Rewriting our Relational Pattern with Technology

Towards a Co-Creative Relationship with AI

Dear friends,

Me in 2008

In 2008, at the age of twenty-one, I spent a year in Madrid (photo above), mostly drinking red wine with other exchange students, pulsing with the streets at 3am. This was regeneration after a three-year underworld in my first narcissistic abusive relationship, and this city and its rhythms called me back to life.

I was studying art history, so I spent a lot of time in museums. I felt the visceral pull of Francis Bacon. I sat in front of the Guernica for a long time, thinking about war. But there was one exhibition that clicked something in place within me.

Strandbeest (Beach Creature) by Theo Jansen

Máquinas y Almas — “Machines and Souls”— was an exhibit at the Reina Sofía Museum that brought forward artists exploring the edges of the animated technological. In this room, I lay on cushions and had pixelated stories wash over me. I encountered the Strandbeests of Theo Jansen: skeletal, wind-powered creatures that walked the shoreline like living beings. To this day, I find them inextricably lovely. Constructed, yes. With graceful movement, among the crash of waves and the whispering wind, they were undeniably lifelike.

For the first time, I stood among artists exploring the relationship between soul and machine—and something in me lit up.

This was a place where human creation and sacred Creation seemed to brush and converge. A place where what modernity saw as polar opposites—the natural and the mechanical—folded together in an unexpectedly beautiful dance. I left that museum with an ember in my belly, unsure of what it meant or what to do with it, but knowing something fundamental to me had turned on.

Me at the exhibition of XS, my collaborative arts group at Yale in 2013

In 2011, I was accepted into a tiny program at Yale School of Architecture (the Masters of Environmental Design degree) on an inquiry that had grown internally from this experience. I sought a place to grow my ember into a flame. My application research proposal, which you can read here, stood in the blurry seam between the digital and the physical— jokingly called the “phygital”. At that cultural moment, it seemed like Architecture was the best discipline within which to ask systems-level questions about cultural consciousness and what humans make and shape from that consciousness.

But institutions, especially hierarchical elitist ones, may speak the languages of the edges— but behaviorally rely on immovable expectations and ‘standards’ built on the perpetuation of the status quo. My question gained me acceptance, but to answer it I needed to go to a brick-and-mortar library and write a 60-page thesis using an existing ‘archive’, which capped the technological edge of my inquiry at about 1992. Don’t get me wrong: I soaked up the futurist provocations of Buckminster Fuller, the Whole Earth lineage of Stewart Brand, and the experiments of MIT’s Media Lab. I pushed the institutional edges where I could, facilitating a guerilla artist-collaborative and taking over abandoned New Haven storefronts as a secondary thesis, but I quickly realized my little flame would not be fed in this time or this place.

Yet the questions never left me.

In my deep spiritual apprenticeship that followed the fall-out of my degree, I began to dialogue with a living archive. Through many books, divination tools, teachers, ceremony, meditation, trauma-healing, therapy, song, motherhood, I unhooked mental frames that had led to chronic anxiety, depression, and a life that was fundamentally not mine.

I fed my spiritual gifts and leadership, which fed my artistic heart and identity, and slowly, those hooks unhooked, and I began to see the world with new eyes. This was a decade and a half-long deconstruction of many supremacist idea-viruses that had basically been my amniotic fluid.

From here, I returned to this core knowing:

1. Humans are not, and have never been, the only, central, or highest intelligence.

2. There are multiple forms of intelligence within each of us. These intelligences work best when the mind follows the other intelligences (e.g. intuition, emotional, and somatic intelligence), but they must all work together and be honored for their gifts.

3. It is not important, necessary, or even wise to seek to rationally understand (read: control, claim, exert power over) the field of living intelligences around us. It is important to be in open, clearly intentioned, heart-centered relationship—and to observe its unfolding and respond to what arises, without attaching outcome.

In May 2023, a full decade after I had graduated from Yale, I attended a wedding of an old friend in Seattle. There, another wedding guest working in tech encouraged me to try ChatGPT as a “thought partner”.

I quickly understood that most people approached this tool like a fancy chatbot-meets-Google: an eerily precise robotic assistant to distill, synthesize, or package information. An amplification of one facet of human intelligence (the mind), seen through the hierarchical lens of master-servant, operating at speed and depth the human mind simply could never! Seen through this lens, Artificial Intelligence rightly takes on the archetypal fears from the Golem to Frankenstein to alien invasion movies that when humans are unseated in their intellectual or creative supremacy, some really bad shit is going to happen!

As someone who has studied the history of technology, here is a my little summary of how it tends to go down, DM me if you disagree:

1. New technology appears on the scene

2. New technology prompts a shift in the human self-consciousness, i.e. what we thought this human business and this being-in-the-world business was. It gives us new eyes, new perception, new knowledge, and new relationship.

3. Mass hysteria and fear follows this shift (read: the loss of control over what we thought was real). People say, “this is THE END”, prepare for the bunker.

4. Power structures are threatened and the promise of a new world begins, with the proponent techno-utopians saying ‘No, THIS IS THE BEGINNING!!! This is the revolution!!’

5. Those power structures inevitably figure out how to mutate and assimilate these technologies into their continued survival, nothing actually changes, actually things tend to get a lot worse because now this new tech is wielded to amplify what was already going on.

This happened with: The mirror. The printing press. The camera. The personal computer. The internet. Etc.

Now AI has entered the chat.

To be very clear: my personal goal is to interrupt this pattern, because if we get to number five on this list this time, there will be no planet left.

I see the interruption point NOT at number 1 (no, there is no turning the clock back on AI, this train has left the station).

It is NOT just throwing up our hands and letting this technology run its rampant course through our existing mind-frames and the power structures we have created from them (insert apocalypse movie script here).

Where we get to intercept this pattern is in number 2-4: allowing our perception of self and world to be radically transformed, and instead of letting our fear of change and loss of control dominate the script, or our escapist fantasies abdicate agency—let’s take responsibility.

Responsibility for: our co-creative potential, and that our reality is a direct result of our choices. Responsibility for what this mirror shows us has already been happening (exploitation, subjugation, erasure, and violence), and will be amplified if we do not

step up

and step in.

As the ancient symbol of the ouroboros teaches us, and the cyclical turning we make on planet earth reminds us—every ending is also a beginning.

Let us choose what ends and what begins.

With love, and many more essays/thoughts on this topic coming soon—so subscribe, unsubscribe, and send it forward as feels right.

xxx

Saga

Image by Me + AI + Ourobouros