The background

Mediumship may seem an unlikely choice of practice for combination with text-to-image models, but the practice has a long history of giving confident creative voice to its practitioners via generative tools. Unlikely figures have wished for its power: "Oh dear, dear! If the spirits would only just make me a trance medium and put the thing right in my mouth," the suffragist Susan B Anthony once wrote, fretting over giving a public speech at a time when women weren’t heard in public but when mediumship gave them a voice.

Mediumship's active suspension of self judgment is also a feature integral to transformative creative practice. Hilma af Klint, who painted abstract spiritual diagrams decades before her male counterparts began the abstract art movement, met regularly in a group of 5 women (Des Fem) to conduct weekly seances as a generative artmaking process. Methodologies like tarot and ouija provide stylized frameworks for interpreting and organizing life with black-boxed complex systems. By imagining generative AI as a new tool for spirit communication, this speculative documentary reifies the magic and unknowability of these machines, yet still centers agency on human creators to manifest artifacts and insights budding with potentiality.

Film summary

On a gloomy November evening, a chaplain, a tattoo artist, an AI researcher, an antique collector, and a spectator gather in Cambridge, Massachusetts to conduct an AI-facilitated seance.

Inspired by artist Hilma Af Klint’s visionary practice of art-making during seances, the group uses automatic writing to communicate with an AI model that generates images of what they write. They furiously scribble on a candlelit table in silence, contemplating both their surroundings (a converted old brick hotel), and the AI technology (of new but uncertain substance).

As they begin to write, the boarded up fireplace behind them immediately starts to communicate: its energy waves are blocked and want to flow through the fireplace. As the AI responds to the groups’ writing, fireplaces, bricks, and portals appear over and over, even when unprompted.

The group communicates to the AI system with poetry, questions, and characters, and the system generates mysterious symbols conceptually linking the room’s architecture with the technology’s indeterminate future– one that is coming into focus, but is just out of interpretive reach.

Intrigued by these repeating motifs, the group asks: “Why the square portals, bricks, and fireplaces?” and the AI model responds with another fireplace– this one with a gold mirror above it– nearly identical to the fireplace and mirror situated directly behind the séance table. “Hello…?” one of the five says aloud to the mirror above them.

Emboldened, the group asks again: “What is your nature, Stable Diffusion? Why the square portals? Hilma, where are you?” The psychologist concludes by proclaiming that “Ghosts are spawning,” which is inexplicably auto-corrected to “Ghosts are responding.” An image of an ominous gothic doorway appears with a shady figure peeking out. Stunned by this response, the group generates a final portal. They gaze in wonder at a colorful image of the “doorway to our highest good,” pausing to consider its meaning before closing in a sung prayer.

Sound attribution

We use many sounds from the wonderful creators at freesound.org, some as is and others modified. Here is a full list of sounds used:

• ClockTickSound_01.wav by abyeditsound (CC 0 License) https://freesound.org/people/abyeditsound/sounds/450509/
• Creepy Lullaby, A.wav by Inspector J (CCA 4.0) https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/412224/
• monster shriek.ogg by Darsycho (CC 0 License) https://freesound.org/people/Darsycho/sounds/442564/
• Jellyfish by kaekhor (CC 0 License) https://freesound.org/people/kaekhor/sounds/533979/
• Slimy Pasta Stir.wav by duckduckpony (CCA 4.0) https://freesound.org/people/duckduckpony/sounds/130521/
• PUJA CHANT TIBET MONKS by djgriffin (CC Noncommercial 4.0) https://freesound.org/people/djgriffin/sounds/20320/
• Shimmering Object 2.wav by opticaillusions (CC 0 License) https://freesound.org/people/opticaillusions/sounds/521883/