Ollivier Dyens

What does it mean to be human

in the 21st century? 

Essays, artwork,  and conferences on the human-machine continent


What does it mean to be an individual endowed with consciousness and free will when technological reality challenges our biological, evolutionary and ontological understanding of the world?

What does it mean to be human as we draw closer and closer to a profound technological transformation? 

And how can we reinvent education and higher education in particular? How will AI, Big Data and the Internet of Things reshape higher education? How will we learn in a seamless and ubiquitous human/machine ecosystem? 

  • Twitter: @Ollivier_Dyens
  • YouTube: youtube.com/odyens

VR and Digital Artwork

These VR and digital artworks are an attempt to redefine poetry in the 21st century. How is one to think of, write, and conceptualize poetry in a virtual world? How is one to redeploy and recreate poetic worlds and experiences while not just adding words to a multimedia platform, nor changing the poetic experience so much that nothing remains? This is my attempt to answer these questions.



We now design ourselves; reorganize our relationship to technology, to the microcosm and the macrocosm; expand the realm of the living; and reconfigure our notions of individuality, of free will, of beauty. Technology is reshaping humanity.


What are humanities in a world where humans as we know them have disappeared? How can we redesign education?  Will we provide current and future generations with a higher education system multifaceted enough to allow them to thrive on this ever changing human/machine continent?

From quantum physics to student affairs; from neuroscience to student politics; from philosophy to immersive realities; from the microcosm to the campus, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break, probe, and recreate the multi-faceted aspects, dimensions, and experiences of ideas, knowledge, thinking, self-development, and education.



we lose.

This is a race with the machines.

Kevin Kelly