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We are delighted to announce the forthcoming Spirituality and the Arts event, inaugurating a new cycle of timely explorations. This session opens with a critical and thought-provoking inquiry into social media in the age of AI and the evolving figure of the 21st-century Mother archetype, approached through interdisciplinary art. The one-hour meeting will include an artist presentation followed by an open discussion.
Abstract
The presentation will attempt to locate contemporary representations of the “Great Mother” archetype in media, and address themes of spirituality, technology, feminism and posthumanism by exploring texts and works from artists, psychoanalysts and technologists. The discussion will utilize Caroline McManus' video work, THE GREAT MOMMY, as a starting point to frame the discussion, taking a critical look at the technologies that we co-create and negotiate in real time.
Artist Statement by Caroline McManus
THE GREAT MOMMY is an 8 minute single-channel video utilizing the Great Mother archetype as a lens through which we can consider “mommy blogger” videos through the eyes of AI. AI-generated material is becoming increasingly challenging to distinguish from “real” media, and essentializes all identities and human experiences in an utterly terrifying way. “Mommy blogger” videos are some of the earliest viral videos on the internet, cementing the relationship between gender, performativity, self-expression and universal experience. The corpus of these videos constitutes rich source material for AI-generated versions of them. They look really real.
Utilizing a variety of prompts, I created a compilation of these videos and played them on an analog television for friends and friends-of-friends. By blending hyper-contemporary media with now-anachronistic technology, I wanted to cement, document and interrogate that empty, cyclical, ouroboric feeling of watching AI-generated "content", while also exploring the potential for these videos to deliver meaning.
What would real people think of these videos? Would the videos capture some degree of authentic, deeply rooted, universal messages about motherhood? Would they come across as uncanny and trite? Both?
We warmly invite you to join us for a lively conversation exploring themes that call for our attention as scholars, researchers, artists, and psychospiritual seekers.
About the speaker
Caroline McManus is an interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been shown internationally at Artists' Television Access, Castel Belasi Contemporary Art Center for Eco Thought, Flux Factory, Black Brick Project, Labocine, Dizzy TV, The Wrong Biennale and elsewhere. She has recently been an artist in residence at DOMUS in Galatina, IT, Swale on Governors Island in NYC and Inside the Castle Press. She has written for the Cleveland Review of Books, Jacobin Magazine, Polyester Magazine, Teen Vogue and others. Her experimental book, ANAMNESIS, was published in 2024 from Inside the Castle Press. She works as an Associate Producer on Good Morning Buffalo, a documentary directed by Thomas Allen Harris and will be an artist in residence at Viafarini in Milan this summer.
For more details, see https://spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org/Spirituality-and-the-Arts-SIG
The SIG Chairs: Dr Lila Moore, Mary-Rita McGuire MSc, Esmira Yusufova MSN
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