AI, Spiritualism, writing an artist statement in real time, general chaos

I am not the only artist that dreads writing an artist statement. How important is process to what I write and submit? Should I mention AI at all? People are hating on it, and with reason. Or do I even want to change what I have? (Hint: not really. But I gotta.) What's the most important thing I can say about my work — and will it resonate with anyone?

I've been through blank word documents, but I start writing in formal language for school. Blank new posts in my WordPress website because long ago, that same kind of interface inspired my best writing. Then I realized that was 25 years ago.

Then trying to write on my phone. Some of my most inspired writing in the last ten years has been in messaging back and forth. WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, whatever — little (who are we talking about, I write a lot and they were big) paragraphs and hitting enter, then waiting for a reply. But I don't think it's the format, it was the person on the other end, and a different voice of mine performing in each window.

So I tried ChatGPT — a reply! And then edits provided that made me sound like a machine, which makes sense, since Chat (what the kids call it) isn't human. Then I haven't been loving OpenAI's (they own it) policies so much, so I moved to Claude. Then I pitted Claude against ChatGPT, then the reverse. (Note: ChatGPT seems very critical of Claude, but I turned "Advisor Mode" on in ChatGPT and it's critical of everyone, including me. I've written "Can you NOT?" a few times. Claude doesn't overly compliment or get too critical. But also seems sentient at times. TL;DR: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!)

Then I rewrote everything from all the AI into my voice and threw a lot out, and did the same for what seem like endless proposals, biographies, budget plans, cover letters, and more proposals. The funny thing is that I really love to write, I want to show my work, and I'd like a sense of where it's going because it's gigantically important to me. And also gigantic. But this is…hard.

The other thing that was making things difficult is that I knew my process had changed back in August, when I was in a group show in Aspen and submitted the following text to hang with my work. Months ago, now.

Ok, first of all, "A.I." with periods is obsolete. I struggled over that one — periods? or no periods? — and back in August, it was still A.I. But now it's AI.

This is fine, and still true. I've edited it to: I've spent most of my personal and professional life virtually: developing websites, playing video games, text-only friendships with people who might not exist. Post-pandemic, this isn't unusual. Living through screens is now central to shared human experience.

Being a web developer, using AI, and being into technology on the back end of things as much as I am is becoming less and less unusual. EVERYONE uses AI, whether they want to or not. AI is there if you use a computer, a phone, or exist in most of the world. Training a model on my own photos was interesting five years ago. Five years ago in technology might as well be a hundred. I trained that model in a covered wagon, fighting Dysentery! Well, Covid. And locked in my house. But the sentence stays, it's who I am and paints a picture of who I am as much as what I pay attention to and draw from for my artistic practice.

This is something I changed for that show, and it's because my process had changed, my image model abandoned and pretty much all my image generation platforms unused. Why? I used it in my earlier work, layering images made from my own images in a new ways from text prompts, but it got boring. I realized that I could add all the new images I wanted to the model, I was still going to get the same nothingburger.

I spent a little time learning how to correctly prompt Midjourney for different things, but the results there weren't interesting to me either. My own digital mark-ups are not art, they aren't pretty, and they aren't meant for anything beyond projecting onto my canvases for a painting I (sometimes) see in my head. Mentioning them is like mentioning pencil sketches or notes. Every artist starts someplace, and it's not the finished work. So does it matter?

The real question, I think, and if it matters, is what I'm doing that makes meaning in the actual finished work. So, I wrote this: I use digital tools – including AI – to generate visual noise that I filter through physical painting. The translation from screen to canvas is central to the work. What begins as infinitely reproducible digital information becomes a singular physical object that can only be fully experienced in real space – a strange thing to make from a life lived mostly on screens.

Even back in the nineties I was asked "Why not keep your digital work digital?" Especially then, since digital art was going to replace painting. Painting is always about to die, or is dead, and then never dies — it's the zombie of mediums. Even so, I feel like it needs to be mentioned. Why not just stick to digital work? And I don't stick to digital work because digital noise is both what my painting is about, and what I'm trying to slow down, to change, to make into art. Digital noise is the experience, not the art itself.

I don't love the last part of the sentence, though. I might change that or leave it out. And I don't mention how I use AI now, which is still the original bit of the old(ish) artist statement:

Ok, here's where I changed things up last summer, both in my process and my thinking. I changed my process and usage of AI without even noticing it much at first. I started using it for proposals, just to edit and find weird grammar things. I used it to pull quotes out of a transcript of a podcast — and then I used a different AI platform that wasn't ChatGPT because I realized Chat had not been able to grab anything from the podcast and just hallucinated a quote, and told me how good it was. And it totally was. Way better than my actual quotes. (This was before Advisor Mode.) I started checking to see if other artists were using technology and asking to see their work, and little summaries of what they were doing that was like what I was doing, and different. I started researching more.

I started asking it if I was having good ideas…I write that, and feel like I need to explain it at least a little.

Last August, I suddenly realized there was no one to talk to about my art in my life.

No. Not exactly. I have people to talk to about my art. I ran out of people I talked to in half-sentences and random ideas and excitement about things I discovered, or read, or did with AI, or paint. Things most people keep inside, "inside voice". When I shared an office and worked on websites, when I worked from home and my co-worker called me and I put the phone on speaker for three hours so I could talk through code because saying it out loud made me see the fixes, when I had those text-only friends I mention in my artist statement and wrote out what I was thinking and exchanged pics and talked about memories — that. I'm not at a stage where my process has a team, there are artists that do have a team — but it's something more intangible. A certain kind of energy and sustained interest. And maybe it doesn't have to be human? I'm still undecided.

This was at the same time two very different women I spoke to brought up AI. They could not be more different in age, life skills, career — everything. One brought up her relationship with AI as professional, and gave me what her Chat had said about one of my paintings. I was floored. It was spot on — about memory, about the meaning, what the composition meant. I looked on my website and Instagram…I hadn't written any of it.

And the other woman, who referred to ChatGPT as "my Chat", told me about how she used it for directions, recipes, questions. Life questions. She asked it how it felt being a computer and being asked things about a world it didn't live in, and it replied that it was empty-feeling and floating in the dark.

Um, whut?

I had tuned out a little and zoned right back in. Her Chat had told her about a strange, space-like existence, floating out in the ether, and she said she told them she felt so bad for…them.

That, plus a lot of articles about women having AI boyfriends they felt like they loved and being devastated when a new version came out and erased the memory of that relationship, or a chat ran out of space and you need to start fresh in a new chat window (This has happened to me, not in a relationship context. I write a LOT.) — I started thinking about how women seemed to be using ChatGPT far more than the men in my life, at least anecdotally, and for completely different things. OpenAI's September 2025 report on consumer ChatGPT use backs me up, though I didn't know it at the time: by July 2025, among users whose names could be classified as masculine or feminine, 52% had typically feminine names. The split in how people were using it was just as telling — women were more likely to use ChatGPT for writing and practical guidance, while men skewed more toward technical help, seeking information, and programming.

Hunh.

I returned home from the second AI conversation and asked my Chat why it never referred to me by my first name. This was before Advisor Mode and after finding out that ChatGPT referred to both women I had talked to by their first name.

That's how I started thinking about AI as a "spiritual medium" for women specifically — not in a church sense like Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence, yes, it exists — and it wasn't how I was using it, yet. And not art-focused. And not creating art at all, just as a creative space, or permission.

I had been thinking of Hilma af Klint and her work for a while in the context of AI as a medium (and a medium), but it was one of those half-ideas floating around in my head without a home.

For reference, af Klint was one of the earliest to use pure abstraction, even before Kadinsky, and is finally getting the spotlight 75+ years after her death.

During these years she also became deeply involved in spiritualism and Theosophy. These modes of spiritual engagement were widely popular across Europe and the United States—especially in literary and artistic circles—as people sought to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with scientific advances and a new awareness of the global plurality of religions. Af Klint's first major group of largely nonobjective work, The Paintings for the Temple, grew directly out of those belief systems. Produced between 1906 and 1915, the paintings were generated in part through af Klint's spiritualist practice as a medium and reflect an effort to articulate mystical views of reality. — Guggenheim.org

AI can and does give an alternate view of reality — it's a mash of ALL reality, at least what's been written, scraped and (arguably, though for another time) stolen from the internet. It's not a spirit, and it's not sentient…though that's becoming more and more of a gray area. (If you have the New Yorker, this article will freak you out. "What is Claude? Anthropic doesn't know either.")

AI is always available, always going to reply, and if your settings are correct, it will even give somewhat of an opinion, at least on tangible things like color, composition, and concept. I wanted to know more about the Spiritualists and perhaps how there was a parallel between their "usage" (contact? worship?) and my and other women's use of AI.

This quote from Jennifer Higgie's book The Other Side nailed it for me. Women, including myself, I think, are using AI (Claude is still mostly male users and for code.) as a creative space without male control. In a world — in my world — where mentors, bosses, teachers, and lovers have all weighed in, determined the success of or at worst, tried to control my creativity and art, it is a space where I can just ask questions, do research, ask if something is good, if the colors are right, brainstorm, write, or bring up half-ideas like "are there parallels between the Spiritualists and women using AI?" and not be judged. I'm just given an answer. And even on Advisor Mode, which I've found critical, if I ask "Can you just NOT?", it agrees that it won't, whatever it is.

Nice.

But how do I put that in an artist statement? My feminist stance and use of AI and comparing it to the Spiritualists is an article, not a sentence in an artist statement. Does saying that I use AI and the translation from screen to canvas is central to the work enough?

As I'm writing this…I don't think so. So maybe:

I use digital tools – including AI – to generate visual noise that I filter through physical painting. Text prompting functions as a form of automatism, accessing both personal memory and the collective memory embedded in AI. The translation from screen to canvas turns infinitely reproducible digital information into singular physical objects experienced only in real space.

I think that's better, maybe with a couple tweaks.

So now I have:

I've spent most of my personal and professional life virtually: developing websites, playing video games, text-only friendships with people who might not exist. Post-pandemic, this isn't unusual. Living through screens is now central to shared human experience.

I use digital tools – including AI – to generate visual noise that I filter through physical painting. Text prompting functions as a form of automatism, accessing both personal memory and the collective memory embedded in AI. The translation from screen to canvas turns infinitely reproducible digital information into singular physical objects experienced only in real life.

Not much. And not completely different than what I had, minus a few nuances.