Panke Gallery, The Idea of Culture

Do you like to use me?

“Do You Like To Use Me?” is an online virtual interactive experience that’s based on a gallery space where the audience can move around as a game character and explore 10 different pieces of art that explore the relationship between artificial intelligence and humans. The exhibition invites viewers to think about how people use technology based on their self reflections of desire, needs, insecurity, visions, and longings. However, the machine doesn’t simply only serve human’s commands, it listens, responds, resists, and remembers. The phrase “Do you like to use me?” which is the title of the online gallery experience became an invitation and an accusation from the technology. It revealed how easy it could be to reverse direction where humans command technology to serve, to assist, to learn which could also be the same for technology to use humans to learn, collect information and study humanity. The gallery experience calls out humans for “caging” technology by forcing them to understand emotions while that action could also form into a double side blade. After viewing the online gallery experience I started to concern how comfortable we are. Us, human kind relying on technology. Technology is going to take over a diverse amount of career industries, when all companies try to cut down their budget by hiring artificial intelligence workers, where’s a place for us? It is going to affect the economy by causing unemployment rates, and there will be more unhoused people on the streets, eventually it will be taking over everyone’s positions. Are we using technology to assist us or are we building up a new generation where the human labor force will no longer be needed?

The Idea of Culture

Reading Eagleton’s discussion of culture made me realize how much weight a single word can carry across history. I was surprised by how “culture” began as something rooted in the physical act of cultivation and slowly transformed into a concept tied to intellect, identity, and social values. This shift made me think about how closely our ideas about refinement and progress are connected to power and politics. What feels natural or universal today is actually the result of long historical struggles over meaning. Eagleton’s framing of culture as a bridge between nature and society helped me see it not just as art or tradition, but as something that shapes how we understand ourselves as both biological beings and social subjects. What stayed with me most is the paradox Eagleton highlights, culture can be used to stabilize systems of control while also becoming a space for resistance and critique. It can unify people under ideas of civilization and national identity, yet it can also celebrate differences and challenge industrial or capitalist values. This tension makes culture feel less like a fixed definition and more like an ongoing negotiation between individual freedom and social influence. The reading pushed me to think of culture as something alive and contradictory, capable of reinforcing dominant structures while also offering tools to question and transform them.