Soul, Spirit and Artificial Intelligence

Conversational exchange through images with AI, evoking the relationships between the arts, religions and sciences; the symbolic, the figurative and the machine.

This November 2024 exhibition has evolved from facilitating a series of workshops based on a two-track series of art works; the first track explores the fundamental symbolic image using various geometric forms, and the second track is working with abstract figurative forms.

I am developing a manifesto that inverts the common narrative that AI will be taking over a vast range of creative and artistic domains. As developed here in detail based on a conference presentation in Venice, June 2024 ("Bridging Dialogues"), I propose that we will be able to integrate AI into our society in healthy, ethical and generative ways ONLY thanks to the arts.

The relationship (or supposed threat) is therefore inversed, where AI needs the arts to fulfil its promises and potential.

We can also look at this in terms of how AI is prompting humanity to fundamentally rediscover what the arts are. The threat of AI is perhaps just eroding that segment of the arts that falls ultimately into the category of decorative "artifice" or "entertainment" (ref. two foundational books on this, JF Martel's "Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice" and Lewis Hyde's "The Gift".

Seeking to draw on inspirations from Integral Philosophy (Ken Wilber), complexity and sensemaking principles (Karl Weick, Dave Snowden, William Irwin Thompson), and "Soul" literature (Bill Plotkin, Thomas Moore) from over the past 20 years, I am steering my creative projects based on Transcendental 'liminalities' as illustrated below: