Digital Storytelling for a Better World: Yacine Aït Kaci’s Visionary Art
Yacine Aït Kaci is an internationally recognized digital artist, SDG specialist, and ambassador with over 25 years of experience blending culture and innovation, art and live performances A pioneer in digital art, he co-founded the collective Electronic Shadow, where he patented Video Mapping in 2003. His innovative work has garnered numerous awards, including the Ars Electronica prize and the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival.
In 2011, Yacine launched ELYX, a digital character that became the UN’s first digital ambassador and a symbol of the Paris Agreement. Through the ELYX Foundation, he promotes UN values, while also advising organizations on societal transitions and intercultural communication.
WeCare Impact: What role does creativity play in the impact you aim to make in your field, and how has your journey shaped the work you’re doing now?
Yacine: Creativity is at the center of the way I’m conceiving my work and its impact. This is not just my creativity as an artist but the porosity to the worlds creativity and innovations. This is how I work since the beginning of my career, surfing from one wave to another, between trends and intuitions with a strong backbone that keeps me on the road, wherever the wind blows.
WeCare Impact: Can you share a specific moment when you felt your work bridged the gap between art/innovation and community impact? What did you learn from that experience?
Yacine: I think the creation of ELYX arrived at a key moment where social networks were still at the beginning and full of hopes and promises. As a digital artist, working with heavy tech at this time, it was paradoxically the way to invent a much more minimalist approach with a low-tech augmented reality hero.
Eventually that spoke to so many people than he became a digital ambassador for the United Nations, with simple ways to approach complex issues. 10 years later, social networks have become one of the biggest challenges to democracy thanks to hate speeches and fake news spreading all over the world.
This experience shows that impact is not directly related to the way we use tech for good because the ones that use is for self-interest or for bad are very strong and have to be considered in any attempt to try to do better.
WeCare Impact: How do you see emerging technologies (like AI, blockchain, or immersive media) transforming the way we approach social and cultural challenges?
Yacine: I don’t think anymore that emerging tech are transforming anything in a positive way, I really used to. Experience showed how all these potentials are ruined by scammers, organized crime and untrustworthy people or companies. This is a challenge that is so great that it takes almost all efforts to prevent before anything good can come out of it. We have a lack of common storyline that would benefit all people and not just a bunch of them. I still believe in the huge potential of it but this is a race that we don’t win all the time and that we already lost recently with social networks. Let’s see if we can do better with AI.
WeCare Impact: In what ways has collaboration within the WeCare Impact ecosystem amplified your personal or professional mission? What unique value does this community bring to your work?
Yacine: The collaboration with WeCare Impact ecosystem brings a connection with artists and activists sharing the same values and using art and tech for the common good. The hacking spirit allows to be everywhere like a shadow army of angels trying to add light wherever they can with emotion and beauty.
WeCare Impact: Looking ahead, what are some of the most exciting opportunities or challenges you see for the intersection of arts, culture, technology, and social change? How do you envision contributing to that future?
Yacine: I think we are actually in a huge cognitive and trust crisis, that is fueled at the same time by scammers and also people that should be trustful and deceive massively. In these times, art is much more than a reservoir of beauty, emotion becomes the alternative to communication. If we can’t talk, let’s share an emotion, a sensation, that will bring us in a common vibration.
We are at the edge of a new world and this is the moment for artists to paint the vision of what could occur and add light to the dark precisions. This is the sense of the Archipel project we are launching at the ELYX Foundation, to reconnect the isolated islands and design a new common territory for the Future.