Active Ingredient Vs Artificial Intelligence – An Artists’ Provocation

 

We called ourselves Active Ingredient in the 1990s, thinking about what creates the magic. We always said we wanted to make the hair stand up on the back of people’s necks.

I have only recently noticed the irony that my email and website address is still ‘I am AI’.  Active Ingredient… not artificial intelligence. We noticed the pun at some point in the late 1990’s and thought it was funny. In this time now, the difference between active ingredient and artificial intelligence feels at the heart of so much that all of us do, and don’t do in our everyday lives.

What does proclaiming ‘I am AI’ mean now in 2025?

Should I embrace this new wave of AI excitement? Can I now finally be part robot and cyborg as sci-fi told me my future would be? Am I the machine? Can I be super intelligent because I have a smart phone and an LLM at my finger tips? Can a human be AI? Can AI be magic? Are the opportunities of AI worth the voracious energy consumption and environmental impacts of its creation, development and usage? Is it even what they say it is if there are underpaid humans moderating and checking what it is doing, often at great harm to the human’s  wellbeing? 

So much has already been written and said about this. Everyone is talking about AI.

What about the active ingredient? The substance that triggers the experience, that creates the magic in art, that helps us experience something ineffable in the forest or by the water. What is it? Can humans create machines that grow their own active ingredients? Can we create the magic, human and machine together? Is the magic in us? In our imagination? Is it triggered by the active ingredients we encounter in the world? 

There are a whole bunch of other philosophical, theological, mystical and esoteric questions, when you get in this deep. The christian theologian Rudolf Otto has a lot to say about awe, the holy and the ineffable. YouTube is full of arguments about meaning and imagination. I tend to resist You Tube along with LLMs. Although as everything, it can be useful. Particularly for DIY plumbing.

If artificial intelligence is a fast learning memory machine (I am thinking of the sign on my sister-in-law’s kitchen ‘coffee makes you do stupid things faster’) can it take the memory of the active ingredient, of magical experience, the trigger for our imaginations, and replicate it? Or does magic have to be a completely novel, reciprocal encounter between alive beings and the world?

I will leave the questions of what it means to be alive and conscious to the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers and theologians, for now.

In the meantime, I return to the active ingredient that triggers imagination and magic… that reaches towards the ineffable. I suggest that the ineffable is not the uncanny and the weird. These are of course important ways of disrupting and making art, but the writings and thinkings of the past tell us that the ineffable is beyond our normal states of being. A sacred and transcendent state, moment or experience. The uncanny, once understood and normalised is just another experience of this messy world, easily assimilated and sold back to us as entertainment, unfulfilled desire and distraction. The ineffable remains unknown and unknowable, whichever way you look at it, however you return to it and however much you try to sell and normalise it.

Rituals can be one of our active ingredients. A gap in the matrix. A space for the ineffable to be discovered and experienced. The hallucinogen, the music, the mask, the totem, the dance, the song, the circle, the place, the art, the story. Most importantly, the practice of deepening experience over time. Where deepening takes place. Could it be that the ineffable is depth?

Robots are uncanny and weird. They are like us and like the world, but they aren’t alive – although a subset of humans seem to be debating this on a daily basis. Maybe one day they will become ineffable, but still now they remain in the valley of the uncanny. Star Wars’ R2D2 was one of my big inspirations when I started making interactive art. What is it about R2D2 playing Princess Leia’s hologram over and over again that still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck?

“Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”

This is the plea, the attempt of one human to communicate and reach out to another for the sake of all life in the universe, across time and space, using whatever means they can. It is not the tin box with legs and a screwdriver and clever noises, for all it’s cuteness.

Our first public artwork Strange News From Another Star was inspired by this desire to communicate across time and space, along with the reach into space of the 1960s, named after Blur’s very 1990s song. We were excited about the early internet, and were trying to get messages through, projected on water, in a storm, in Derby’s Market Place. We continued this theme later, with our early experiments with video streaming on Moon Radio WebTV.

And so it is with my current 30 year project, Future Machine. The active ingredient is not in the making of the ash octagon, the oak box of tricks, the copper trumpets, the levers, dials, handle, wheels and brass signs. These may contain beauty, uncanniness, humour even. But the magic is in the turning up, again and again, for 30 years, hearing people’s messages for the future, however mundane or poetic. Playing the voices over and over again in different places and to different people, across England. Remembering and dreaming. Repeating and deepening the ritual in the same places, letting the connections emerge, year after year.

Times have changed. Trying to get a message through to others is a mediated algorithmic mess. As the cliché says, everyone is speaking, no one is listening. The bubbles surround us. The people that are speaking and listening to each other online are increasingly surrounded by high, guarded castle walls and the messages we send out, flaming arrows.

Those in the world seeking the active ingredient, enchantment and magic live in their own castles. Those believing in the inevitability of artificial intelligence, fossil fuel reliance and technological advancement, live in castles next door.

There are bubbles and castles for every thought and feeling and need and desire, wrapped up in algorithms, embedded in the ‘internet of things’. Following the trends, the algorithms, the clicks and the scrolls now seems to be the easiest way to live in our contemporary world. Our eyes, brains and bodies captured by this multitude of data and screens. So much easier, less exhausting and efficient for our busy, tough, modern lives than searching for magic and enchantment. We are told by our rational, techno-bureaucratic, late-capitalist, materialist culture that the search for magic and deep connections with the non-human is the domain of childhood, superstition, religion, rich hippies and wellbeing seekers, the hedonistic and the crazy.

How do we move forward from this point? Particularly whilst trying to scrape a living together. Overwhelmed by the need to make fast decisions about how we live, eat and drink, how we move, dance and swim, how we think, how we communicate, do rituals, tell stories and even how we breathe and love. Never mind how we live with, love and care for the other beings who inhabit this planet with us.

How do we have faith in the active ingredients of the life of this planet when the global religion of economics, extraction, technological, corporate determinism and unequal economic growth is embedded in this internet of everything?

Can rituals or robots help us?