Dusty Mag

The question of whether AI art is killing art is contentious and worth exploring with a nuanced perspective. AI art exhibits tensions within it—on the one hand, it challenges established concepts of creativity, originality, and artistic human capacity. Conversely, it opens up fresh possibilities for human expression and democratizes creative agency. So, is AI art actually killing art, or is it only transforming our perception of art and the artist?

To start, let’s tackle the fear that AI art dilutes an artist’s work. The roots of traditional art come from the human experience—emotion, personal experience, culture, and literacy in a craft. Artists are literally trained over the course of years, and slowly develop methods to evoke their inner vision into a two-dimensional painting, film, or digital art. With some human input, AI can produce images that simulate the composition, color, and content of art, in seconds or minutes. In effect, many see this as a shortcut, a process that seems mechanical and denies humanity’s soul from art. There are fears that AI art will level the playing field and devalue artist wages to a hobby, flood the market with AI workshops, fail to pay artists back royalties, etc.

The argument misses a crucial ideology—art is more than the final image. It is intention, process, and context. An AI-generated version of a painting could arguably look nice or impressive, but it lacks the artist’s process. In a human’s painting, a viewer could consider that artist’s process, struggle, inspiration, and, of course, message. The identity of the artist and their lived experience imbue the work with meaning no machine can duplicate. The artist’s hand embodies more than technique, it embodies the consciousness that can question, disrupt, or celebrate the world.

Nonetheless, AI art is creating a shake-up in the art world’s hegemonic structures, making clear we must reconsider what creativity actually means. If a machine can remix styles in existing work and produces something new to look at, even if it is derivative, is that art? The definition of art has always been fluid throughout time, from cave paintings to digital installations it will continue evolving. AI art offers something for this continuum by expanding the artist’s tool bag. It can exist as a collaboration between multiple people, a collaboration between artist and a machine, an assistant to artist, and/or even exist as a new medium that allows the artist to consider ideas in a different way. Many contemporary creatives are using AI to expand their own practice, as opposed to replacing it, whereas a human artist utilizes intuition and machines create via algorithms.

AI-generated art also has the power to democratize creation as has never been able to happen before. You do not need to pay for expensive materials nor have years of training to make something beautiful or culturally relevant using AI tools. This accessibility breaks down a variety of barriers creative barriers, allowing truly more people to express ideas and show their creativity or lack thereof. Even if that’s something that purists don’t value as “true art” this should be valued as new perspectives, new voices, and new culture being introduced.

That being said, there are also legitimate positions about the ethics and economics of AI-generated art. Many AI models are being trained on datasets of existing artwork without consent from the original artists, with major implications in terms of intellectual property, ownership and fair credit. If an AI is fed the works of every creator and then creates a volume of “art” that derive from its own, then who owns the rights to that derivative work? If the internet is flooded with free AI-generated art, what implications lie for human artists financially and in their practice? These challenges will need to be addressed as an industry to ensure artists can flourish moving forward.

I don’t believe AI-generated art is killing the artist. It is simply disrupting the already outdated way of thinking about artistry, creativity, and forcing us to recalibrate how we think about creativity in a digital landscape. While some professional that adapt and embrace AI tools as part of their process can use it to either innovate the way they create or engage with audiences, those that cling onto rigid definitions are the ones that will become redundant. Art is still centered on human expression—even though machines can elevate or disrupt human expression, they cannot fully replicate a human voice and create a meaningful work from that voice.

So think of AI-generated art less as the death of the artist, and more as a moment to evolve the human and machine expression. It asks that artists, audiences and institutions rethink what art means, who can make it, and how we value it. The artist isn’t dying, they are reshaping like all art is constantly in a state of flux.

Terrence Malick is a filmmaker who asks us to experience cinema not only as story told, but meditative engagement with life itself. Malick’s films incorporate many themes, but “time” and “memory” are perhaps the two most important. His conceptualizations of time and memory do not depend on traditional narrative techniques to depict those ideas. Instead, Malick treats time and memory like living, breathing things that intercede with the sensory world, the inner life of the characters, and his larger philosophical ideas. He doesn’t just show the time-passage of the moment; he asks us to feel how memory shapes our sense of time, how things from the past bleed into the present, and how human consciousness struggles with the relentless flow of life.

In many ways, Malick’s conceptualization of time is disorienting—a sensation not uncommon when sitting through one of Malick’s films. He often presents a film in a non-linear way, and shifts back and forth between past and present, and multiplex perspectives, and revisiting subjective impressions. All this is not a style choice; he is intentionally mirroring how memory operates in the mind. Memory does not unfold in an orderly and linear fashion. Other than the fact that there are some things that we can typically consider “memory,” memory is often fragmented, associative, and emotional— it is not only distinct actions we can experience. Every moment flows into the next moment in time, and may be blurred, or sharp, and colored by affective quality rather than by factual representation. Malick’s voiceover narration—also fragmented, and often poetic, philosophical, and impressionistic—can voice this important interior experience to give us access to the thoughts and memories rain-raining and layering all of our experiences.

Consider The Tree of Life (2011), perhaps Malick’s most ambitious meditation on time and memory. The narrative of the film finds its anchor in Jack, a mature adult reflecting upon his childhood memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s, especially his relationship with both parents as he grapples with larger and deep questions about existence, grace, and nature. But instead of structuring the narrative with typical flashbacks, The Tree of Life bobs along a continuum of memories and sensory moments, like sunlight flickering through the leaves of a tree, the rush of childhood liberation, and the quiet sadness that derives from loss. It shifts back and forth from depiction of personal family lives to enormous, and sometimes fantastical, cosmic imagery. The Tree of Life collapses the time scale, suggesting that the personal and universal are interchangeable.

Here memory is not a recollection of facts but about re-experiencing the emotions and sensations that constitute a person’s life. The scenes feel dreamlike; they feel less like a narrative in time. Time loosens and memories run together. The past year and the present year come together in Jack’s adult voiceover, as he recounts moments that are both no more and still alive in memory. The impressionistic motifs in the sequence of non-linear editing create an aesthetic that parallels the flickering nature of memory – how a single image, or sound can suddenly unleash an avalanche of feelings; the way memory flits unpredictably from moment to moment.

Malick has long tinkered with time and memory, particularly in Days of Heaven (1978) in similar ways, but with an important distinction. In Days of Heaven, the narrator is a child named Linda. She narrates, poetically recounting a tragic love story set in her childhood. While we follow along with the plot because of Linda’s voice-over narration, the experience is less linear because of the lyrical and fragmented quality of her narration and processing the narrative in memory that grabs onto pieces of time. The rural beauty of the films—golden fields, light, and seasons in nature—does not just show us the passage of time and movement, like a timeline of sorts, but highlights time as a cycle. Here, time dances to a rhythm following the seasons of nature’s growth and decay, allowing humanity to think about living life as a cycle, rather than a single, linear, uninterrupted process. Malick’s fascination with memory is often framed against innocence and experience, or wonder and mystique children, usually in the shroud of loss or trauma. The Thin Red Line (1998), a film set during World War II, embodies character’s past memories, thoughts and reflections that create a rhythm against the violence surrounding them. Here, the inner voice of a character explains to us the fears, hopes or regrets in their relationship with their past. Memory carries on a subjectivity through a sense of identity and self, even amid war’s destructive potential; time has elasticity here, folds upon itself, allowing soldiers to remember a moment that exemplifies peace or innocence amid the brutality of war.

What makes Malick’s treatment of time and memory all the more emotionally impactful is the merging of the sensory and spiritual. Malick encourages us to think about memory but more so experience the memory. He uses natural light, long shots of landscapes and nature, and limits dialogue to encourage a way of watching that encourages a reflective state of memory. We enter into the characters’ subjective world and live their memories as moments and experiences that are vividly alive. Malick’s use of reflection acts as an interactivity, dissolving the viewer distance from the film, and creating time and memory, not as a narrative structure, but relationally and emotionally.

Malick suggests that memory is redemptive. Memory can connect us to our previous selves and others, and while time moves on, memory can also enable a sense of continuity and meaning in our lives. Often the characters’ memories, musings and reflections take on a spiritual dimension—a searching for grace, a reconciling of the mystery of life. In fact, memory serves the function of reaching toward understanding, healing, and (dare I say it) transcendence in The Tree of Life.

At the same time, Malick’s films counter a way of thinking about time as behaving as a straight forward progression, as suggested by time being one direction and linear—it is cyclical, layered, and subjective. You never really leave the past, nor lose it; the past lives with you in the present through memory and consciousness. The past and present, together by time, offers us a more human, lived experience of time, where emotion operates, that is uniquely shaped by emotional sense(s) like loss, nostalgia, etc. The non-linear structure of Malick’s films in no small way, highlight a more meaningful style than structure in proclaiming the way we have lived our lives.

Malick engagement with time and memory consider cinema’s unique capacity to tell and express complexity about human consciousness. Malick’s films are arguably not about plot, but about creating space to lose yourself in the flow of memory and reflection. They offer us the opportunity to reflect and foreshadow they chaos of everyday life and living as not a coherent, neat story, but a tenuous collage of moments- some crisp, some out of focus, all with time limits, but all defined by our capacity to remember.

To watch a Malick film is to feel as though you have entered a waking dream. Time bends, twists and pauses. Memories emerge as whispers. And this space of present-being allows a glimpse of the deeper currents of existence; of how we carry our past with us; the meaning we find in change; and that time is, in the end, who we are.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s films are meditative excursions, expansive, breathtaking, and contemplative. When watching his films, you enter a space where time expands, nature exhales, and silence glistens with meaning. At the center of Tarkovsky’s work, is a profound exploration of spirituality; not spirituality in a narrow religious sense, but a responsive inquiry into being, faith and the search for a meaning that transcends the material world.

A Poet of Time and Spirit

Tarkovsky did not just make films; he made cinematic poetry, and like poets, he struggled to represent the non-essential. His style resists typical narrative speed, and does not contain expressions of fast action. He invites us to consider a state of reflection, in which each image, each sound is imbued with meaning. Furthermore, time is represented as fluid, and layered; it is rarely linear. This temporal approach suggests a spiritual approach to existence that manifests in traditions that view life as cyclical or eternal; rather than as chronological icons of past events.

Tarkovsky viewed film as a means of accessing the metaphysical. His work is rich with a feeling of reverence towards nature, memory, and dreams, which also advocated for a negotiation between the physical and a wider unseen reality. Tarkovsky stated that cinema was a way to “sculpt time” that expresses his intention not simply to represent time, but to mold time; to create a sensibility in which viewers might feel a glimpse into the eternal.

The Spiritual Heart of Tarkovsky’s Films

Take “Andrei Rublev” (1966) for example. The film is inspired (loosely) by early medieval Russian painter Andrei Rublev, who is an icon painter. Within what is a historical drama lies the examination of faith, doubt, creativity and the role of the artist in society in relation to the reception of their work. One of the film’s distinguishing characteristics is its extreme, often savage, stark reality and juxtaposition of harsh realities, moments of transcendence, beauty, and deep spiritual understanding. The pacing is slow, and many of the shots seem to linger, inviting patience and openness of the viewer, much like the long distance a pilgrim must travel to even begin to comprehend their spiritual destination.

In much the same vein, “Stalker” (1979) conveys the theme of faith and human desire in association with a mysterious Zone said to grant their deepest wishes. The character’s trek through the Zone is not simply a journey toward material gain, but an invitation into the depths of the naked unknown of the human spirit. The film’s speaker is little more than a set of powerful and painfully discordant images. The stillness, quiet tension, and minimal dialogue elicit an extraordinary mood that evokes the esoteric. In this film, the questions are more important than the answers.

In “The Mirror” (1975), Tarkovsky masterfully weaves together his own memories, dreams, and historical representations in a nonlinear format. “The Mirror” presents a work that goes beyond the genre of autobiography, a true exploration of time and identity as a spiritual experience across generations. The fluid shifts between past and present, in this film regarding the past, shows contentious evidence that memory connects the earthbound realm to the transcendent realm.

Beyond Religion Spirituality

It is important to recognize that although many of Tarkovsky’s films contain Christian imagery, and themes stemming from Russian Orthodoxy, his spirituality is not boxed-in by any one immutable tradition. Tarkovsky’s spiritual cinema develops and processes ideas that speak to a universal search for meaning, authority, the sacred, and the numinous. One cannot underestimate the depth of love and admiration Tarkovsky holds for what could be described as Eastern spirituality, or Eastern thought, as well as the love and admiration he shows to the strong influence of the work of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke upon his films.

What Tarkovsky aches against is spirituality that is reduced to dogma or doctrine. Instead, he invites viewers to a personal experiential relationship with the mystery-ridden existence. In his films, and by the experience created, he opens a space of feeling rather than answering questions on God, life, and death; slowing people down to consider what lies beneath the surface reality of existence.

Silence, Nature, and the Sacred

Another feature in Tarkovsky’s spirituality is his use of silence and nature. He often stayed longer than most filmmakers in sequences that contained water, fire, air, and earth – the elements of nature that can both destroy and renew. These elements are not simply scenery; they have profound significance and point to the rhythm, cycles, and renewal of life, death, and being.

When we experience silence through Tarkovsky’s films, we are not experiencing emptiness, we experience presence—a presence where one can sense the unknown. When we do not have sound or dialogue, it is an inward listening to depths beyond the visible. This can be seen in reflections seen in “Nostalgia” (1983), where the protagonist is seeking the comforts of being whole again, for them, this is situated in home; home that is revealed in shots that either contain silence or imagery of silence.

The Artist as Spiritual Voyager

Tarkovsky made clear he considered the artist, as a religious figure, a sort of prophet or guide. He considered that art was capable of revealing the truth and when it has done its job contribute to spiritual awakening. In contrast, entertainment offers distraction or superficial entertainment; he considered the art he promoted and practiced, he wants to be participatory and contemplative. He wanted films that would “cleanse the eyes” so they would see and be deeply and truthfully present in the world.

The idea is not far removed from his most cited contemplation on film—“sculpting time.” Through art, Tarkovsky sought to give form to invisible energies that shape human existence: memory, faith, hope, suffering, and so forth. It is clear in his films when he uses silence, and other experiences to draw out a viewer to slow down to watch for the feelings of these energies in ourselves and within our being and world.

The Lasting Impact of Tarkovsky’s Spirituality

Although Tarkovsky’s work was controversial during his lifetime (largely due to censorship in the Soviet Union, and misunderstanding from so many viewers) and equally ambiguous in his mind, today his films have many followers on a global scale and this global community – made up of viewers who find spiritual connection in the ‘spirituality of film’ – is growing. Spiritual engagement as I understand it in relation to cinema in a fast paced, distracted, and activity based world is alive and well. To experience Tarkovsky’s films is to spiritually resist the superficial distractions of life. It is a call to return to a sacred moment in existence.

His legacy and influence go beyond film, and surely will reach to artists, philosophers, and other communities of spiritual seekers. He argued film could be a sacred art form, allowing contemplation and engagement with some of the deepest questions about human existence.

Final Reflections

Through the experience of Tarkovsky’s films, we enter a space where ‘time’ is slowed, the spiritual reality meets the material reality, and the viewer is invited to reflect on the essential depths of the human experience. Tarkovsky’s cinema does not give simple and easy answers, they offer contemplative space; contemplation invites engagement with the mystery of life.

In a world that focuses on noise and existence on the surface of being, Tarkovsky’s work is a humble, silent reminder of the spiritual nature of silence, nature, and seeing. He encourages us to look beyond the visible, and to listen to the whispers of the soul.