistic portrait in pink, red and orange tones, with a face emerging from light and colour.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi avons-nous encore besoin des artistes ?

An everyday scene:

You go online and open a search engine.
You type: “What is art for?”
Within seconds, you get an answer:
“Art is a way to express emotions, question the world, and connect people.”

All of this is true.
But something is missing.

We are constantly trying to understand the world we live in. Statistics tell us about poverty, aging, or isolation. Scientific research helps us better understand climate change. Economic, historical, and social analyses help us explain the transformations taking place in our societies.

We need all of this knowledge.
But there is more than one way to understand the world.

A statistic can tell us that thousands of people live alone. A poem can make us feel loneliness. A report can describe the consequences of a war. A photograph can make us stop and look at the face of someone living through it. A study can analyze a society. A novel, a song, a film, or a play can take us into the experience of the people who live in it.

These are not competing ways of understanding the world. They reveal different dimensions of it.

This is where the particular role of artists begins.

Artists bring their own way of seeing the world. They can draw attention to what goes unnoticed, give form to an emotion that is difficult to name, or reveal a reality from an unexpected angle. Through their works, they offer us new ways of seeing, feeling, or imagining the world.

But a way of seeing is not enough.

The artist looks for a form in which to share it: words, an image, a melody, a story, a movement, a scene, a film, an installation. The work then becomes a means of communication between a singular way of seeing the world and other human beings.

We do not only need to know what kind of world we live in. We also need to feel what it means to live in it, to imagine it, and sometimes to dream it.

Artists offer us their way of seeing and invent forms through which they can share it with us.

The artistic gaze enriches human experience. Reality is not discovered through rational analysis alone.

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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 Continue Making Art in a Digital World?

🟦 Has Publishing Their Work Become Part of an Artist’s Job?

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

🟦 Why Continue Writing Poetry in a Digital World?

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Why Continue Making Art in a Digital World?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 6 commentaires
A human hand points toward the orange intersection of two black-and-white checkerboard circles.

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.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦Why I Continue to Write and Publish in a World Saturated with Technology

🟦Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦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

Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 5 commentaires

Cultural Stewards

Two black-and-white checkerboard spheres dotted with colorful squares, evoking circulation and cultural diversity.

Read this article in French:
Qui fabriquera la reconnaissance culturelle et artistique demain ?

You log on.
You ask a search engine to name some internationally recognized artists.
An AI-generated overview suggests several names, grouped by artistic field.

But who decided that these artists were recognized?

For a long time, this recognition was largely shaped and transmitted by different mediators: museums, galleries, critics, curators, publishers, universities, media organizations, and other cultural institutions.

Painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, music, theatre, cinema: among all the works created in these fields, some have been recognized and passed on by these stewards. By preserving, publishing, exhibiting, interpreting, or studying them, they have also contributed to their longevity.

Today, other stewards have joined them: search engines, platforms, recommendation systems, and artificial intelligence. Without replacing institutions, they are participating in a new ecosystem of recognition.

Today, a work can have little presence within institutions and yet be encountered by millions of people in our global networked culture. It can be searched for, shared, cited, and continually recirculated.

Is that enough to call it recognition?

Not necessarily. A work can go viral on the Web and then disappear. Popularity, circulation, recognition, and longevity are not the same thing.

Time, however, can have an impact. If a work continues to be encountered, transmitted, and rediscovered over the years, its circulation can contribute to its recognition and longevity.

This phenomenon is not new. From Leonardo da Vinci to Van Gogh, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, works continue to endure because generations of stewards have preserved, studied, published, exhibited, or transmitted them.

And behind this circulation, there are not only algorithms. There are also people. Their searches, publications, links, citations, and encounters leave traces that new mediators can, in turn, organize and bring to our attention. Search engines and AI systems can suggest a work. But without a human encounter, there will be no one to recognize it, transmit it, and contribute to its longevity.

Tomorrow, institutions, audiences, and new stewards will probably participate together in shaping cultural and artistic recognition.

Stewards may change.
Technologies may change.
But a culture remains alive only if people continue to share it.

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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 Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 The Horizon of Circulation

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

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor