I’ve finally stopped working on — I hesitate to say “finished” — a big and complicated piece called “When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist?” (A line from the great X Ray Spex song “Genetic Engineering”).
As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, this image is a “Hellscape” in the European tradition of Bosch's "Last Judgement" or Bruegel the Elder's "Dull Gret" — but it's actually based on an old book illustration I found many years ago of some geologists looking at the inside of a gigantic volcanic caldera.
My thinking about the piece as a whole revolves around the relationships between creativity and religion (God the Creator) and the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence - and with it, artificial artists. The central figure is this new AI Creator wielding a ceremonial paintbrush, which He waves in the air like a conductor, willing different scenes and scenarios into existence.
However, He isn’t the biblical Creator up in Heaven (we actually see a distracted Yahweh in the clouds at the top of the piece, dreamily reimagining His past Glories). Instead, this AI Creator is in charge of an underworld, in a direct nod to Harlan Ellison’s AM supercomputer in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. One other note: the Creator’s mask (see detail below) is a reference to a meme popular in AI circles, where HP Lovecraft’s “Shoggoth” monster wears a smiling fake face to cover up its terrifying underlying form.
