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 Evens

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.

A digital painting of a green glade of woodlands

Reconstructed Landscape{s} – Hidcote Bartrim : multi-channel 4K video with stereo soundscape : 2023.

A digital painting of a turbulent stream.

Reconstructed Landscape{s} – Great Falls [I0-1B] : 2024. Digital monoprint on archive fine art paper.

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.

Visit the Un/familiar Terrain{s} digital gallery

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21 October 2024

5 min read

Ludwig’s clues to the answers we long for

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, we will be rewarded.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

Two TV characters, a man and a woman, stand in front of a crossword cover walls of a room.

Anna Maxwell Martin, David Mitchell.

BBC.

The BBC have scored a bingeable hit with new comedy-drama Ludwig, starring David Mitchell as a maladroit puzzle-setter who is roped into a rather fabulous whodunnit. It involves his missing twin, a police detective whom he must impersonate in order to chase the trail of the disappearance. While on the case he solves a few other conundrums, giving the show many intriguing, if knotty, narrative threads.

It is not the first-time crossword setting and detective work have gone hand in hand. One of the very first cryptic crossword setters - the ‘grandfather’ of the genre - was Edward Powys Mathers, who also dashed off a mystery thriller, Cain’s Jawbone in 1934. The novel was provided to readers in the wrong order, with the simple but infuriating challenge to reconstruct the right sequence of pages based on maddeningly subtle internal clues. Despite offers of a cash prize, virtually no solutions were submitted.

Such is the dilemma of a cryptic crossword setter - when is clever too clever? Puzzles can appeal so much to our pride; our desire to be part of an ‘in-group’ which understands the highbrow references to opera, Latin oratory, and cricket slang. Those who can outwit them are part of an elite rank. The Telegraph crossword of 13th January 1942 was used as an exercise to recruit for the ENIGMA codebreaking unit. Indeed, when Mathers all but invented the idea of a fully cryptic crossword in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1924, his challenges bore the banner ‘Crosswords for Supermen’.

There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

I’ve often started out on a cryptic crossword, hoping to discover that I am one such genius, only to bitterly give up shortly afterwards, irritated that I don’t have that instant ability to see the solutions. I stare at the riddle, wanting to be one of those people who can naturally recall information, connect ideas, or see what has been hidden in the tortuous clue. Surely the appeal of a show like Ludwig is that it gives us an aspirational glimpse at the peak of human mental prowess, even if Mitchell’s wannabe inspector is a little socially awkward. He still possesses a penetrating gaze that looks through the surface of things, to see what no one else can. He is one of those ‘supermen’ - beholden to no one, able to uniquely see the way things are all by himself.

And yet, when Edward Powys Mathers died in 1939, he was referred to in his Observer obituary not as a kind of lone snobby genius, but “the gentlest of men… a saint”. It’s appropriate, as crosswords have long been a curiously churchy phenomenon: in the small list of great UK cryptic writers, two have been Anglican priests (Revd John Graham, known as Acaucaria, and Revd Canon A. F. Ritchie, or Afrit). Even Mathers’ fondness for Biblical allusions in his clues “led many to endow him with ecclesiastical rank” as Roger Millington’s book on Crosswords put it. Christian faith, because it is a religion built on the idea that God is with us in flesh, invites us to pay attention to the world around us. The world is not something to escape from, but is rather the place that, in Jesus Christ, God has come to meet us in. It makes you want to understand time, place, and culture, to better understand the God who has spoken through them, and given them meaning and destiny. In reference to this way of seeing things, Mathers was spoken of as a ‘catholic’ thinker in his obituary. This did not mean his church affiliation, but rather an instinct for seeing how everything is part of a greater whole. There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

There is also a negative hint in this obituary clue, ‘catholic’. Crossworders work under a nom de plume (David Mitchell’s character John for instance, who goes by ‘Ludwig’). And while Mathers was indeed a generous, open-minded man, he sealed his reputation for difficulty by adopting the pseudonym ‘Torquemada’, in reference to a former Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. So, if Christians are alive to the interconnectedness of all things, we also have a reputation for the institutional guarding of those very mysteries. History shows believers have tortured those who do not come to their idea of what the answer is; indeed, they have set the questions for too long, in the eyes of many hostile to the faith.

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded.

But this is the tension that crosswords offer us - a very authentically Christian way to think about the way God spells things out for us which does not rely on a stark binary of ‘true’ or ‘false’. He reveals things like a puzzle; slowly, and cryptically. Some might fairly object to this comparison, on the grounds this would make God too ‘out there’ - far away from the intimate father that Jesus bids us address so familiarly. Does it make God too remote and enigmatic to say he is setting riddles for us? But actually, a puzzle does not deceive us, like a mask does. Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded. The answer is there, reaching out to us, if we only commit ourselves humbly to receiving it. It may cost us much effort and time. It may require us to learn things afresh. But this is part of the joy of trying to see, as St Paul puts it, "the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things”.

Jesus himself spoke in parables, very much like cryptic clues. But this was no elitism, designed to cut out those without the high IQ of David Mitchell’s ‘Ludwig’. Arrogant intellect or love of one’s own status is, for Jesus, just as much a bar to those seeking a solution, because to find the answer requires a certain submission - a discipline - to see things as the puzzle-setter sees them. If we proceed only to do things our way, we remain blind: seeing we do not see, and hearing we do not hear, nor do we understand.