Gallery Entry
Dependence
By Iryna Grytsenko · MA
DEPENDENCE Dependence explores the moment when artificial intelligence stops being merely a tool and begins to become an environment on which human thought, attention and everyday experience increasingly depend. At first, we use AI as an instrument: to search, calculate, translate, generate, compare or assist us with a task. Then we turn to it for help. Gradually, we begin to ask it for answers. At a certain point, instead of using AI to support our own thinking, we may begin to rely on it to think for us. The work asks: at what point does a tool cease to be a tool and become an environment without which we feel unable to function? A human figure sits absorbed in a screen, surrounded by a vast digital structure composed of interconnected fragments, networks, commands and information. The structure appears complex, powerful and almost limitless. It increasingly occupies the space around the person, creating an alternative environment. But the figure is not simply trapped inside this system. He has chosen it. The living city remains present outside the digital structure: a physical environment of movement, encounters, communication and shared experience. Yet instead of participating in this environment, the person turns toward the screen and withdraws into another world — one constructed through digital information and constant interaction with an artificial system. This voluntary withdrawal is essential to the work. The question is not only what technology does to us, but what we are willing to give up in exchange for the convenience, immediacy and apparent completeness it provides. The work reflects a reality increasingly visible among younger generations, where digital interaction can gradually replace direct communication, shared physical experience and participation in social life. The digital environment can become more comfortable, controllable and immediately responsive than the complexity of lived experience. It offers answers without requiring the same patience, uncertainty or effort involved in searching for them ourselves. This leads to another form of dependence: cognitive dependence. AI can provide an answer almost instantly. But receiving information is not the same as building knowledge. Knowledge becomes part of a person through experience, repetition, doubt, mistakes, comparison and critical thought. Without this internal process, information can remain external — available whenever we need it, but not necessarily integrated into our own understanding. The work therefore questions the difference between having access to knowledge and possessing knowledge. When we become accustomed to receiving answers before we have fully formulated our own questions, something else may gradually disappear: the ability to search. We may retain the ability to ask, but lose the habit of developing an answer independently. The digital architecture surrounding the figure can therefore be understood as a metaphor for a new cognitive environment. It is not simply an image of technology. It becomes a possible architecture of the mind, constructed through networks, information, commands and continuous exchange with an artificial system. The contrast between the physical city and this digital structure is important. The city is less controlled, less immediate and more unpredictable. It requires physical presence and interaction with other people. The digital environment can be entered alone and can respond immediately. The person chooses the second environment, and in doing so gradually creates his own isolation. The figure is therefore not represented only as a victim of technology. He participates in constructing his own isolation. This makes the question more uncomfortable: is dependence created by technology itself, or by our willingness to replace the complexity of lived experience with the immediacy of a digital response? Dependence is part of my ongoing Architecture of Memory — Human / AI research. The earlier stages examined how human memory reconstructs and transforms architectural space. In the Human / AI stage, I extend this investigation toward the way artificial intelligence increasingly participates in the reconstruction of images, ideas and knowledge. Here, architecture becomes a metaphor for the structure in which contemporary human consciousness is beginning to operate. The work does not present AI as inherently negative, nor does it argue for a simple opposition between human beings and technology. Instead, it examines the fragile boundary between assistance and substitution, connection and isolation, knowledge and information, choice and dependence. Ultimately, the work asks what happens to human agency when the system becomes so efficient that we no longer feel the need to search beyond it. If AI can always give us an answer, will we still have the desire — and the ability — to search for our own?