Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping how we create, share, and experience spiritual and sacred imagery. Artificial intelligence produces sacred images in seconds, relying not on cultural contexts, theological frameworks, or spiritual investment but on training databases and algorithms. It remixes symbols and images across cultures, styles, and even religions. The outputs circulate rapidly and widely on social media platforms and are used for a multitude of purposes. What happens when images once mediated by tradition and handcraft are instead produced through machine learning algorithms? Can AI-generated images evoke the same spiritual or emotional response as human-made counterparts? And, what is gained—or lost—when spiritual and sacred imagery becomes infinitely remixable and shareable? By examining these questions, this presentation considers how GenAI functions not just as a technological tool but, more significantly, as a potential force of cultural change.
The early 2025 California wildfires present a perfect case study of how current events are prone to mis- and disinformation spread through the use of visual generative artificial intelligence (GAI) images and videos on social media, especially how such disinformation centers on culturally sacred or ritual sites. Centered on a series of social media posts that purported to show the iconic Hollywood sign ablaze, the case study explores how creators are utilizing GAI tools to leverage cultural capital, heightened emotions, and a divided public for content engagement. Using three frameworks: Information Disorder, Metaliteracy, and Visual Literacy, the presenters will walk through the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of the GAI content as it spread. The session will include a discussion of how we can develop critical looking skills and critical evaluation skills to detect GAI content before spreading it. This presentation builds on an upcoming chapter for the book AI and Metaliteracy: Empowering Learners for the Generative Revolution.
This work explores how digital images have become a central element for societies to remember and document their histories, cultures, and identities. The increasing accessibility in generating digital images allows institutions and individuals to create extensive visual collections. By digitizing fragile physical materials, resources susceptible to damage are protected, and remote exploration is facilitated, configuring a dynamic memory that can be updated and reorganized. These image repositories not only preserve memories but also contribute to collective memory, enabling communities to share, reinterpret, and rewrite their histories. Additionally, new methodologies for data analysis and visualization, such as data mining and virtual reality, are discussed, allowing interactive reconstructions of historical and cultural contexts, expanding the reach and diversity of these archives.
M Leuven is a museum that zooms in on visual literacy and transhistoricity. Since 2017, it has collaborated with ENVIL on a model encouraging deeper, more critical engagement with artworks. From 2020 to 2024, the museum hosted Moving, an exhibition exploring religious art and heritage objects designed to move—both physically and symbolically. With themes like procession, pilgrimage, and devotion, it showcased objects essential to rituals, such as animated sculptures, procession tools, cult items, and home altars. These items were created to enhance spiritual experiences and unite communities. The presentation highlights how the exhibition juxtaposed historical and contemporary worship, broadening our understanding of the role of images in religious and festive contexts. It also explores how this theme continues in M Leuven’s permanent collection, where rituals like opening reliquary caskets and adjusting retables on feast days are brought to life.
This critical arts-based research paper centers the creation of two fabric assemblage pieces made in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings. Here, I explore methodology, materiality and representations of collective memory. As a Black joy project, I unpack tacit knowledge production grounded in the Gullah Geechee heritage of my grandfather. This unspoken knowledge undergirded my work in embodied ways. Thus, I meditated on the sources of the work-cultural traditions and visuality-that intuitively informed my making. Lastly, as a former art teacher, current university professor and longtime artist with periods of hiatus, I conclude by positing implications for my field of study.
Revolutionary festivals of the first decade after the social revolution of 1917 in Russia became the main means of manifesting the new ideology. A significant part of the images created for the festive manifestations expressed the ideas of hatred and destruction. Capitalism, monarchism, religion, symbols of culture and everyday life of the past made up a special semantic system consisting of signs of negation. The actions of the revolutionary festivals took place in vast urban spaces, mobile platforms were used, and troops participated in the actions. The ideology of the new state corresponded to the ideas of the Russian avant-garde, which turned into an artistic program corresponding to the new social order. The manifesto of the avant-garde - the opera-performance “Victory over the Sun”, created by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin and Alexei Kruchenykh in 1913, vividly expressed with the help of planetary metaphors the concept of negation and destruction. Images of negation were rooted in Soviet visual culture - in cinema, fine art, book design and books for children.
