Can AI art be spiritual?
Irrational, symbolic, prophetic art in the Age of Spiritual Machines
In 1911, Kandinsky observed much of art becoming soulless, imitating older styles, increasingly mechanical, and specialized. But in a few pioneering artists (himself included), he saw “minds awakening after years of materialism,” as he writes in his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art.1 Like science, he writes, art is devoted to seeing the unseen, or the unnoticed. But the artist, he contends, sees the spiritual in the material, where the scientist sees only the observed.
Specifically, Henri Matisse, in his use of color, Kandinsky said, “endeavours to reproduce the divine,” his pictures being “full of great inward vitality.”2 Paul Klee was similarly making the invisible visible, as he said himself around the same time.3 Piet Mondrian was moving further into abstraction, distilling trees and seascapes into simple lines and colours; his later minimal, rectilinear paintings attempted to remove all traces of the real world, aiming to depict the universal through just a few colours and lines.4 Pablo Picasso, too, was deconstructing the picture plane: as Kandinsky wrote, “In his latest works he has achieved the logical destruction of matter, not, however, by dissolution but rather by a kind of a parcelling out of its various divisions and a constructive scattering of these divisions about the canvas.”5 Contemplating the abstract, Kandinsky said, allowed the artist to see what he called “the in-between”.6
At the same time, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was becoming a pretty accomplished painter of symbolic imagery himself – he used painting to illustrate his theories about dreams and archetypes.7 And in Sweden, Hilma af Klint was making amazing and explicitly spiritual paintings; she said she received messages from beyond, telling her what to paint. But Kandinsky was not aware of either of them, because their work was kept secret for decades to come.
We should therefore recognize, retrospectively, some problems with Kandinsky’s position. For him, the artist is an exclusively male prophet, and by contrast he refers to the field of painting as “her”.8 He was firmly situated in the exclusively white, European art world, and primarily focused on painting as a medium. But I believe his essay serves as a useful starting point for investigating the spiritual in art a century later, specifically art that engages with new techniques and ideas of artificial intelligence (AI).
In this article, I use the term spiritualism and not spirituality, to discuss AI art specifically in relation to the Spiritualist movement in late 19th and early 20th Century Europe and the Americas. Kandinsky’s can be included in this movement. I will not explore explicitly religious notions of spirituality. I will refer to machine learning, neural networks, and other aspects of AI, and in contrast to Kandinsky I try to incorporate as many female and non-western voices as possible – although access to the technologies and discourses of AI is still asymmetric. While this article brings together several strands of research I have followed, it is still a new area, and thus any conclusions I draw are tentative.
What is spiritualism in art?
Hilma af Klint, like Emma Kunz and others who came later, used sacred geometry in her paintings. Sacred geometry, according to mathematician and artist Karen French, is what structures reality: it is the mathematics of the world, it is what we perceive. But she echoes Jung in stating that such geometry comes not from nature but from inside our heads – it reflects a deep symbolism. What differentiates sacred geometry from other geometry, she says, is intent:
What makes sacred geometry sacred is the purpose with which you use it. In mundane geometry, you build a chair so you can sit on it. In sacred geometry, the location, materials and process of construction is important. Every aspect of the way an object comes into existence and is used is sacred.9
We might say something similar about art in general: what makes something art is also about intent, placement, materials and process.
“Every era," according to Susan Sontag, “has to reinvent spirituality for itself.”10 One definition of spiritualism from Kandinsky is that it comes from within: drawing from French’s description of sacred geometry above, we could say that this has remained consistent from one century to the next. Art “validates that internal landscape.”11 In machine learning, a similar kind of internal landscape is called latent space, in this case existing inside a machine – for our purposes, a machine involved in the creation of art.
“Every image embodies a way of seeing,” according to John Berger.12 The image above is from a project by artist Edie Jo Murray, who took some of my research into AI as a starting point, and generated by an AI system based on her text input.
Can this image be considered spiritual? It’s not sacred geometry according to French’s definition, in terms of intentionality of the placement of elements. But we might think about the “materials" – in this case including the training set provided to the machine, and data in the form of Murray’s text input. And we might look at the process of construction – for example in nearest neighbour algorithms, decision boundaries, feature spaces and classifiers. Any intentionality in this case, I would argue, is inherent to the training set.
If we wanted to look for Jungian archetypes, we might consider the symbolism of a room, such as you might encounter in a dream: a room symbolises individuality and private thoughts, and a window symbolises “the possibility of understanding and of passing through to the external and the beyond”; it’s also a symbol for communication.13 Windows are square, and squares, French tells us, do not occur much in nature; it thus symbolises rationality, and consciousness.
But this is just one interpretation. We might also look to the machine’s human collaborator, Murray. In this project, she had an explicitly “spiritual" intention, if that’s the right word, based on our discussions during the project. For us as viewers, when we respond to something in art, it’s because we either recognise something in it, or we believe in the belief system of the artist.14 So in defining what is spiritual in art, in addition to the artist’s intent and and the content of an image, we can add the viewer’s reception and interpretation, which will also be linked to their context and their state of mind.
A nice example is UUmwelt, a 2018 exhibition by Pierre Huyghe at the Serpentine Gallery in London. He drew on research in which scientists recorded people’s brain patterns using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while showing them pictures of specific objects; the scientists then asked the participants to imagine the same objects, again recording their brain patterns, then using those to construct new images. The results are uncanny, flickering images that look somewhat like the real objects but have a distinctly dreamlike quality – which matches imagery created by Google’s DeepDream, and work generally created using a form of machine learning called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).
“GAN art” has indeed become a sub-genre of AI art, and since GANs were been made readily available online for anyone to use, this has resulted in a plethora of work with varying quality and intent (i.e. mostly bad). Huyghe’s work, however, displays something like the “internal truth” Kandinsky spoke of, I believe, making invisible (latent) mental processes visible, to reveal that “in-betweenness” that Kandinsky referred to.
Regarding the context of the viewer, Huyghe used the whole environment of the gallery to create an uncanny atmosphere around the flickering images, in which live flies were bred, and paint was scraped off of the walls to expose previous layers.
Spiritual=irrational
A scientific interpretation of Huyghe’s images would be concerned with fidelity to the original objects, and the feasibility of such a process of mental reconstruction. But Kandinsky was against rationality and scientific measurement, seeing these as opposed to the spiritual. Georges Braque, who developed cubism along with Picasso, said, “The only thing that matters in art is what cannot be explained.”15 Another artist, Sol Lewitt, said something similar about conceptual art in the 1960s: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach,” and “The artist may not necessarily understand his own art.”16
Murray named her project from the concept of the “third space” developed by ancient Persian philosopher Suhrawardi: it describes a space between the intellect (the rational) and the senses (the phenomenal or pre-conscious); he described “the land of non-where” that exists invisibly alongside the material world.17 This concept provides a bridge between the internal, latent space of artists’/machines’ intentions, and visions that come from somewhere else, as Hilma af Klint claimed to experience. Such visions can be induced by scientists as well as other external forces,18 but perhaps the source does not matter: in terms of agency or intent, what extrinsically motivates us to do anything? Might we, for example, consider how computers might be using us instead of the opposite, particularly in light of the increasingly rapid development of AI?19 One of the functions of artists, according to critic Jack Burnham, is indeed to specify how technology is using us.20 Might another function be to act as a “medium” in terms of a spiritual communicator with other intelligences?
Experiences of alteration, loss of agency, and thoughts or forces believed to come from outside are common across cultures and time periods, according to psychiatrist Quinton Deeley; they are “foundational experiences which organised cultures in ways of life”.21 In many contemporary societies, surrendering to such irrational experiences acts as a counterbalance to the techno-scientific rationality that orders our lives.
Breaking the system
Much of machine learning is concerned with classifying things, and one type of AI art is concerned with challenging or disrupting this process. For example, Georgia Ward Dyer pushed a neural network into the absurd by making drawings of nothing, in order to see what the network would classify them as — an example of what is called apophenia. Specifically, she used automatic drawing, which is not a machine learning algorithm but a method that dates back to Victorian Spiritualism, in which people possessed by external spirits or forces were prompted to transcribe drawings from the beyond. The method was later taken up by the Surrealists, who used it to create images from dreams or pre-conscious states. Ward Dyer exhibited her drawings alongside the classifications bestowed by the system, along with a second print of each drawing, highlighting portions of the image the system identified specifically with the object classifier — portions which signify the essence of the object, in machinic terms. Her abstractions then become symbols, pointers to real objects; and the process becomes one of unlearning — a process in fact used by Hilma af Klint, whose automatic drawing forced her to unlearn her formal artistic training [29].
Much AI art necessitates the use of large training sets to facilitate classification. Artist Anna Ridler usually creates her own datasets, through photography or drawing, before creating her own machine learning models. She created Mechanized Cacophonies (with Caroline Sinders) during a Covid-19 lockdown, during which she longed to travel to natural places but was forced to resort to videos found online — in this case of seascapes. The result is moving, perhaps because it taps into a primal human mesmerisation with complex, natural motions such as the sea, fire, clouds, etc [30]. A process of interpolation results in a similarly dreamlike quality. Ridler and Sinders go further, by incorporating sound, also paying attention to the context of the viewer — suggesting the use of multiple devices to view the work, to create a more immersive, spatialized experience.
Such an experience lies beyond linguistic description; in Kandinsky’s words, “No such theory of principle can be laid down for those things which lie beyond, in the realm of the immaterial” [31], and artists should “endeavour to awake subtler emotions, as yet unnamed” [32].
Want more? You can read a longer version of this article here.
Acknowledgements
This article was adapted from a talk I gave at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in December 2021. Thank you to Jinjoon Lee and KAIST for giving me the opportunity to begin researching this fascinating area. I’m grateful to all the artists who graciously shared their work and made suggestions, to Edie Jo Murray and Linnea Langfjord Kristensen for collaborating on projects, and to my students, who always inspire me, and who carry theory and practice ever further.
Kandinsky, W. (1977 [1914]), Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p.43. Tr. M.T.H. Sadler, Dover Publications.
Ibid., 76. See e.g. Matisse’s painting Goldfish, 1912.
Klee, P. (2013), Creative Confession and other Writings. London: Tate Publishing. See e.g. his painting Foehn in The Garden of Franz Marc, 1915.
See e.g. his painting Tree, 1912. His ideas are detailed in Holtzman, H. and James. M.S., eds. (1986), The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, New York: Da Capo Press,.
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 77. See e.g. Picasso’s painting Man with a Clairinette, 1912.
Kandinsky, W. (1947 [1926]) Point and Line to Plane, 11, Detroit: Cranbrook Press.
Jung, C. (2009), The Red Book: Liber Novus, W.W. Norton.
The volume’s translator may share some blame for this.
In The Medium’s Medium: Spiritualist art practices from the turn of the century and beyond (2019), 13, London: Gallery of Everything. This accompanied an exhibition of spiritualist art at Gallery.
Ibid., 48.
This according to psychic Avril Price, in Ibid., 49-50.
Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing, 23, New York: Penguin.
Cirlot, J.E. (1962), A Dictionary of Symbols, 262, Tr. J. London: Sage, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
According to Museum of Everything founder James Brett in The Medium’s Medium, 17. Museum of Everything (and its offshoot Gallery of Everything) is devoted to ‘outsider art’.
Braques, G., Cahier (notebook), 1917.
Lewitt, S., ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 0-9 no. 5 (January 1969)
In Campagna, F. (2018), Technic and Magic, 9, London: Bloomsbury.
So claims psychiatrist Quinton Deeley in The Medium’s Medium, 16.
There is a great deal of writing on how technology companies use humans, for example Lanier, J. (2011), You are Not a Gadget, New York: Penguin.; and some research on the addictive qualities of social media, e.g. Greenfield, A.(2017), Radical Technologies, London: Verso. An increasing number of voices raise concerns (and hopes) about the emergence of ‘superintelligent’ AI – see e.g. Vickers, B. And Allado-McDowell, K., eds., (2020), Atlas of Anomalous AI (Ignota Books.
Burnham, J. (1968), ‘Systems Esthetics,’ Artforum, Sept. 1968.
In The Medium’s Medium, 15.