Five of Wands

"Where Do I Use My Fire"

There is an entire tarot section at the bookstore now. I go in to pick up a book for my son and it towers before me (dark pun intended). Of course I can't resist seeing all the new decks. I jump over the oracle decks- a whole other can of symbolic worms to fish with in the deep waters of the collective unconcious. There's decks with every spiritual theme in existence, every culture, every blockbuster movie. Ok, not every one! Yeash. but so. very. many. And then I notice a new one- the Artists Decoded tarot. And on the front is this painterly figure. It looks like a beautiful art deck painted with oils or acrylics. It is full of darkness and light, painted loose and flowing, and I am really upset. Because I am still caught up in being special and this deck looks better than my oil paintings and it's called almost the same f'ing name and well...dang! I think of my friend Annetta Black, who has so recently passed away. She spent a year in a dingy apartment in Northern California, with mold growing on the wall, writing articles and creating a website where you could find cool, weird, and quirky places to visit in your travels, or in your hometown. She called it, like, World Obscura, or some such. One week before she went live with the website, a team of writers and entrepreneurs in New York presented their new site: Atlas Obscura. Exactly the same, but built with lots of money backing it on the East Coast. Long story short, she wrote to them and they hired her, annexing all her work, but she was never made partner, and barely made money. Anyways...bit of a tangent there. Point is, I think, Oh Shit Fudge! The same thing is happening to me. And she's dead and I can't talk to her about it. And I got all depressed , as one does...
At a red light read their little booklet that came with the deck, and realized the deck was named for a podcast: The Artist Decoded Podcast. I keyword searched tarot on their page and there it was: an episode where the artist and esoteric writer talk about their deck, in fact, defend their AI generated tarot deck! What?! AI!?

 Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of late. I had just finished reading Nexus, by Yuval Noah Harari, all about the need to slow-way-the-bleep-down and think about what he calls 'Alien Intelligence'. My ceramics teacher, Hiroshi, gave us a whole spiel on day one about how AI was going to take over the art world, but NOT ceramics (yay for ceramicists!). And then this deck pops up like a stink eyed wack-a-mole. Is it legitimate? Yoshino, the artist of Artist Decoded, takes strange, lovely photographs but says he is not a technical artist. He hints he does 'tweak' the images but doesn't elaborate. If an artist only uses AI prompts is it art? Is the artist's soul in there? Or is it the soul of an Alien Intelligence? After all, AI is a compilation, a muddling of all human artists' works. Perhaps it is only another tool, like photoshop, with the prompts and the 'tweaking' being the expression of the artist. Is the artist's soul transmitted into the art? Can AI be a conduit for something 'other', something holy, or real, to pass into the digital image and then into the viewers human heart and mind?
Think about the famous Go game in 2016 between AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol. AlphaGo knew every human move and every possible game. The AI won because it was able to make moves a human never would have thought of. What art will AI generate? Will it outshine our own? Will it be beautifully different or horribly different? Maybe AI will make a tarot deck for other AI. Will there be 'soul' in it, will it resonate?

After falling down this rabbit hole that I have yet to climb out of, I further complicated the answer to all those tangled questions by asking my daily deck what an AI deck (not AI itself) would bring to and be to humans. I got the Lovers and three of coins. So that's RATHER positive. We will be partners, collaborators, on this path. But I still felt the ghost in the machine was too opaque.
So a collaboration with AI- was I being unfair to judge it so harshly? Alien Intelligence is frightening and we are moving too fast. But right now, it's just another tool that some artists will use well and others will be bad at . Ultimately, if it awakens, then who knows?

I know you are asking "what does any of this dribble have to do with the five of wands??". When I pulled this card I actually asked my core deck to give me something easier (having just finished the nine of swords). So I got the five of wands, which maybe seems NOT easier, since it is a card that denotes conflict, of people all beating on each other. But a couple days before I had taken a picture of Morris Dancers at a Dickens themed winter fair, just in case I ever needed a photo reference of five guys beating on each other with sticks. Ha! For me the five of wands has become a reminder to listen to all the voices, to work together. I see it as young soldiers, learning to fight together, as dancers, trying to choreograph their moves. As people coming together to try to build something, and yes, messing it up, but trying. Or if it's only about me, then I am spread too thin, juggling cats (which is an image I REALLY WANT to paint). Learning about the 5 of wands by listening to my usual spade of tarot podcasts left me confused, so I tried some new ones, listened to the other voices, and found a gem in The Cafecita Tarot Podcast. Nicole Pontillo tells us " There is only so much you can do with your fire. How can you be strategic with your fire and how can you be aware of the right group/collaboration, to work with...where is your fire best of service to?". And so the coals appeared under the feet of the Morris dancers. 
Still contemplating the fire, a tarot reader friend had read my cards a week ago and asking "where I am with my art " pulled the devil. Yikes. Fire licked up all around the beast, almost encompassing it, and the figures were small and insignificant in this deck's portrayal. Synchronicities with the Devil and fire and the 5 of wands arose again and again, carved like petroglyphs into the walls of the rabbit hole I was falling down. Jodorowsky, in the Way of Tarot, writes about the five of wands "The tempter, the Devil, offers a descent into the darkness and subconscious to reach the impersonal magma that is the source of all creativity" , (though he also points out that path leads to depravity). pg.292. There's the devil in the details. Haha. Is AI the tempter, offering up easy art, instant gratification art, 78 cards 'painted' in three months? My partner said it's like the song, "The Devil went Down To Georgia". I'm certain you've heard it. The devil and Johnny have a fiddle battle, but Johnny wins, his soul intact and a pretty gold fiddle as his prize. My partner asks 'why didn't the devil win? He was an amazing supernaturally good fiddle player, but he had no soul, no passion'. Johnny might not have even been a better fiddleist than the Devil, but man, he had passion galore. AI is passionless, soulless, just a tool. It's up to the human wizard behind the screen to create the magic. 
Where did we get our passion, our fire? Myths around the world tell us how fire was stolen and brought to man. In SouthAfrica, Ikaggen the mantis steals fire from an ostrich. The Mazatec of Mexico tell of a fire stealing possum. The  Algonquins, native Americans, say it was a rabbit. The Australians talk of a crow who stole the fire. And we all know about Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to us. Did you know his name literally means 'forethought'? We must be tricksters to steal the fire, but we also must consider the repercussions. Let's think ahead about ai, the little devil, before he gets too big. Lets decide who gets our fire and what it will be used for.

My Morris dancers grip their batons with too many ai fingers, and fumble about in their dance, trying to synchronize. So I decided to paint one figure of the five as the AI with its obscured face. We dance together with this inevitable future. And in the final version of this little book it will be some AI program that decides the keywords that accompany each card. My devil-card-pulling tarot reader and friend, Suzanne Edminster, says the other four are the Tetra-Morph,  the ancient four; the lion, the eagle, the man, and the bull, the fixed signs of the zodiac, the four evangelists, and the four corners of the earth. They are as solid as four, but the fifth person breaks them apart, making them unstable so that they might become something new , something better. Here's hoping! The woman dances with them, raising her voice to be heard. Perhaps she is the world, needed to complete this journey. And I am listening to all their voices now, if I can. And I am keeping an eye on my own fire, using some forethought to decide where it is best of service.

43 x 25.5” oil on wood in upcycled frame