Art has always reflected humanity. It reflects our greatest triumphs and laments our worst failures. It doesn’t stop there. Art challenges, interrogates, disrupts. It scrutinizes what is underlying the shiny veneer of progress, pokes at the apparently untouchable and loosens the foundations of our comforts. When technology, with all of its promise and peril, busts through the door of society, art doesn’t turn its back. Instead, it studies the damage, magnifying the fractures, and cautioning us of what is to come. Dehumanization, environmental destruction, loss of privacy, the erosion of cultural values — art doesn’t merely illuminate these dangers; it implores us to confront them.
In its complication art about how technology is bad expresses how technology in that relentless forward advance, generates a bait trail of lack of intent. Where creativity and critique meet is a dynamic, if fraught, dialogue. Here, we unpack how art — through its different movements, its most gripping works, its frankest questions — reveals the unspoken costs of our tech-driven society.
The Dehumanization of Society
What does it mean to be human in the age of a machine? For centuries, this question has vexed artists and writers, manifesting in grimmer dystopias, stark imagery and cautionary tales about technocracy. The fear? That as systems become smarter, faster and more efficient, something essential to us — our individuality, our essence — erodes.
Look at Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. It’s not just a movie; it’s a dare-to-critique of new industrial mechanization. The evocative images — machines that appear to stretch infinitely with faceless discoverers on a factory floor marching sequentially — demonstrate a heartless world. People cease to be people. They become extensions of the machine, deprived of agency. It is a future that feels uncomfortably near even now. Algorithms turn us into data points. Our likes or dislikes, habits and identities have all been distilled into patterns to be harvested.
Jump a few years to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Part absurd, part tragic, it amplifies humanity’s fall into mechanized uniformity. He is visually devoured by gears, regurgitated like a busted cog in the larger machine. It’s funny, until it isn’t. The comedy dissolves into a grim awareness—machines swallow not just work but the human side of work.
Even artists working today, such as Trevor Paglen, partake in this critique. Paglen’s darkly luminous but also disconcerting photographs of data centers, surveillance architecture and undersea cables glimpse into a digital empire expanding out of sight. His work compels us to consider what transpires when humanity disintegrates into code, our voices submerged beneath systems optimized for efficiency.
Machines shall set us free, we were told. And yet here we are shackled to devices, drowning in workflows, the humanity at stake.
The Telling Environmental Toll
Innovation is the path to moving forward. But the question remains — at what cost? Technology, which likes to present itself as the hero of convenience and productivity, leaves environmental devastation in its tracks. This devastation has not escaped the notice of artists, who bear witness to the scars of progress and scream, “Look what we’ve done!”
The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole predates modern environmental conversation, but its message is spine-chilling all the same. His five-painting series guides viewers through the life cycle of a fictional civilization, from untouched wilderness to urban dominion and, finally, word dust. That final image — a once-bustling world reduced to flotsam — strikes a note of both prophecy and caution. Born during the early days of America’s Industrial Revolution, Cole understood the hubris of progress, a lesson that has aged all too well. Today, we observe landscapes in reality echoing the decay his brush foretold.
Fast forward to the present era and Edward Burtynsky provides photographic proof of this state of affairs. His series Manufactured Landscapes is equal parts beautiful and terrifying. Endless oil refineries and e-waste dumps reach out in their surreal beauty bitterly contradicting the fact of their precocity. Burtynsky’s work challenges us to grapple with contradictions; how something so blighted can remain so beautiful, how so many things could be both wondrous and destroyed all at once. It’s the art of paradoxical technology — of progress that erases the stuff that gave rise to us in the first place.
The Erosion of Privacy
It arrives silently, almost imperceptibly at first — your data, bought and sold, prized, stolen. You don’t just innovate with technology; you invade. And with surveillance capitalism expanding, and digital footprints becoming inescapable, notions of privacy flicker like a dying bulb.
But artists — observant and defiant — have long zeroed in on this incursion. Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings turn declassified government documents outward, into the public eye. Darkened lines, ominous phrases, withheld truths — her stark works are more about what’s not being said. They embody the paranoia of being surveilled in a world in which you can’t see anything of the systems surveilling you.
And then there’s Ai Weiwei — provocative, fearless Ai Weiwei. His series S.A.C.R.E.D. recreates scenes from his imprisonment by the Chinese government. Surveillance, control, domination — it’s a visceral glimpse at what happens when technology jumps the tracks from useful to dangerous, giving the advantage to regimes rather than individuals. What makes Ai’s work even more powerful is that it’s based on the reality, not just imaginary scenarios. He demonstrates how these overarching systems rob people of agency.
Meanwhile, performance artist Hasan Elahi meets surveillance with ridiculous transparency. When he became a target of government suspicion, he started documenting every dull detail of his life — photos of his meals, receipts, his habits. Deliberately over-sharing, Elahi ridicules the surveillance state, subverting the imbalance of power it represents.
By their work, these artists make one thing clear. Surveillance isn’t only about cameras on street corners. It’s about control — control that is subtly infiltrating every aspect of our lives.
Tradition Versus Innovation
The future promises progress. But the past? The past gives us roots, culture and meaning. As technology rewrites the art of living, there is a constant tug of war between innovation and the traditions that give us — in a fracturing world — something to hold on to. Artists have long waded into this conflict, drawing its complexities into sharp relief.
Consider Italian Futurism. This artistic movement from the early 20th century celebrated machines, speed and modernity without holding back. Plates like Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space sparkle with energy and expectation. But underlying this celebration is an uncanniness. Futurism’s fascination with machinery was interpreted by critics and audiences as disdain for venerated cultural traditions. Do we forsake the previous in service of creating the next? The question lingers.
In his 1974 work TV Buddha, video art pioneer Nam June Paik asks a different question: The correspondence between an ancient Buddha statue reflected on a live-video feed of itself has a disquieting effect. The work urges viewers to think about how, and whether, modern technology connects to age-old spirituality. Does it desecrate it? Transform it? Or something in between? The tension crackles.
Fast-forward to today, and AI-generated art poses an entirely different set of questions. New tools, such as A.I.-driven programs that make paintings with the click of a button, raise questions about what it means to be creative. What does the soul of the art become when authorship is shared with algorithms? Are we experiencing access, which is a-positive, or losing the very humanity that art thrives upon?”
What Art Demands of Us
Art does not attempt to answer every question. But it makes us ask the right ones. In a time when technology is barreling ahead at breakneck speed — faster than we can regulate, faster than we can catch up — art becomes the pause, the hesitation, the doubt in a world that’s propulsively moving forward without looking back. From the haunting industrial dystopia of Fritz Lang to the mesmerizing but wrecked scenery of Edward Burtynsky, these works keep urging us to halt and contemplate.
Innovation? Absolutely. But at what cost? Is it progress, if the things that make us human are lost to technology, if the planet we inhabit is destroyed, if privacy is stripped away, if the values that bind us to one another and the earth are abandoned? It’s art that doesn’t shout these questions; it whispers them, buries them deep in your brain, and waits.
Maybe the solutions won’t be found on a canvas or in a sculpture. Maybe they lie with us, looking at this constant march of progress and finally finding the courage to say, “No more.” Art shows us; the rest is our job.
