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

Addiction

Culture

Film & TV

Monastic life

26 August 2025

5 min read

Mother Vera: from heroin addict to heroine helping the recovering

The horse-loving orthodox sister with a liturgy for life, and a dilemma.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A nun on a white horse, gallops across a snowy field, in black and white

Equine therapy.

She Makes Productions.

Across the arts, the recovery journeys of people with addiction and mental health issues are being re-narrated, giving voice to the navigators of their own personal transformation. In Mother Vera, the Grierson award winning documentary about a recovery community surrounding the Saint Elizabeth Monastery in Minsk, ritual and nature’s unfolding therapeutic power take centre stage.

From Sister Act I and II, to The Sound of Music and Black Narcissus, big screen depictions of women’s monastic life tend to be overwrought. But Mother Vera is different. Shot in black and white, Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s documentary visually pays subtle homage to Black Narcissus’ bell tower scene, with a nod to Citizen Kane here and a wink to Andrei Tarkovsky there, but the overall tone is sober, in every sense of the word.

At the heart of the film is charismatic Mother Vera, a horse-loving orthodox nun, whose story of heroin addiction and betrayal by her onetime partner is micro dosed throughout the film. Surrounding Vera are a team of world-weary men, who she organises into readers for the monastery’s liturgies, as well as directing them in caring for the community’s cows and horses. They declare themselves “snowed in” by the monastic routine of “processions and liturgies” and relentless rounds of physical labour: shovelling snow and ice, feeding and grooming the animals. But the recovery community also acknowledges the bounded routines of the monastery keep them alive, able to face down their longing for drugs and drink. The rhythm of the natural world is woven into the liturgical year as Christmas cribs are replaced with Easter celebrations, all linked by scenes of candlelight, prayers and genuflections.

Early on in the film, Vera slips a puffa jacket over her black habit and gallops across the snow on a white horse. Without giving away too many spoilers, Vera’s desire for a life beyond the borders of the monastery grows as her story develops. Visits to her family show adolescent nephews and godsons growing into strapping maturity in her absence. Her mother relates the time Vera overdosed, 20 years ago, and doctors told her “to prepare for every outcome.” Vera reflects on how her charisma influenced “fresh faced girls” to become heroin users. For Vera, heroin went from being a portal of insight and revelation, to “showing its true face” which was diabolic. In monastery community meetings men praise how Mother Vera helped them to “reconstruct”.

Vera initially joined the monastery for a year, to wait out her partner’s prison sentence. Twenty years on, she has reached a new phase of her own reconstruction. Immersing herself in a river, her parting words are: “Let’s move on. Let’s continue. Amen.”

The community at Saint Elizabeth Monastery echoes the residents of W-3, the psychiatric ward in the American teaching hospital described in Bette Howland’s memoir W-3 first published in 1974, and republished four years ago. The author is admitted to hospital following an overdose, while she struggles to raise two children alone, on a part time librarian’s wage, while also trying to write. “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.”

Howland positions the institutionalised rhythms of the hospital as the supreme life force, and ultimately more curative than talking therapy or medication. “For the sick in their beds were invisible. They were there only by implication. They must have existed, if only for the sake of this other life, full of importance – the bustling arms, starched coats; the carts, mops, ringings, beepings; the brisk comings and goings of white stockinged nurses.” The invisible, timeless guiding spirit of the hospital “as mysterious as a submarine”, would prevail regardless of what the medical staff or patients did, or resisted doing. Realising they were not the ones calling the shots, was the first step for Howland and her fellow patients to returning to life outside the hospital.

Accepting community and kinship, rather than superiority or aloofness, with others in recovery is also a key feature of Saint Elizabeth Monastery and W-3. “Nothing was original on W-3, that was its truth and beauty,” writes Howland. And continually telling and re-telling her story to fresh batches of medical students, under a psychiatrist’s supervision, eventually allowed it to be transcended. “It is not strictly accurate to say that these interviews were of no use to us. Because you would have to tell your story yet once more, all over again. And each retelling, each repetition, hastened the time when you would get tired of it, bored with it, done with it – let go of it, drop it forever – could float away and be free.”

In Mother Vera members of the lay community argue about accepting a new member, who may have been raped in prison, and is labelled a “downcast”. But the argument against allowing prison hierarchies to overshadow their new community wins the day, with the new member being integrated, and objectors accepting “you are no better than him.”

Contemporary approaches to mental health and wellbeing also pivot on an acceptance of shared humanity and imperfect day to day life with its relentless demands, as well as acknowledgement of a power outside human control. In the Netflix documentary Stutz, actor Jonah Hill charts his sessions with Hollywood psychotherapist Phil Stutz. Stutz counsels his clients there is no escape from pain, uncertainty and hard work. To try to avoid these conditions, whether through fantasy or substance or addiction, is to live in the Realm of Illusion. Progress and satisfaction can only be achieved by embracing the here and now, and doing the next necessary thing for life to continue. Stutz calls these actions the String of Pearls, urging his clients to be the one to put the next pearl on the string. The outcome of the action is immaterial, it is the self -belief fostered by taking real world positive action in support of self-flourishing, that is critical.

Stutz believes in a force for good he calls Higher Forces, and a malign force thwarting human growth he calls Part X. For Mother Vera her latter days at the monastery when she felt she could be of more service in the outside world were “tricking God”.

From a Minsk monastery to a Hollywood therapist’s office, to a 1970s hospital, an acknowledgement of the divine, together with an embrace of each other and demands of daily life, emerge as key tenets of recovery’s long road.

Mother Vera is released in the UK from 29 August.

Screenings

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