Article
Culture
Re-enchanting
4 min read

The falcon’s call

Awed by an encounter with a bird of prey high above a Texas river, Anthony Baker ponders both the place and his place.

Anthony Baker is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He is currently exploring the intersection of classical accounts of Christian holiness with current issues in ecology. 

A view of a lightly misted valley to mountains in a desert area.
The view from the South Rim of the Big Bend National Park.
National Park Service Digital Image Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing God in Big Bend

The scream from the sky shattered the quiet calm of my cliffside campsite. I'd never heard such a sound—it was like a large crow had decided to try and quack. I rushed out of my tent, where I'd collapsed after making the seven mile trek up the mountain, to find the source of this alarming noise.

I was up on the rim of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, where I'd come on a solitary backpacking retreat. The "big bend" is the abrupt L-turn of the Rio Grande river, as it changes course from southeast to northeast. At the heart of the park rise the stark and severe Chisos Mountains, and the crown jewel of the Chisos is surely the South Rim. A thousand feet beneath me, a sheer drop from where I've staked my tent, there is a whole other mountain range. And ten miles away to the southeast I could see gorgeously striped limestone ridges across the river in northern Mexico.

It's a place that puts you in the presence of the sublime.  Everett Townsend, the pathfinder responsible for bringing the region under the protection of Franklin Roosevelt's government, was particularly awed by this view. As a biographer put it, the view from the South Rim allowed him to

"see God as he had never seen Him before and so overpoweringly impressed him that he made note of its awesomeness…"

What does it mean, though, to see God in a place? Do I need to be up high and far away, staring into sublime depths? The South Rim gives me the impression that I'm hovering like an eagle over the earth, not standing on it like a human. Why are these the places that we think we sense the divine? 

I'd like to think that seeing God in a place can be just as much about close and near attention as it is about sublime distances. What does God look and sound like here, if I stand on the ground and pay as much attention as I can to what I see and hear around me?

The Falcon's cry

I had no Internet connection on the Rim, so when I heard that bird cry out over my head I tried to burn the sound into a mental audio file. Jumping from my tent, I saw a large predator bird shooting directly above me and out over the cliff's edge. The size and shape—a large flying crossbow—told me that I'd been hailed by a peregrine falcon. A sign near my site told me that the section of the ledge where I was camping—where the South and East Rims meet—is in fact a protected nesting ground for the birds, closing to human trekkers each spring.

The peregrine is the world's fastest animal of any kind. They can dive at 200 miles per hour. That means they can only hunt birds in flight, since if they attacked anything on the ground at that speed they would both wind up, as my Granny would put it, "nothing but a greasy spot on the pavement."

A display down at the park's visitors' center had already filled me in on the near demise of the remarkable bird. DDT, a killing-machine of a pesticide that Rachel Carson called out in her book The Silent Spring in the 60s, triggers an immuno-response in female birds who have ingested it into their bodies. This response limits the calcium they can supply to their eggshells. As a result, the eggs were too vulnerable to predators or simply weather, and the embryos were not surviving.

We gave the Nobel Prize to the scientist who discovered how to use DDT to kill insects. It made so much sense, after World War II, to find ways to kill the pests who were spreading disease among the wounded soldiers and other victims of the war. But we were not yet thinking, in those days, about what else we might be killing. Now we're at least thinking, even while we're still killing.

Sin and redemption on the mountain 

What does the falcon, soaring off the Rim, reveal to me about God? Consider, for instance, the doctrine of sin. Taken as an abstraction, sin is what theologians call the manifold ways that humans can turn from their holy God.  But what if we fill that doctrine in with attentiveness to the story the falcon tells us? Here on the Rim, sin looks like failing to be awed enough by this remarkable life form to notice, until almost too late, that we are killing it. 

Similarly, redemption, in the Christian telling of things, refers to the way that God overcomes sin and restores holy relationship. Here on the rim, redemption looks like a shared grief over the damage we've done. It looks also like the effort to protect this space as a bird sanctuary—literally a "holy place." It looks like a hope that falcon and human, like the bird and its own prey, can find a balance of mutual respect and coexistence.

The warning call of God

When I came down the mountain, I got on the Wi-Fi at the lodge outside the park and went searching for bird calls. I found a match for the sound that I'd heard - that caw-quack of a scream. It was the warning call of a peregrine falcon who has found predators in its nesting grounds. The bird was talking about me! Maybe somewhere in her DNA she recognized me as one of the DDT users that ruined her ancestors' eggshells. Hearing that call, as the bird flew off into sublime depths and distances, I suspect I was hearing about the mystery of life, the damage of sin, and the beauty of redemption. In other words, I was hearing the voice of God.

Review
AI
Art
Culture
5 min read

Art, AI and apocalypse: Michael Takeo Magruder addresses our fears and questions

The digital artist talks about the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A darkened art gallery displays images and screens on three walls.
Takeo.org.

In the current fractured debate about the future development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, artists are among those informing our understanding of the issues through their creative use of technologies. British-American visual artist Michael Takeo Magruder is one such, with his current exhibition Un/familiar Terrain{s} infusing leading-edge AI systems with traditional artistic practices to reimagine the world anew. In so doing, this exhibition pushes visitors to question the organic nature of their own memories and the unsettling notions of automatic processing, misattribution, and reconstruction. 

The exhibition uses personal footage of specific places of renowned natural beauty that has been captured on first generation AI-enabled smartphones. Every single frame of the source material has then been revised, reworked, and rebuilt into digital prints and algorithmic videos which recast these captured moments as uncanny encounters. In this exhibition at Washington DC’s Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, the invisible work of the AI allows people to experience more than there ever was, expanding both time and space. 

Magruder has been using Information Age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world for over 25 years. A residency in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London resulted in De/coding the Apocalypse, an exhibition exploring contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. Imaginary Cities explored the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age. 

JE: You are a visual artist who works with emerging media including real-time data, digital archives, VR environments, mobile devices, and AI processes. What is it about the possibilities and challenges of emerging media that captures your artistic imagination? 

MTM: As a first-generation digital native, computer technologies – and the evolving range of potentials they offer – have deeply informed my life and art. Computational media not only opens different avenues for artistic expression but provides a novel means to recontextualise traditional artforms and histories of practice; its ephemeral nature is a particular draw. However, this also creates new challenges, especially in areas concerning preservation and access. I sometimes wonder if my art will still exist for future generations to experience in full, or if it will simply fade alongside the technologies that I’ve used in its production. 

JE: To what extent does Un/familiar Terrain{s} build on past exhibitions like Imaginary Landscapes and Imaginary Cities, and to what extent does it break new ground for you? 

MTM: Un/familiar Terrain{s} certainly arises from and expands on the artistic concepts of those past projects. The main difference is that each artwork in Un/familiar Terrain{s} is generated from a small sample of personal data (a scenic moment that I’ve captured intentionally), not digital materials gleaned from large public archives and online collections.      

JE: Do you find that working with images of the natural world (as is the case with this exhibition) as opposed to images of human-made environments (as you did with 'Imaginary Cities') leads to different approaches or inspiration on your part? 

MTM: My projects that explore constructed environments often reference principles of Modernist architecture and design whereas my pieces in Un/familiar Terrain{s} explicitly seek to dialogue with the long history of Western landscape art. The AI systems that I have used in their creation are leading edge but conversely, their conceptual references extend back to long before the onset of what we consider ‘modern’ art.  

JE: I've heard many artists criticise digital art in terms of degrading the principal tools and techniques of artists throughout history and those arguments would be made even more vigorously in relation to AI. In this exhibition you're enabling a conversation about the painterly effects you can create as a digital artist and those that can be achieved through AI, yet without leading us to one side or other of that argument. Is your vision essentially one of wanting to see the possibilities in whatever tools, techniques or technologies we have to hand? 

MTM: Absolutely. For me that’s one of the fundamental purposes of art. AI is unquestionably the most disruptive (and potentially problematic) technology affecting creative communities at present, but it’s just the most recent historical example. I imagine similar criticisms arose during the proliferation of devices like the printing press and the first photographic cameras. Such inventions clearly did not ‘degrade’ art, but they indisputably shifted its trajectory. 

JE: While your work is not expressly religious, you have engaged with theological themes and institutions as with Un/familiar Terrain{s}, which is on show at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. What do you think it is about your work and the ways you use and explore emerging media that enables such a dialogue to take place?  

MTM: I feel that many of the social and ethical questions raised by the emergence of transformative digital technologies are quite similar (and sometimes identical) to ones that have been traditionally posed by theologians. With that in mind, although the fields are quite different in many ways, at present there are some strange and compelling intersections. 

JE: From your experience, what can theological or religious institutions learn from a more engaged involvement with emerging media, particularly AI? 

MTM: Like artists, perhaps theologians can use emerging (and disruptive) media to not only expand possibilities for their work, but more importantly, to refocus their efforts towards areas that these technologies cannot presently (and will likely never) address. 

JE: Apocalyptic scenarios are often invoked in response to developments such as AI, the refugee crisis, populist political movements or the climate emergency. In De/coding the Apocalypse, you worked with emerging media to explore contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. From that experience, what advice would you give to emerging artists wanting to engage with or invoke apocalyptic imagery? How might emerging artists live in the shadow of apocalypse or what have you noticed about our contemporary fear of modern apocalypses? 

MTM: Throughout history, visions of apocalypse have been consistently rooted in humanity’s prevailing fears. In the Digital Age these sit alongside our growing concerns about technologies that afford increasingly greater potential to create or destroy. Of course, artists should continue to reveal the deeply problematic (and potentially apocalyptic) aspects of new technologies, but they should also highlight their positive aspects to encourage the creation of “a new heaven and a new earth” that can be a better place for all. 

 

Un/familiar Terrain{s}, 30 May – 18 September 2024, The Dadian Gallery, Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion.