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

Article

Art

Awe and wonder

Culture

30 May 2025

5 min read

The late Pope Francis was right – Antoni Gaudi truly was God’s architect

Sanctity can indeed be found amongst scaffolding, as Gaudi’s Barcelona beauties amply demonstrate.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Looking up at the front of Gaudi's cathedra; as the sun comes out from behind the spires.

Sagrada Familia cathedral, Barcelona.

Csaba Veres on Unsplash.

Barcelona is a magnet for tourists and art lovers because of the sense of exuberance and abundance created by the sinuous, sensuous curves and colours of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet’s amazing buildings. Whether we are encountering the shifting sea-like blues of the Casa Batlló, the abstract collage of the wave-like trencadis mosaic bench at Park Güell, the whirlpool-like undulations on the ceiling at Casa Milà, the columns in the Crypt of Colònia Güell which form a wood of trees, or the sunflower forms on the ceiling of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's work possesses an ecstatic sense of natural beauty. The Sagrada Familia, his still unfinished magnum opus, attracts over 4.5 million visitors a year, 85 per cent of whom come from outside Spain.

Known as ‘God’s Architect,’ Gaudí, in one of the last acts by the late Pope Francis, was declared Venerable, a step on the path to sainthood. He was recognised for the heroic virtues which encompass faith, hope, and charity, with Divine charity being paramount. The Vatican’s announcement noted that when Gaudí accepted the task of directing the project of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in 1883, his focus was “making art a hymn of praise to the Lord” and “he considered it his mission to make God known and bring people closer to Him”. Also noted was the humility of his death after being struck a tram on June 7, 1926. Unrecognized, the architect was taken to the Hospital de la Santa Creu, the city’s hospital for the poor and, after receiving the last sacraments, he died three days later, on June 10. Around 30,000 people then attended his funeral.

The Sagrada Familia is primarily experienced as a forest of columns through which light falls in glowing colours. As in medieval cathedrals the eye is drawn upwards towards the light and glory of God, here by means of slender trunk-like columns, which branch (for reasons of form and function) before the ceiling of the basilica, where natural and artificial light mingle in star-like shapes resembling sunflower heads. Lower down, the abstract stained glass of Joan Vila-Grau filters the blazing natural light of the Catalan sun through primary colours to create a sense of mystery even among the thousands of tourists crowding the space for the best camera angles.

Among the columnar forest and stained light (if one ignores the baldachin, which is an example of the gaudy Gaudí), there is an almost total absence of explicit Christian iconography, creating a special interior sense of spiritual space. Unlike a medieval cathedral where the Christian story is told inside in stained glass, Gaudí placed the narrative element on the exterior of the building to form a Bible written in stone through three facades: Nativity, Passion and Glory.

Much of Gaudí's work was marked by his big passions in life: architecture, nature and his Catholic faith. He integrated into his architecture a series of crafts in which he was skilled - ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork and carpentry - and introduced new techniques in the treatment of materials, such as trencadis, a special type of mosaic made of waste ceramic pieces.

After a few years under the influence of neo-Gothic art and Oriental techniques, Gaudí became part of the Modernista movement which was reaching its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work transcended mainstream Modernism, culminating in an organic style inspired by nature. He was the great sculptor, utilising natural form in his work both for utilitarian and aesthetic reasons. He described nature as “the Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read” and, as the art critic Robert Hughes recognised, thought that “everything structural or ornamental that an architect might imagine was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes or dry bones, in a beetle's shining wing case or the thrust of an ancient olive trunk.”

It is said that Gaudí’s aim at the Sagrada Familia was to bring heaven and earth together.

Although driven, single and celibate Gaudí was not an ascetic loner. He surrounded himself with work colleagues to whom he gave significant responsibility. He was also well aware that work on the Sagrada Familia could only be completed by the architects, sculptors and craftspeople who would follow his team and plans. Gaudí and his primary patron, Eusebi Güell, were men of great vision and vast ambition, resulting, among other accomplishments, in the Crypt of Colònia Güell, which consists only of the lower nave of what was intended to be a larger building. Their example suggests that to reach for the impossible and fail can nevertheless result in significant achievement.

The Crypt of Colònia Güell is a culminating point in Gaudi's work, where he included for the first time practically all of his architectural innovations. He said that without the large-scale experiments he undertook there, he would not have dared apply those same geometries to the Sagrada Familia. It is the place where, according to Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, he “overcame all established limits regarding shapes.”

This church of Colònia Güell was blessed by the Bishop of Barcelona in 1915 and today functions both as parish church and tourist attraction. Like the Sagrada Familia, albeit on a smaller more intimate scale, its varied columns form a wood of trees. Flower-like, cross-shaped stained glass in primary colours creates a warmth to the space which is complemented by the red brick forming the walls and catenary arches of this cave-like space.

This is a warm, womb-like enclosure; intimate yet archetypal. It is real and usable communal space while also being of great architectural worth, innovation and beauty. Here the ‘heaven in ordinarie’ of the Eucharist is celebrated in the surround of natural forms recreated by man-made means. It is said that Gaudí’s aim at the Sagrada Familia was to bring heaven and earth together. It may well be that this aim is more fully realised in the earthy intimacy of the Colònia Güell’s wooded Crypt than in the soaring grandeur of the Sagrada Familia.

In welcoming the news that Gaudí had been declared Venerable, Cardinal Juan José Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona, said “It is a recognition not only of his architectural work but something more important.” He continued: “He is saying you... amid life's difficulties, amid work, amid pain, amid suffering, are destined to be saints.” Ultimately, he notes, “Gaudí’s life and work show us how beauty and holiness can transform the world” as they include the “recognition that sanctity can be found amid scaffolding, suffering, sublime obsession.”

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