Our earliest ancestors left their marks by pressing their hands to cave walls and blowing pigments over them through hollow bones and reeds. Seventeen thousand years later, we’ve learned to make marks without ever touching anything at all. Artificial intelligence now writes poems, generates images, and drafts emails on command, and often with such startling fluency that casual recipients might not notice their mechanical origin. Yet for all their sophistication, these digital expressions still lack intent, the sense that someone is actually there, reaching out through the act of creativity.
Without indulging in nostalgia or dismissing what LLMs can do, a deeper question arises as predictive algorithms mimic presence more and more convincingly: What would it mean to create with intention again, to raise a hand rather than type a prompt?
In 1967, Sol LeWitt, the American artist who helped define conceptual art, wrote that “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He was not referencing AI, of course. What matters here is his vision of the artist as thinker, not just a maker. Lewitt saw the idea as primary; execution was reduced to a kind of automatic follow-through. That formulation now feels eerily aligned with how our creative expression, with increased frequency, plays out in algorithmic form.
Conceptual art emerged in the late 1960s as a rejection of the gallery system, the object status of art, and the dominant power structures of the commercial art world. It sought to detach art from the artist’s hand, biography, and often from material itself. For a brief historical moment, among a small but influential group, ideas were more important than finished art objects. In the best cases, execution was outsourced. In the worst, irrelevant. What was thought mattered above what was visible. It is not difficult to see how this relates to our current moment. The conceptual artist’s dream of the pure idea, freed from the perceived messiness of making, has reached a kind of culmination in the prompt box.
There is a sterilized nostalgia to the attempts of conceptual artists at erasing biography, at removing human presence from artworks. Seen from another angle, conceptual art carries an egalitarian promise: if the idea alone matters, and if anyone can execute the work by following set instructions, then art is freed from oppressive structures of ownership and mastery.
Faced with cave paintings, it’s easy to sense they fulfill a serious purpose. They’re not in open view but deep into the earth; reaching them often takes a deep crawl into dark and dangerous spaces. It requires effort, intention. This suggests they were not made for casual display but for something more deliberate.
It’s tempting to imbue the hand silhouettes with symbolic meaning: hands reaching toward the spirit world, indicators of danger, markings of a boundary. Art historian Jerry Salz even called them the invention of photography. However, history suggests that the simplest explanation is often most profound. They’re widely regarded by scientists as markers of presence, a human gesture from the far past, saying, we’re here.
Imagine them: the women and children (studies of finger proportion suggests that most handprints belonged to them) raising hands against the cold damp walls as if saluting the depths of the earth. Did they recognize themselves in their freshly printed silhouettes, flickering among their shadows in the torchlight? Perhaps they smiled. After all, if anything, creativity is life: the recognition of a part of yourself, outside yourself.
And what better gesture could there be than a raised hand? It doesn’t claim mastery, it asserts nothing but existence, it’s an acknowledgement of the other that marks one’s own presence as well: I am here.
Approximation is not presence. Prediction is not creation.
Marshal McLuhan, the media theorist known for the aphorism “the medium is the message,” argued that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed. From the hollow bone that carried pigments to the cave wall, to the wheel, to writing, the Gutenberg press, every development has pushed human capability further beyond the natural limits of the body. As the gap between the body and the marks it left widened, human presence became encoded less in touch and more in decisions, gestures, instructions. Conceptual artists were among the first to push this trajectory toward dematerialization. Reacting against the way art had become entangled with money and prestige, they reduced it radically – sometimes entirely – to instructions. Their solution, however, no longer suits our moment. It has become, in some ways, our trap. We’ve become so adept at separating ideas from execution that we risk forgetting what presence means at all.
And while I can’t help feeling like a flea trapped on flypaper when faced with 1960s conceptual art, I recognize that the problems it formalized opened a territory rich with possibilities, where the body reasserts itself as a site of meaning. As culture is increasingly defined by speed, automation, and frictionless interaction, the body offers a type of resistance. Rather than a retreat, reclaiming gesture is a way of fully inhabiting the human experience.
See the work of artists Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, for example. They engage directly with manual manufacturing processes that are increasingly invisible in the age of automation. Others, like Noor Nuyten, reintroduce embodied meaning within conceptual approaches. For her work Let’s Meet at Three o’Clock, she manipulated wristwatches to run at a different speed, opening a private time zone that enables wearers to meet outside the rhythms of standardized, institutional time.
“The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes /And still return safely to its nest?” poet John Ashbery asks in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a meditation on art, language, perception, distortion, and understanding. As Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their influence over education, reshape how we learn, write, and communicate, the question that keeps returning is: What do we lose when expression no longer begins, or ends, with the body?
A fellow literary editor once described AI-generated stories as if they were written from outer space – a narrator observing Earth through a telescope, unable to raise their hand at other characters. These stories show what happens when expression becomes too abstracted or disembodied and is lacking in physical action or sensory experience – not unlike the conceptual art movement in the 1960s, for example LeWitt’s Wall Drawings in which he sought to remove the artist’s hand and de-emphasize ownership by having others execute his ideas.
LLMs don’t create by being present; they’re prediction engines that generate output by calculating what is statistically most likely to come next. There is no awareness, no intention behind their acts of expression, but a simulation of creativity or insight disconnected from embodied experience. But approximation is not presence. Prediction is not creation. Presence, the sense that another person, with all their contradictions and flaws, is listening, responding, waving back, is what makes creativity possible.
On the first day of my writing class, I bring in a 3D scan of a cuneiform tablet – one of the earliest known forms of writing. The original, made about 6000 years ago, records the transfer of a field near the city of Anzukalli in exchange for a gift of silver.
When I demonstrate how Sumerian scribes wrote – a lump of clay in one hand, reed stylus in the other – I’m struck by how little this gesture has changed. In the midst of the technological storm, we still communicate with our hands. Instead of impressing signs into clay, we silently touch glass.
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