“A bit of madness is key
To give us new colors to see...”
- La La Land
There’s something deeply human about the need to dream. Not in the surface-level sense of wishful thinking. But in the generative, disruptive, wildly imaginative act of envisioning what doesn’t yet exist.
The artist lives right there - in the liminal space between what is and what could be.
The Artist's Cycle as the Pulse of Progress
Artists are agents of human evolution.
Art, in all its forms, is how we metabolize the human experience. It is how we grieve, rejoice, protest and imagine. And yet, society routinely marginalizes the artist. Dreamers get dismissed as unrealistic, arts budgets get cut, creative work gets sidelined in schools.
But here’s the paradox... While we downplay their importance, we subconsciously rely on artists to guide us. This is especially the case when the world shifts beneath our feet.
The cycle of dreamers and artists is a summary of human progress. They push outward in every direction, ensuring that we don't just survive change, but make meaning through it.
1. Future-Builders: Giving Us the Dreams of Tomorrow
Artists dream first. Then the world catches up.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched helicopters before physics could explain how they would fly. Science fiction authors envisioned the internet before it had a name. And films like Black Panther and Her shape how we think about race, identity and technology - before policy or science does.
The imaginative power of artists has always been a prophetic tool. While politicians argue over the present, artists sketch the possibilities of tomorrow. Their visions filter into the collective consciousness, planting seeds that will one day bloom into scientific discoveries, policy innovations or social movements.
Artists do not just create images of the future. They create desire for that future. They open the emotional bandwidth we need to believe in new possibilities in new worlds.
2. Explorers: Charting New Human Experiences
Every time humanity enters a new frontier, the artist’s role becomes urgent again.
Whether it’s a new technology, a new social structure or a new physical environment, someone must make it feel human. Someone must teach us how to "be" in this new space.
Take virtual reality. Technologists may build the tools, but artists will determine how we will eventually move, feel and express. When humans eventually populate space, it will not be enough to bring oxygen. We will need to reflect on our conditions with poetry, dance and storytelling.
I once improvised a dance in water - exploring movement in a less familiar environment. It required slowing down and focusing intently on the new dynamics of gravity, density and balance. That act became more than art. It became research. A bridge between my mind and an uncharted realm. A new awareness through the senses. Artists do this instinctively -charting new terrains of experience before we have the language to describe them.
As we enter new realms - Mars or the metaverse - we need artists to translate the unknown into something we can identify and feel.
3. Storytellers: Making Meaning of Our Past and Present
In times of great change - whether global or personal - we turn instinctively to artists. Not for explanations, but for understanding.
Storytellers help us process what raw information cannot. They take the chaos of the world and distill it into forms we can feel, reflect on and ultimately make sense of. Through their work, emotion becomes shared experience.
Art is humanity’s emotional processing system.
Music gives us a way to grieve. Film surfaces the quiet tensions of a generation. Novels record the slow shifts in culture and thought. Dance, painting and theater express what language often fails to capture. These forms don’t just reflect life - they help us metabolize it.
In his book Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari has noted how speculative fiction, like Black Mirror’s episode Nosedive, serves as a warning system. It highlights and amplifies a technological and social risk before it fully takes shape. Such embodiment often helps us make sense of what we have at hand before either policy or science catches up.
In this way, storytellers are more than creators. They are translators of collective consciousness. They help us look at the world - not just to see it, but to understand where we are, how we got here, and what it might mean.
AI vs. the Dreamer: Can AI Replace the Artist?
In the age of generative AI, we face a powerful question: can machines get creative?
AI can remix, repackage and even generate material that looks creative. Such creative work will surely be fun to consume and enjoy in our daily lives.
But AI does not feel. It does not intend. It does not make meaning.
A machine can replicate styles and mix them in new ways. But it cannot originate direction. It does not wake up in grief after an earthquake or dream of life on Mars.
Art made by humans isn’t just about novelty - it is about risk, vulnerability, presence. It reflects the consciousness behind it. Until machines have desires, contradictions and existential crises, until they have complicated sensorial experiences, they cannot truly replace the artist.
What AI produces may be beautiful, but without the artist’s spark, it remains derivative. We need dreamers not because they are efficient, but because they set direction, reminding us consistently of what it means to feel, to wonder and to be fully, irreducibly human.
Education Needs a Creative Spark
Our schools have also forgotten the dreamers.
Art and creative expression are often treated as decorative extras. They tend to serve as elective material. A break from “real” learning. Something nice but non-essential.
But creative exploration is not a luxury. It is how we learn to make sense of ourselves and the world. When it is woven into education, it serves as a process of reflection, connection and meaning-making. It offers students alternative ways to digest, metabolize and revisit what they have learned. It also gives them the opportunity to experience the flow state and heightened awareness.
Art allows for ambiguity. It gives us tools to reflect inward, to explore outward and to meet uncertainty with curiosity rather than fear.
Creative work therefore does not compete with academic work. It becomes a valuable companion to knowledge, transforming how it is held and understood.
Our goal is to assist students in acquiring key skills of the knowledge age. See #[[21st century skills - Future skills]]. These include curiosity, adaptability, creativity, self-awareness and sense of purpose among others. Capacity for creative exploration and expression is correlated with each of these skills.
That's why we need more than art classes in the learning environment. We need dedicated spaces and ateliers that are accessible and inviting. We need a wide variety of tools and material, arousing curiosity. We need artists embedded in education - not to decorate learning, but to expand it.
Liberating the Child: The Case for the Atelierista
Every child has a hundred languages. Most of our schools teach in only one.
There is a unique role for the artist in education. Not only as an instructor, but also as a "creativity scout." This is the spirit behind the Atelierista in the Reggio Emilia approach. Atelierista is a practicing artist, who helps students discover, nurture and protect their expressive voice.
The Atelierista sets an example for the learner as an artist and a craftsman. She observes, provokes and amplifies. When a child begins to express something authentic - through paint, movement, digital media, stories or other forms of art - the artist is there to catch it, hold it and invite more of it. This kind of presence and support creates the conditions for deep exploration and growth.
In this model, schools become studios of experimentation. They transform into creative laboratories, where identity, inquiry and imagination are nurtured as part of everyday learning. Art does not sit on the sidelines. It threads through math, science and language, offering multiple entry points into understanding.
We want to cultivate a generation of creative meaning-makers, who can adapt to today's tech-dominated world and lead humanity to its future. That's why we must make room for artists within our schools.
Every child needs someone who can recognize the flicker of original thought and feed it until it becomes a flame.
Here’s to the Mess We Need to Make…
There is no clean path to the future. No perfect roadmap. What we need most right now are those willing to imagine messier, wilder, truer possibilities.
Artists make the chaos meaningful. They hold the broken pieces and shape them into stories. They offer the world not answers, but insight.
So here’s to the rebels. The crazy fools who dream. The ones who see the invisible and give it form.
