Art as Refuge, Health Communication as Challenge
What else?
When I am asked about the challenges of art and technology in health communication during my training sessions, I always respond: learn to verify, do your own checks, handle different sources, train your intuition and creativity, cultivate the good habit of selecting critically. Dedicate time to each action. Never take anything for granted. Do not underestimate anything or anyone. And, above all, have a prior foundation – the best and most updated possible – to help you maintain control. If you have never driven, do not fall into the temptation of getting into an autonomous car, even if you were allowed to do so.
Technology is extraordinary; its evolution keeps us alert because it goes where we cannot even imagine. In the field of health communication, it allows our artistic projects to have a greater reach; it can serve to give new meanings and provide an experience where utility prevails even beyond aesthetics and the creative dimension, always through our personal seal. Unique.
Communicating Health, don’t disguise it
Technology applied to health communication should avoid being a trend. If something characterizes scientific knowledge, it is precisely the method, specialization, verification, and the cumulative character. Making health communication an open, understandable, and measurable value, especially lasting, necessarily involves creativity, awareness, and human involvement, which today is fortunate to benefit from a technological deployment in full euphoria.
In this era of expansion – or rather adaptation, adoption, and acceptance – digital, it is often questioned whether awareness is imperative in creativity, a question I have been asked countless times over the years. My answer is always the same: it depends. I consider the need to communicate well less questionable – actually unquestionable. When we are incapable of doing so, disaster comes. When we communicate health in the digital chaos, the risk of turning utility into a trend, an agenda, or a campaign script is high. Delving into that challenge does require a wakeful and consequential awareness.
The Universal Scholar: Decentralized
Technology can indeed make us let our guard down. When I am asked whether technology will replace us, I honestly reply that it has been doing so for years, quietly. Today, technology allows us to create extraordinarily complex and visually impactful projects, technically feasible in mere seconds and, moreover, by any user with a minimum curiosity. Perhaps the day will come when we need no one, but that day does not guarantee that we have overcome the extraordinary challenge of selecting critically, establishing methodology with utility, and creating with continuity. Perhaps ideas will survive and even save us.
Not all master formulas can be automated or controlled, although it is true that technology increasingly focuses on the popular over the academic. The power of the universal scholar, institutional gatekeeping, the validating agent, is dissipating, opening new ways to create, communicate, and participate in a more decentralized manner with an unpredictable future. A future we must not underestimate.
Perhaps at some time, everyone will be able to do almost everything with the technologies at our disposal – or do more of the same but do it – Perhaps everyone will have greater access to information – whether true or biased. The cornering is so radical; it has been executed with such a direct and rapid blow that perhaps we don’t even realize it. But it is already here, and making a difference, innovating, surprising, and generating originality is becoming increasingly more challenging. Perhaps the unpredictable is reduced to the gift of words and our own ability to communicate with them, through a work that conveys our unique, conscious, recognizable, living, and irreplaceable style.
Words Subordinated to Their Utility
In the realm of health communication, many – too many – times, the word ends up subordinated to its partisan utility beyond the search and dissemination of pure knowledge, nothing more. We assume the transition from useful knowledge to the slogan of ephemeral impact without considering the importance of the content we are handling.
In many – too many – instances, it prevails more to nourish the showcase agenda, compete for headlines about innovation – probably already invented – or adjust governance approaches without considering the elements we are assimilating into in our communication.
We do not even bother to distinguish between information, dissemination, or marketing – the veiled and sometimes also banned word. Forgetting that we are addressing a sovereign audience, perhaps very aware of being protagonists of an era that spins between absolute disintermediation and absolute misinformation.
Immersive Art AR and VR by Houda Bakkali | Breast Cancer Awareness | Communication and Health
Art as Refuge
In this context, perhaps art can still be a refuge for communication, and technology can also serve to give meaning, context, and utility to health communication, expanding it and making it participatory.
When I am asked why I use technology in my works, I always respond: it makes you stop and question. And that moment is key. Technology allows me to leverage its activation and reinvention possibilities to connect with the audience. What is this? What is it for? How is it made? How does it continue? etc. Perhaps at some point, the answers will be so assumed that the audience will no longer stop.
Apply Awareness to Achieve Results
Today we are witnessing a transformation towards automation models capable of completely replacing the experience and uniqueness of professionals. Turning complex processes into simple and immediate ones. It is a reality. And when everything seems to have the same value and it appears that everything has already been invented, we include in the discourse the democratization of art and science, including health in the same showcase program. Inviting the spectator to immersive events, which are unquestionably a powerful and extraordinary marketing tool where we can – we must – implement criteria unique to this discipline: acquisition, retention, measurement, updating, and conversion, values absolutely applicable to the field of science and health communication, as long as the strategic vision is exactly that: the dissemination of science and health.
Knowing the creative process, creating with intention and awareness, should also imply knowing and applying that strategy with criteria. Now, mastering what we are talking about. Applying technology to art for communication and health dissemination involves knowing the language of art, the dynamics of technology, and the rules of communication and dissemination in health; that experience and knowledge are hard to achieve through automated alternatives because applying awareness is imperative to achieve results.
Published on October 18, 2026
Art and Health, Health Communication, Art as Therapy, Emotional Wellbeing, Healing Through Art, Art and Science, Immersive Art, Virtual Art, Augmented Reality
