Dialectical Postcards from the Future, or the Multiple “Afterlives” in the Painting Cycle Deus Machina by Helena Schultheis Edgeler

Kovačić-Macolić Gallery, Varaždin, 2 December 2024

Paola Orlić

When, in 1924, art historian Aby Warburg began work on his famous yet never completed project Mnemosyne Atlas—through which, by investigating the so-called “afterlives” (Nachleben) of images, he founded iconology and forever altered the course of art history—he could hardly have foreseen that, scarcely a century later, humanity would have advanced to the point where, in addition to the luxury of time-saving afforded by developments in computer technology, humans would soon be able to communicate with artificial consciousness, capable not only of providing answers but also of generating infinite interpretations.

Significantly naming it after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses, Warburg conceived the Atlas as a material representation of collective memory—a collection of disparate and, at first glance, unrelated visual materials, which, in his view, revealed undeniable correspondences and connections across multiple cultural levels. While the central focus of Warburg’s work was above all the tracing of motifs, symbols, and the legacy of antiquity—tracking the migrations of their ideas and the ways they were communicated between societies of different cultures, as well as the roles of their varied manifestations in shaping cultural patterns—the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne not only charted the history and continuity of collective memory from antiquity to the 20th century, but, in a sense (however simplistically), can be compared to the invention of the global data network—especially in the context of the research tool known as the World Wide Web, today’s ubiquitous Internet service.

But how does Warburg relate to the latest body of work by Helena Schultheis Edgeler, which, after being shown in Samobor and Zagreb, is now on view at Varaždin’s Kovačić-Macolić Gallery?

Helena Schultheis Edgeler (Zagreb, 1972)—a trained painter and, not coincidentally, an art historian—is among the pioneers of the Croatian art scene who have approached the tools of the latest technological achievement—artificial intelligence (AI)—with readiness, curiosity, and openness, plunging without hesitation into the creative possibilities of opening a dialogue between human and “machine.” What Warburg anticipated with his renowned Mnemosyne Atlas panels—as a kind of illustrated database establishing concrete cause-and-effect relationships between ancient motifs and their many “afterlives” in the form of later versions and (re)interpretations—the machine, a hundred years later, could achieve with a simple programmed command, instantly transforming text into a concrete pictorial translation.

By engaging directly with AI—deliberately generating templates for her work in the traditional medium of oil on canvas—Schultheis Edgeler created eight distinctive pictorial reflections, encapsulating the imaginary realm of archetypal civilizational fears, aspirations, and their philosophical articulations. Far from merely illuminating and transposing the manifold “afterlives” of motifs that have preoccupied humanity for millennia, her cycle Deus Machina seeks, in the artist’s own words, to evoke a sense of the numinous and introspective. It is the result of sustained, long-term inquiry into the limits of art and technology, and, in particular, the implications of complex interactions between human and artificial consciousness—and the possible consequences for a future in which reassessing one’s moral-ethical values and the boundaries of humanity itself will be an unavoidable necessity.

In the catalogue foreword for Schultheis Edgeler’s previous exhibition (Put it in the Cloud, Karas Gallery, 2021), art historian Nada Beroš significantly remarked that “postmodern double-coding, present in almost all of Helena Schultheis Edgeler’s works, is due, among other things, to her dual degrees as both art historian and visual artist.” Indeed, just as she skillfully navigates the challenges of mentoring students at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Textile Technology, where she teaches drawing and painting, alongside her own creative output—whether in experimental film or the slow, traditional medium of oil painting—from which this latest large-format cycle (130 × 96 cm) emerges, the artistic habitus generating the chimerical worlds of Deus Machina is fundamentally dual in nature.

Rich in seductive, cryptic content, in which one discerns human figures bearing weapons within architectural elements of ambiguous sacred provenance, the eight pictorial “afterlives” from the future function as dialectical images in which everything appears simultaneously doubled: near yet far, familiar yet utterly strange. According to the artist, these are specifically incarnations of the machine—more precisely, embodiments of AI given physical form within a recognizable environment, yet marked by a shift that symbolically represents the continuation of a new form of life growing out of the achievements of civilization. Created and trained on human-made content—constantly accessible to it online—and absorbing an entire range of ontological and cosmological premises, as well as manifold moral and ethical values (from positive emotions and full socio-political pluralism to the most negative impulses of intolerance and hatred toward all that is “other” and “different”), Schultheis Edgeler embodies AI with two highly significant, almost disparate attributes: the weapon and the book.

As symbolic exponents, these stand on one hand for the fear that, with the further development of AI—specifically the attainment of consciousness—the end of the human species will come; and, on the other, for the possibility that accumulated knowledge, from written words to images, might prevent such an outcome. The entire imaginary realm of Deus Machina thus underscores the painter’s propensity for double-coding: juxtaposing two scenarios—one of total extermination of humankind, the other of constructing an entirely new (brave) world in which the blind spots of past ideologies and religions might be overcome through the further development of science and technology. She thereby points to the crucial moment of anticipatory choice at the threshold of an imminent future, in which humanity must learn to outwit the pitfalls of its own flaws—foremost among them the laziness of body and mind—which could lead to complete exile and the loss of old knowledge and skills, and with them a total social, cultural, and moral collapse in which humanity would finally lose its vertical axis and the meaning of its existence.

The Deus Machina cycle must therefore be seen as the direct outcome of the artist’s years-long study of new technological achievements in computer-based image manipulation. While her interest initially centered on film and video, as well as on algorithmic development and photographic processing, in 2022 Schultheis Edgeler discovered the then newly launched tool “Midjourney,” whose primary aim was explicitly to “turn text into image.” Recognizing that such a tool would soon bring about a seismic shift—permanently altering the paradigm of image-making, design, and art, akin to the change brought soon after by the invention of ChatGPT—she continued to explore the possibilities offered by increasingly sophisticated technology.

Generating thousands of images with AI, she refined the “perfect” text prompt which, once input into the machine, would yield a satisfactory outcome upon which she could base a painting. Yet the most satisfying results, she notes—not coincidentally—came from error: only when the machine failed to comprehend her prompt, producing incoherent images, did she, by applying graphic tools and intervening in numerous “working sketches,” arrive at her first coherent attempts suitable for further development. Though such work was often limiting—since changes possible within the system rarely aligned with her vision—she continually subjected her sketches to numerous modifications, generating new elements and extensively refining her textual code, which ultimately produced results she chose to adopt as painting templates.

Convinced that abstract and conceptual thinking belongs to the past—today’s greatest challenge lying precisely in reality, especially in defining what it is and where its boundaries lie—she consciously embraced figuration, or realism, to highlight the vast interpretive field of interference between reality and artificially generated worlds.

Programmatically titled with numbers—mathematical terms such as the Golden Ratio “1.6180,” the lesser-known “1.17628” (Salem’s constant), or “0.001400” (the Schwarzschild radius)—selected as carriers of a universal language of mathematics transcending the limits of geography and cultural codes, these works consciously transcend temporality, functioning equally as traces of the past and as fragmentary sketches of the future. While they clearly evidence her connoisseur’s command of precise art-historical terminology and the canons of beauty in various stylistic idioms, the eight monochrome, romantic-nostalgic chimeras—prolegomena to a metaphysics of the future set within the ruins of sacred architecture—are brought to life on canvas with the practiced hand of a consummate painter. Yet, in their experimental conception and mode of creation, they openly incline toward slipping through the fissure beyond all known constraints.

Fully aware that in the exact sciences, qualities celebrated in the arts—untranslatability, approximation, intuition, openness—are often perceived as error, blind spot, deviation, or noise, Schultheis Edgeler, in her long and elaborate dialogue with the machine (AI), did not hesitate to use such “inexact deviations” as tools to arrive at her desired results.

Reading in Leonida Kovač’s Rasprizorenja (Sandorf, 2024) how the art historian theorizes Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as articulating “a history of ghosts for adults,” with its sustained focus on the “afterlife” of images, one cannot miss the uncanny correspondence between the term Nachleben and Helena Schultheis Edgeler’s Deus Machina cycle. That never-completed work, which Warburg continued assembling until his death in 1929, as Kovač notes in quoting fellow theorist Georges Didi-Huberman, inaugurated a new genre of knowledge in which imagination departed from fantasy. For, as Didi-Huberman writes, imagination—with its inherent potential for montage based on discovery—offers knowledge that exceeds boundaries precisely at the point where it rejects the connections formed by removed similarities, connections imperceptible to direct observation.

In a similar line of inquiry into the origins of images and the imagining of their infinite “afterlives” as hybrids generated by AI tools, Deus Machina can be understood as one of many possible paraphrases of Warburg’s “history of ghosts for adults.” Eschewing literal deconstruction in favor of open navigation through the only certain constant—perpetual change—resting on interpretive deviations, Schultheis Edgeler comes close to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated concept of the “dialectical image,” in which he found confirmation of his thesis on history as a text into which the past has impressed its images.