Étiquette : Understanding Today’s Culture

Why Do We Still Need Artists?

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

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

🟦 Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

🟦 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

Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

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

Works, Ideas and Knowledge: The Stewards of Cultural Continuity

Two sunflowers in a vase, one yellow and inspired by Van Gogh, the other transformed into a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi certaines traces humaines traversent-elles le temps ?

A scene from everyday life:

You log on.
You run a search.
You are shown a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

You encounter a work created more than a century ago, without going to a museum and without ever seeing the original.

But this story is not just about painting.

A poem, a novel, a song, a film, a photograph, an idea or a piece of knowledge can also travel across generations.

How do they reach us?

And why do some of these human traces continue to circulate while others disappear?

Van Gogh’s story offers us a clue.

Van Gogh left behind paintings, drawings and letters. Traces.

His brother Theo supported him and helped preserve these traces. After both brothers died, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, played a crucial role in preserving, exhibiting and bringing Vincent’s work to public attention.

Then others took over.

Collectors, art dealers, museums, researchers, teachers and publishers. Later came photographers, filmmakers and television. Then the Internet, search engines, platforms and, today, artificial intelligence.

All became, in their own way, mediators.

Stewards.

Through them, the traces left by Van Gogh continued their journey, encountering new people generation after generation.

The journey can be summarized as follows:

Traces → Mediators → Horizon of Circulation → Effective Circulation → Longevity

A broader horizon of circulation, however, does not guarantee that a work will endure through time. It simply opens up more possible paths.

And preserving a work may not be enough to ensure its cultural longevity.

A work can lie dormant in an archive for decades. It still exists, but no one encounters it.

Preservation allows a trace to survive. Circulation and encounters allow it to remain alive in culture.

Perhaps this is what longevity means: not a state achieved once and for all, but a process. A work is rediscovered, viewed, studied, discussed, reproduced, transmitted and then put back into circulation.

Each generation receives traces from the past and passes some of them on to the next.

We, too, are stewards.

Perhaps cultural longevity is, above all, a succession of human encounters across time.

Diagram: Traces → Mediators → Horizon of Circulation → Effective Circulation → Longevity.

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

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Further Reading

🟦The Horizon of Circulation

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

🟦Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

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

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

How Far Can a Publication Go?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 6 commentaires

The Horizon of Circulation in Global Culture

Black-and-white checkered spheres gradually receding into a vast white space, illustrating the horizon of circulation of works, ideas and knowledge through cultural mediators.

Read this article in French:
Jusqu’où une publication peut-elle aller ?

An everyday scene:

You log on.
You search for a topic that interests you.
Within seconds, you find a fascinating article.
You read it.

Then you discover that it was written by someone living on the other side of the world and translated so that you could read it.

You realize that only a few decades ago, you probably would never have had access to that text.

What made this encounter possible?

For centuries, works, ideas and knowledge have circulated through mediators such as storytellers, scribes, booksellers, librarians, teachers and critics. Today, new algorithmic mediators — search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence — also play an essential role in their circulation.

In our example, it is precisely these new mediators that made this encounter possible.

Mediators make encounters possible. But their ability to circulate a publication also depends on the way it is published.

Choosing how to publish

Take the example of a poet who wishes to share a poem.

The poet may choose to recite the poem during a poetry reading before an audience of about ten people, without publishing it.

The poet may also decide to publish it in a printed poetry collection distributed through a few bookstores, reaching a few hundred readers.

Or the poet may publish it online, where it can be shared, indexed by search engines, recommended by digital platforms, sometimes cited by artificial intelligence, and discovered by tens of thousands of readers around the world.

The poem is exactly the same.

What changes is the potential extent of its journey.

This is what I call the horizon of circulation.

Several ways of making a text accessible coexist. If we choose to publish it, each publishing method opens a different horizon of circulation. The chosen method of publication therefore influences the potential extent of the circulation of a work, an idea or a piece of knowledge.

I have used the example of a poem, but the same phenomenon applies to every publication: a work of art, an idea, a piece of knowledge or even a simple personal testimony.

Algorithmic mediators now allow certain publications to reach a horizon of circulation on the scale of global culture.

Choosing how to publish also means choosing how far a publication may potentially travel.

📚 View all Micro-Essays

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

→ Back to the Micro-Essays page

Further Reading

🟦 You Already Use Artificial Intelligence

🟦 You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

🟦 Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

🟦 The Horizon of Circulation

🟦 AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms That Organize Global Culture

🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor