Review

Art

Culture

14 September 2024

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 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

Review

Care

Community

Culture

Film & TV

25 March 2025

5 min read

Amandaland's portrayal of falling social standing is spot on

What happens when motherhood is no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

On the sidelines of a pitch a well-dressed mum hands a coat to a sceptical looking mum beside her.

Nobody likes mums. Not really. We talk about our kids all the time, we’re bossy, we’re interfering, we’re no fun. The stereotypes abound. Not even mums like other mums. We should help each other, but we often end up mercilessly judging each other instead. If you work, you’re a cruel, neglectful mother; if you’re a stay-at-home mum, you’re lazy, weak, and probably boring.

Even worse than being disliked, though, is not being taken seriously. I thought motherhood would bestow a certain level of respect, a kind of admission, from society at large, that if you can keep a human being alive – let alone several – you must be somewhat competent at least. I can now see that’s only the case in older motherhood, once your children are grown up and you can prove to the world that you did, in fact, do a good job of raising them. Before then, while your kids are still loud toddlers or moody teenagers, being a mother is a decidedly low-status affair.

That’s exactly what Amandaland, the new Motherland spin-off, gets right. In Motherland, the original show, the character of Amanda is a confident, terrifying alpha mum, a modern anti-heroine and a foil to the frazzled, overwhelmed protagonist Julia. As a stay-at-home mum, Amanda holds on to her high social status by a combination of displaying her husband’s wealth and a careful strategy of putting other mothers down at every possible occasion.

By the end of Motherland, however, Amanda is lost: she opens and very quickly closes a lifestyle shop, she’s about to lose her house in the divorce, and her ex-husband is about to remarry. She’s not quite so terrifying anymore; she’s more human, more fragile. Her insecurities begin to show.

It’s only in Amandaland, however, that her alpha-mum persona fully breaks down. She’s had to downsize and – gasp – move from Acton to a less affluent part of London; her ex-husband is refusing to pay for their kids’ private school or for her car; she has no career and no prospects. While materially still more privileged than many, in the eyes of society she’s lost any claim to admiration.

As she meets a host of mums and dads from her kids’ new school after her move, it’s obvious that Amanda is trying to conceal this drastic change. She refers to all the furniture which she’s hording from her old, much bigger house – in her mother’s garage – as ‘curated items from my style archive’. When her mother nudges her to get rid of said ‘curated items’ in the school’s car boot sale, she deflects by declaring, in a suitably dramatic way, ‘I’m so ready to streamline all these investment pieces’. In the next episode she starts showing off, at her kids’ football practice, that ‘this big-shot interiors firm just begged me for a meet at their flagship store’. What she means is that she’s got a job interview at a kitchen and bathroom showroom. Which job she does get, by the way, and proceeds to refer to it for the rest of the show as her ‘collab’.

I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There’s a reason Amanda speaks in cringeworthy euphemisms half of the time, and it’s not because she delights in being irritating. It’s because she’s feeling the full force of her fall in social status. We can judge her for being shallow enough to care about wealth and appearance so much. But it’s impossible for me not to feel an enormous amount of sympathy for her. I know what it’s like to see someone’s gaze at a social event drift away as you mention that you’re a stay-at-home mum. I know the agonizingly overnice look that often meets you when you say you’ve been trying to get back to work after having kids.

And to be clear, I’ve been referring to ‘mothers’ throughout, but consciously being perceived as low status is an experience common to all primary caregivers. In Motherland, Kevin, the stay-at-home dad of the group, was often mocked and dismissed as insignificant for looking after his two daughters full time. I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There are two ways to respond to the plain fact that caregiving is seen as low status and low value, and Amanda learns both over the course of the show. The first is to realise we have an innate value that cannot be determined by social approval. We must become comfortable with being sneered at; there’s no way around it. Without spoiling what happens in later episodes, Amanda does grow in virtue by valuing status less and less, eventually rejecting the opportunity to return to wealth and high status for the sake of her family and her own integrity.

The second way is to find fellowship. The friendships which Amanda forms, especially with the wonderful Anne, also an original Motherland character, are what save her from herself in the end. Anne and the other parents show her that they, at least, don’t care that she’s no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying. They chip away at her armour until she realises that she doesn’t need to be adored in order to be loved.

We cannot control how people perceive us, but we can control how we respond. At the beginning of the show, Amanda’s response to the challenges of motherhood was to sink into self-absorption. In the end, she’s redeemed by the kindness of her friends. Motherhood will, perhaps, always be a thankless, low status job. But it’s also, and will always be, an irreplaceable one.

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