Why physical objects may become more meaningful as the world becomes increasingly digital

The Human Hand

For much of the digital age, progress has meant making things disappear. Music left the record shelf, photographs disappeared into phones and letters became messages. Maps became interfaces, while books, tickets, documents, money and increasingly even identity were transformed into information that could be stored, transmitted and reproduced almost without physical form.

Artificial intelligence takes that development another step. Images can now be generated without cameras, voices reproduced without speakers and objects visualised before they exist. Entire aesthetic worlds can emerge from a prompt.

We are entering an age of extraordinary abundance in which representations can be produced almost without limit. And precisely because of that, something unexpected may be happening. Materiality is becoming interesting again.

The more we can reproduce, the more the original matters.

Not because the digital world is disappearing, but because physical things possess qualities that digital abundance cannot easily reproduce: weight and texture, ageing and provenance, resistance and the simple fact of having existed somewhere in the world.

The more abundant representation becomes, the more meaningful presence may become.

What Does It Mean for Something to Be Material?

Material culture is much broader than art. It includes the objects through which societies express themselves: clothing, furniture, buildings, tools, books, ceramics, jewellery, textiles, photographs and countless everyday things. These objects do more than perform functions. They carry information.

A worn wooden table tells us something about use. A handwritten note contains gestures that disappear when the same words are typed. A piece of clothing can carry traces of its maker, its wearer and the culture in which it was produced.

Over time, materials acquire scratches, folds, stains and repairs. Their histories become physically embedded in them. That makes an object fundamentally different from its representation. A photograph can reproduce its appearance. It cannot reproduce its existence.

What Happens When Images Become Infinite?

For most of human history, producing an image required effort. Someone had to draw, paint, carve, photograph, print or otherwise make it. Digital technology dramatically reduced that cost. Generative artificial intelligence is reducing it again.

The consequences extend far beyond art. Images, designs, texts, music and increasingly video can be generated in quantities that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. This does not necessarily reduce their quality. It changes their scarcity.

Material is memory you can touch.

When almost anyone can produce hundreds of plausible images, the existence of another image becomes less remarkable in itself. Attention begins to move elsewhere: towards who made something, why it was made, what happened during its creation and whether the object actually exists.

We may increasingly want to know whether something can be touched, where it has been and what kind of history preceded our encounter with it.

These questions move value away from appearance alone and towards provenance, process and presence.

The Difference Between Looking and Encountering

This distinction becomes particularly visible in art. A high-resolution photograph can communicate an extraordinary amount about an artwork and, for many people, it may be their only encounter with it. But looking at an image and standing in front of an object remain fundamentally different experiences.

Scale changes. So does light. The viewer has a physical position relative to the work and can move closer or step back. Surface irregularities become visible, while shadows reveal structures that a photograph may flatten. Most importantly, the material occupies the same physical environment as the viewer.

For Dutch artist Denise Buisman Pilger, this distinction is particularly important because material is not merely a carrier for an image. Kozo fibres, handmade Washi and metal wire are part of what the work means.

The fibre is not an imitation of fibre and the irregularity has not been rendered. Both are consequences of something that actually happened. The object has a physical history.

“I want people to experience the material, not only the image it creates.”
Denise Buisman Pilger, artist

That distinction may become increasingly significant as simulated materiality becomes more convincing.

Why Are We Returning to Physical Things?

There are already hints of a broader cultural movement. People who can stream almost any piece of music still buy vinyl records. Printed books continue to coexist with e-readers, while independent ceramics, textiles, handmade furniture and analogue photography attract audiences in societies surrounded by mass-produced and digital alternatives.

This should not necessarily be interpreted as nostalgia. A vinyl record is less convenient than streaming. A handmade ceramic cup is less uniform than an industrial one. A physical artwork is more difficult to distribute than a digital image. Yet those apparent disadvantages contain qualities that digital systems tend to remove.

Physical objects impose limits. They occupy space, deteriorate and require care. They cannot be copied perfectly at almost zero cost and because they cannot exist everywhere simultaneously, encountering them requires something from us as well.

We may have to travel somewhere to see them, hold them carefully, preserve them or simply live with them long enough for them to acquire meaning. Material culture creates relationships partly through limitation.

Does Imperfection Become More Valuable?

Industrial society spent enormous effort eliminating variation. Standardisation made products cheaper, safer and more widely available, while allowing two objects produced by the same system to look and behave increasingly alike.

Digital systems pushed reproducibility even further. A digital copy can be functionally identical to its source. Artificial intelligence introduces another form of abundance: not simply identical copies, but endless variations.

Against that background, imperfection begins to acquire a different meaning.

In handmade Washi, variation is unavoidable. Fibres do not distribute themselves identically, edges differ, thickness changes and water leaves consequences. The hand intervenes differently each time. These characteristics would be defects in a process designed for perfect standardisation.

In another context, they become evidence — that something happened, that material encountered a maker and that the object emerged through time rather than instantaneously.

Perhaps imperfection is becoming valuable not because imperfection itself is desirable, but because it signals history.

Can an Object Carry Time?

This may be one of the deepest differences between digital and material culture. Physical objects accumulate time. Paper yellows, metal oxidises, wood darkens and textiles soften. Surfaces acquire marks and, even when carefully preserved, matter continues to exist within time.

Digital representations behave differently. They can certainly become technologically obsolete, corrupted or lost. But the image itself does not acquire a scratch because someone touched it every morning for thirty years.

A physical object can therefore become a record of relationships: who made it, who owned it, who repaired it, where it travelled and what happened around it. This is why seemingly ordinary objects can acquire extraordinary emotional value. Their material value may be negligible. Their history is not.

“Materials remember what has happened to them.”
Denise Buisman Pilger, artist

For an artist working directly with natural fibres, that idea becomes almost literal. The material arrives with characteristics that preceded the artwork and continues changing after the artist has finished working with it. The artwork does not escape time. It enters it.

What Does AI Change?

Artificial intelligence makes this discussion more urgent, but not because machines and humans need to compete.

AI is extraordinarily good at manipulating representation. It can recognise patterns across enormous collections of images and produce new visual configurations from them. As those systems improve, distinctions based purely on appearance will become increasingly difficult to maintain.

A generated image can look painted. A synthetic surface can appear weathered. Digital fibres can seem irregular, while artificial light can simulate the atmosphere of a physical room.

Eventually, asking whether something looks handmade may tell us very little about whether it was handmade.

That shifts the question.

Instead of asking only:

What does this look like?

we may increasingly ask:

What is this?

The difference is subtle but profound.

One question concerns representation. The other concerns existence.

From Authenticity to Provenance

This may also change how we think about authenticity. Authenticity is often treated as a binary judgement: real or fake, original or copy, human or machine. Material culture suggests a richer approach.

An object’s meaning can come from its provenance — the sequence of people, places, materials and events through which it came into existence. That history cannot always be seen, but it can matter enormously. In an age of generative abundance, provenance may therefore become a form of cultural infrastructure.

Museums already document it. Collectors value it, craft traditions preserve it and artists explain it. Future technologies may increasingly help verify it.

The question will not merely be whether an image is authentic. It will be whether we can understand the history behind the thing we encounter.

The Return of the Object

None of this means society will retreat from digital life. Quite the opposite. Digital systems will become more capable, more immersive and more deeply integrated into everyday experience. Artificial intelligence will produce extraordinary new forms of culture. But technological abundance does not necessarily eliminate what came before it. Sometimes it changes what we value about it.

In an age of infinite images, physical presence becomes scarce.

Photography did not eliminate painting, recorded music did not eliminate concerts and streaming did not eliminate vinyl. Digital communication has not eliminated the significance of receiving something handwritten.

Generative AI may produce a similar effect on material culture. Not by making physical objects obsolete, but by making us notice what was unusual about them all along.

A physical object exists in a particular place and at a particular moment. It requires time to make, encounters resistance and continues to change after its creation. It can be damaged, repaired, inherited and preserved. Unlike an endlessly reproducible representation, it carries the consequences of having existed in the world.

In the work of Denise Buisman Pilger, Kozo becomes fibre, fibre becomes Washi and Washi becomes part of an object that carries the traces of that transformation. A photograph of that object can travel around the world in seconds. The object cannot.

Perhaps that is no longer merely a limitation.

In a world where representations become almost infinite, the physical object may become valuable precisely because it remains finite.

And the more our culture learns to generate, simulate and reproduce, the more we may rediscover the significance of something remarkably simple: a thing that is actually there.

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This article is part of The Human Hand, an Altair Media series exploring craftsmanship, materials and human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. Denise Buisman Pilger’s work provides a recurring lens through which the series examines what happens to material, process and human agency as digital systems become increasingly capable.

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Photo credit

Photo courtesy of Denise Buisman Pilger / Artist Abroad.

Caption

Denise Buisman Pilger working directly with raw material as part of her artistic process. The hand, the tool and the material meet in a physical act that cannot be separated from the object’s history — a reminder that material culture carries not only form, but also process, resistance and time.