AI Séance: Recounts from designing artificial intelligence for transcendence, interpretive lenses and chance

Abstract

As AI becomes a prism through which we reflect, see, and make sense of the world, the way we create creative, transcendent experiences around AI can shape our relationship to it. Drawing inspiration from the ritual structures of Spiritualist séances and creative art-making séances of Hilma af Klint, we present reflections from a series of participatory experiments we called AI Séances. These gatherings brought together artists, technologists, and spiritual practitioners to engage with generative models in contexts shaped by ritual, randomness, and collaborative interpretation. We found that creative production with AI can yield transcendent user experiences (TUX), different communities bring distinct interpretive lenses to AI outputs, and increased technical control can paradoxically diminish serendipity and transcendence. Through our experiences, we suggest that reclaiming interpretive agency over AI outputs in the creative and spiritual context, rather than treating models as machines that produce answers, opens up new avenues for critical and creative engagement with these technologies and is critical to preserving our humanity. The AI Séance offers a model for human-centered interaction with generative systems where magic lies not in the machine’s capabilities, but in our collective ability to create meaning.