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

Column

Character

Confession

Culture

Psychology

18 September 2024

8 min read

‘Yet All Shall Be Forgot?’ Saying sorry has never been more difficult

Acknowledging wrongdoing is vital for any society to flourish. So why do we find it so difficult to apologise, especially online?

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

On a street, two men confront each other face to face.

Darwin Boaventura on Unsplash.

People in the UK don’t like to apologise. At least that’s what a recent poll reported by the Daily Mail claims. Of a thousand British people surveyed, about forty percent of them claimed they didn’t like to apologise because they were never wrong! At least that’s what the headline said. When you actually look at the survey itself, things get a bit more nuanced. 18 per cent don’t feel ‘comfortable’ making an apology. 15 per cent don’t like admitting they’re wrong. 23 per cent feel embarrassed at the thought of apologising. Sorry does indeed seem to be the hardest word. And Elton John seems to be the hardest person to avoid quoting whenever these things come up. Which they do - a lot!

We shouldn’t really be that surprised by the findings of this study. Contrary to the popular belief that the world is divided between goodies and baddies, upstanding citizens and immoral rotters, the ethical picture is much more complex than that. The line between good and bad, as Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted, runs through people not between them. Many moral qualities like kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, humility and so on, are trait-like. There are relatively few pure saints and absolute villains, most of us linger in the muddy moral middle, neither exceptionally good nor reprehensibly evil. And this is what the survey indicates. Despite all our reservations about apologising, the average 20 to 50-year-old says sorry about three times a week, totting up an annual total of 150 apologies per year. We may not like apologising, but we get there in the end.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all that. Because while we may apologise, we don’t always mean it. If the need to apologise is a spectrum it not only includes those who NEVER apologise, but also those who ALWAYS apologise. If the non-apologisers sit at one extreme, the super-apologisers dwell at the other. These are the people who over-use apology, who never stop apologising for their existence. According to this survey, 41 per cent of us are first to apologise whether or not we think we are in the wrong, and 38 per cent apologise without meaning it. Ever found yourself inexplicably blurting out a sorry to the person who bumped into you at the supermarket? or gratuitously apologising for your emotions in an attempt to appease the workplace bully who caused them? I have. If that’s you, please pull up a chair and join me at the table of compulsive and unnecessary apologies- assuming you can sit down without apologising for taking up the air space.

With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

It does seem, from this survey at least, that people are a bit confused about the nature of apology. ‘Sorry’, is a necessary part of the social vocabulary that makes community life possible. To say sorry is to acknowledge that we are embedded within a rich social network upon which we rely for our existence and without which human life would be untenable. It belongs alongside other basic words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, that recognise our social dependence. This applies everywhere: at home, at school, in the office, down the high street, at church. When we say Please, we acknowledge that there are things we cannot do and cannot know without the help of others. When we say Thank You, we accept that even our greatest achievements were team efforts, not wholly down to us. And when we say Sorry, we accept that this community of trust, this web of promises and fulfilments, is fragile. We can act in ways that fray or even break the threads that connect us to others. Sometimes we don’t show up when we said we would. Sometimes we lie to avoid shame. Sometimes we take far more than we should from those who can’t afford to give. Sometimes we are rude, hurtful, even hateful. Saying sorry is the way we recognise, renew and repair our damaged connections to the people on which our lives depend.

One of the most interesting findings in forgiveness research is that as people get older they generally become more forgiving. Now we can all think of exceptions to this - we all know people who seem to have become bitter rather than better with age - but that’s not the rule of it. Most of us will mellow and become more tolerant as the years pass. Partly because the passing of time diminishes our energy for grudges and plotting petty retaliations. But mainly because the older we get the fewer friends we have left. If young adulthood is awash with weddings, then later life is filled with funerals. To put it bluntly, as we get older more people we know have died. We increasingly realise that our connections to family and friends are priceless and irreplaceable and hardly worth severing over minor grievances. With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives.

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This by contrast sheds some light on why it might be that some people (the maligned 40 per cent of the survey) simply do not apologise. Admittedly it is likely that the tendency to offer apology varies alongside other personality traits like Agreeableness- our general tendency to get along with people. Those high in Agreeableness are more sensitive to ruptures in their relationships and therefore more likely to resolve these with a well-timed apology. And given that women tend to score more highly than men in measures of agreeableness and social intelligence, it seems equally likely that the league of super-apologisers who say sorry too often (like me) is predominantly populated by women (unlike me). By contrast those who do not apologise are likely to be at the tough-minded end of the personality spectrum, more ferociously individualistic, less emotionally aware, and not particularly sensitive to the fabric of social life into which they are inescapably stitched.

The apologiser and the non-apologiser then inhabit different universes. If apology belongs to a social network that needs to be tended, then the refusal to ever apologise is to deny the relational fabric of human life. Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives. Anyone can trawl the elephant’s graveyard of our online history and find things we said or did in our least thoughtful moments. And if they do, no amount of apology seems sufficient to rectify the mistake. Online apologies cannot erase online offences. It’s hard to imagine a better system for teaching us the futility of saying sorry.

There‘s a timing issue too. Quite often people who do not like to apologise assume their apology will result in humiliation. If they admit to being wrong, they will be publicly shamed, not restored to connectedness but excommunicated. As a result, if they ever do get round to apologising, they do so reluctantly or halfheartedly or under duress or just way too late, and consequently receive exactly the kind of vicious reaction they assume apologies usually receive. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe our apologies will be met with hostility, we tend to apologise in ways that make hostility more likely. It’s no wonder some people don’t see saying sorry as a viable social strategy.

To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength.

It is a pity, because for those who care to look apology can address the deepest needs of the human soul. Apology restores us to the human community, reweaves the threads of trust that connect us to family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. It assumes there is an invisible world we can rely upon, in which we can place our faith, and to which saying sorry can restore us. This is not just the logic of social apology but also the logic of spiritual apology, or to use the more traditional term, confession.

Just as we seem to be confused about apology, we are also pretty confused about confession. For many of us it belongs to movies where gangsters seek forgiveness for heinous acts through the screen of a confessional booth. Or even worse to the humiliation of being forced to publicly reveal our most shameful character flaws. But these are caricatures.

Confession, like apology, ultimately belongs to a benevolent view of reality. A view suggesting that, at all times and in all places we are in the presence of an utterly attentive, absolutely constant and unfailingly loving God. A God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. A God who cannot help doing whatever it takes to close the distance between us, whose gentle presence hugs the contours of our lives the way the sea hugs the shore. And this divine reality is so permanent, so consistent that, like white noise, we live in complete ignorance of it most of the time. We tend to think that we are here and God is elsewhere, but actually it is God who is here and we who are absentmindedly elsewhere.

In this universe we don’t confess in the hope that our abject humiliation might possibly eke out a morsel of compassion from an otherwise indifferent deity. No. When we confess we acknowledge that while God may be unfailingly aligned with us we are less so with Him. We don’t seem capable of flying in formation with Him. If He moves in straight lines, our lines waver. To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength. If apology restores us to a wider social reality than confession restores us to the deepest reality of all.