My commitment as an artist is to engage people with the meaning and depth of understanding art can bring to our lives. For this project I see the opportunity to invite people to engage with medieval and contemporary visual cultures in an original and creative way, so that we learn something new about our diverse understandings of intelligence (and its perceived absence) and it’s long standing relationship to wider historical, animal and material forces. I have started to create an animated atlas of medieval and modern depictions of smartness (and its visual antithesis) and to ask how our senses and ‘smartness’ are depicted in medieval imagery and what are the significant differences or similarities to our contemporary systems of visual representation. These animations playfully draw upon tensions, concurrences, anomalies, orthodoxies and novelties in the way we visually conceive of intelligence between the Middle Ages and now in the 2020s. Via workshops I propose to hold online and in person at Cambridge Digital Humanities, audiences and workshop participants are invited to learn about and respond to images of intelligence (and its absence), from medieval churls, scholars and fighting snails to contemporary images of human and artificial forms of intelligence.

The project draws upon collections within Cambridge’s museums, religious buildings, colleges and archives, and also the National Gallery, London, curating a selection of images that engage audiences and form a focus for me to select ideas and images which people find amusing, informative, resonant or somehow important.

“Manuscript decoration is part of the painture of language, one of the gates to memory, and the form it takes often has to do with what is useful not only to understand a text but to retain and recall it too.” Mary Carruthers, 281, The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, 1990, Cambridge University Press.

My drawing of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano processed by an AI image to video application, the algorithm has added guns and modern military weapons and uniforms, revealing the dominant patterns of representation such systems draw upon, Impett notes how poor AI systems are at representing pre photographic and pre Fordist culture.
‘imagine trying to adapt these algorithms for early modern European painting; it becomes clear that the categories of objects being detected (e.g. Polaroid Camera, iPod, Model T), and indeed the very notion of object detection, are bound up with a (post-) Fordist image world in which pictures are largely made up of industrially manufactured consumer goods, rather than, say, Albertian istorie (narrative painting)’ Impett, 12, 2024.

Impett, L. (2024). Digital Art History as Critical AI. The Art Bulletin, 106(2), 11–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2024.2296270

Gif version of the charge into battle:

From the Macclesfield Psalter, with ongoing notes, animated gif

Fighting Snail, stop motion animated via my studies at the Aardman Academy, April 2026-

AI image to video derived from Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, about 1438-40.
In 2018 Researchers at the MIT media lab trained ‘Norman’ an algorithm to perform image captioning with ‘a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit (its name is redacted due to its graphic content)’ Cebrian et al, 2018. The algorithm would interpret innocuous ink blots as acts of murder and horror film intensity.
There is little documentation of the project, which seemed designed to reinforce the construct of ‘data bias’, deliberately using extremely violent data as if it was a niche form of representation and not the ideological basis of extractive AI industries. The algorithm I have used here manifests a degree of Ballardian behavioural conditioning towards video game levels of aggression, which goes above and beyond the idea of ‘biased’ data sets and is reminiscent of wider game culture and AI CEO identity, such as Mark Zuckerberg, infamous for challenging Musk to a cage fight. The original painting does not animate violence in this way and is instead still, materially grounded, seeming like a moment of reflection within a very carefully constructed formal space. Uccello does not invoke a need for ‘more masculine energy’ as Zuckerberg does, but this short film seems to fulfil that intention, contrived and ontologically questionable as it may be.

MIT Media Lab, ‘NORMAN: World’s first psychopath AI,’ Pinar
Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, & Iyad Rahwan.

Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano, left panel (probably c. 1438–1440). Tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, 182 × 320 cm. National Gallery, London

Longer montage, I plan to use role play and real people to create a re-enactment of marginalia, via Tableaux Vivant, the AI animations seem deadiningly bereft of vitality and predictably lifeless for all their movement, limited compared to the drawings in medieval marginalia (see https://artmuseumteaching.com/2012/12/06/tableaux-vivant-history-and-practice/)