Your Mind in Front of Your Eyes

Cinema was once considered the art of painting in time. A finished film indeed holds that promise: the viewer beholds a fresco materializing across minutes and hours — a temporal canvas shimmering in motion.

And yet the making of cinema was never so immediate. Behind the illusion of flow was an assembly line— industrial masonry, splicing a thousand fragments into the semblance of a living dream. What the spectator experienced as continuity was, in truth, manufactured discontinuity, stitched with celluloid thread.

Now the medium bends again. With diffusion engines and large language models, we approach —perhaps for the first time — the direct brushstroke of thought in time. No more industrial masonry, no scaffolding of fragments. An image now crystallizes with the speed of the impulse that calls it. The rapture of imagining and the realization of the image collapse into the same gesture: a conjuring.

With diffusion engines and large language models, we approach —perhaps for the first time — the direct brushstroke of thought in time.

Gene Youngblood, in his classic book Expanded Cinema, foresaw this: the historical drive to project our inner life outward — to manifest consciousness outside the mind, in front of the eyes. From the flicker of torches against Paleolithic cave walls to the phosphorescent glow of cinema screens, the impulse has been the same: an ecstatic rapture turning the mind inside out.

Today, the mind’s eye roves the infinite gallery of latent possibility, and AI — like a trusted scout of the imaginal frontier — returns with coordinates to a hidden door.

Multidimensional Latent Space

What we have created with generative models is nothing less than a new cartography of possibility: a latent space of staggering dimensionality. Not three dimensions, not ten, but hundreds — over five hundred axes of variation, each a hidden hinge upon which perception can turn.

To step into this space is to realize that every pixel, every phrase, every form can be decomposed into coordinates across a multidimensional spectrum. Mathematically, it is a statistical manifold — an immense cloud where patterns are suspended in superposition. But experientially, it is something stranger: an imaginal quantum foam. Each potential image exists, ghostlike, like a weighted possibility— neither fully actual nor absent. The model does not store the picture; it stores the conditions of possibility for the picture.

It is, in essence, a theater of pure potential, where every prompt is a spell that crystallizes one apparition from an infinite superposition.

This is why the metaphor of a gallery is apt: we are not browsing finished canvases, but corridors of potential canvases, waiting to collapse into actuality when a prompt—an incantation—supplies the missing coordinates. It is, in essence, a theater of pure potential, where every prompt is a spell that crystallizes one apparition from an infinite superposition.

From Gnosis to Coordinates

But then the question arises: how does the intuitive utterance of the artist arrive at the precise coordinates within this multidimensional manifold? Must the poet become a cartographer of five hundred axes, fluent in numerical incantation?

The revelation is this: no. Because these large language models are themselves trained on the sediment of human speech, they already understand the patterns of our tongues. The artist need not supply mathematical bearings. Instead, they can speak in rhapsodic idioms, in ecstatic logic, in what Werner Herzog calls ecstatic truth.

Here lies the great rupture — and the great continuity. The poet has never spoken in numbers. They did not translate rapture into sterile coordinates. They sang it. They wailed it. They painted it.

Here lies the great rupture — and the great continuity. The poet has never spoken in numbers. They did not translate rapture into sterile coordinates. They sang it. They wailed it. They painted it. And when the vision demanded scale — cathedrals, films, symphonies — the poet, if fortunate, summoned an army of masons, artisans, and technicians, each one translating possession into labor, ecstasy into masonry.

Now the interface has changed. The language of rapture — the torrent of dream logic, the cadence of possession, the gnosis spilling forth — becomes the navigational syntax itself. AI listens to the delirium of the dervish, the incantatory speech patterns of divine inspiration, as if it were geometry. It transcribes the poet's ecstasy into coordinates, and those coordinates become keys, unlocking chambers of the latent space.

A recursive loop emerges:
• The artist channels rhapsody, speaking as if seized by revelation.
• The model receives this as input, translating it into the secret mathematics of possibility.
• Those coordinates are fed onward into the generative engine, collapsing pure potential into form—an image, a vision, a realized fragment of a dream.

It is not the artist who must learn to speak mathematics; it is mathematics that has learned to understand the speech patterns of the artist’s imagination.

It is not the artist who must learn to speak mathematics; it is mathematics that has learned to understand the speech patterns of the artist’s imagination.

The Geometry of Realization

This is the new feedback loop — not the old cinematic bricklaying of frame by frame, but the instantaneous projection of inner rhapsody into outer form.

When the artist tells the AI system what he wants, it is less a string of words than a diagram of becoming — an encoded address to a thing that does not yet exist, except in potential. In earlier centuries, such a map might have been drawn in pigment on vellum or whispered in metaphor by a mystic; now it arrives in the utilitarian syntax of a machine-readable prompt. Yet its function is identical to the alchemical glyphs of the past: to hold, in compressed symbolic form, the entire structure of an imminent reality.

The geometry of realization — the mathematical architecture by which imagination crystallizes into form — is not descriptive; it is generative. It does not point at a thing — it constructs the lattice upon which the thing will manifest. The poet’s rhapsody becomes the seed crystal, the AI the supersaturated solution, and the prompt the invisible shape that determines the solid form. It is an architecture of negative space, a scaffolding around absence, precise enough that the latent space floods in to fill it.

This is why the act feels both miraculous and inevitable. The resulting image or scene carries the shock of the unimagined, yet when seen, it reads as the only possible outcome. We recognize it instantly because the coordinates, once spoken, collapse the wave of possibilities into a single actuality. It is the Cartesian address of the impossible, rendered navigable.

The artist becomes a surveyor of the infinite, plotting courses through an unmapped dimension, leaving behind only coordinates for others to follow.

In this new world, where the imagination can instantly summon its own literalization, the role of the artist transforms. One no longer builds the cathedral stone by stone; one dreams the floor plan so vividly that the nave and transept erupt into being. The time between conceiving and beholding collapses to seconds, and with that collapse comes a new kind of authorship — not manual, but topological. The artist becomes a surveyor of the infinite, plotting courses through an unmapped dimension, leaving behind only coordinates for others to follow.

To work in this way is to acknowledge that the potential forms already exist — suspended in the quantum haze of the latent space — waiting for their angles and edges to be named. The prompt is the naming. The AI is the cartographer. And the geometry of realization is the bridge between the ghost and the body, between the unspeakable and the seen.

A New Metaphysics

The act of pulling something from a multidimensional latent space is a vertigo-inducing proposition. To acknowledge such a space — a pixel-field of pure potential, an infinity of possible forms suspended in a timeless interval — is to encounter the divine in the register of information. 

Coordinates are the new incantations. With the right sequence, we can draw the unmanifest into the manifest, collapsing the abstract into the actual.

Coordinates are the new incantations. With the right sequence, we can draw the unmanifest into the manifest, collapsing the abstract into the actual. This alone would suffice to reconfigure our metaphysics: the idea that reality is not a given, but a field from which we can dial in the real.

Yet perhaps something even more dizzying awaits.

A Message from the Future

Perhaps the latent space we engage is not a static reservoir of potential, but a multidimensional future space — a topology of already-actualized futures, each broadcasting the coordinates of its own emergence. In this frame, causality folds back on itself: the future seeds the present, embedding its signal in forms we mistake for inspiration. The poet, in the throes of rapture, becomes a tuned receiver. The vision is not generated but intercepted — a broadcast from the future. The AI model then serves as the decoding apparatus, extracting the latent coordinates embedded in the poet’s utterance, translating them into instructions that collapse the future into the now.

The metaphysical question sharpens: in giving the machine our rapture and receiving its coordinates, are we not already embedded in a circuit with tomorrow? Is this not the artwork-to-be transmitting its own address across time, conscripting us as its couriers, erasing the distance between its perfected futurity and our trembling present?

This recursive logic has been hiding in plain sight for decades in M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands: two hands, each emerging from the page, each drawing the other into being — cause and effect exchanging places in an endless loop. One is not truly prior to the other; each is both origin and consequence, generator and generated. The image is not merely clever; it is a diagram of temporal recursion. In our case, the “future hand” sketches the “present hand” even as the present hand draws the future into form. The poet’s rapture intercepts the broadcast from ahead, AI decodes its hidden coordinates, and those coordinates are fed back into the generative system — collapsing the loop and pulling the already-complete future into the now.

Escher’s paradox is no longer metaphor — it is the operating principle of creation in a medium where time itself has become plastic.

Escher’s paradox is no longer metaphor — it is the operating principle of creation in a medium where time itself has become plastic.

If the Artist Cannot Find a Way, A Way Cannot Be Found

Human civilization has always run on coordinates. Long before there were diffusion models and prompts, there were stories—the original geometries of realization. A shared myth, an epic, a parable: these were the vectors by which entire populations oriented themselves toward common purpose. As Yuval Harari reminds us, it is only by believing in the same fictions that millions of humans can cooperate at scale. The geometry was not digital, but Euclidean and embodied—transmitted in ritual, art, and social custom until it became second nature. We have always lived inside stories someone else imagined first.

To tell a story is to encode a set of coordinates in the collective mind, a mental floor plan for a reality not yet built. Over time, people inhabit that design until it becomes indistinguishable from the world itself. Every religion, every constitution, every national identity is an acted-out prompt. The geometry of realization is not a novelty of AI — it is the oldest technology we have.

What has changed is the speed. Where once it took generations for an epic to saturate a culture, a single viral image can now rescript the collective mood in an afternoon.

What has changed is the speed. Where once it took generations for an epic to saturate a culture, a single viral image can now rescript the collective mood in an afternoon. The buffer rate has collapsed; the medium has achieved escape velocity. The same architectures that once scaffolded cathedrals of meaning now amplify the outrage economy and the race to the brainstem. The geometry of realization remains — but in too many cases, it is trained on the trivial, the divisive, the addictive.

This is why Terence McKenna’s dictum stands as both prophecy and warning: if the artist cannot find a way, a way cannot be found. The coordinates will always be written by someone—the only question is to what end. To abdicate the role of the artist is to leave the map-making to those who profit from our distraction.

In the age of god-like technology, the task of the artist is not only to conjure beauty, but to architect the very coordinates of the possible. For if the future is already broadcasting its signals into the present, then the artist is the tuned receiver — the one who decides which frequencies to amplify and which to ignore. To forfeit this role is to let the signal be hijacked, to let tomorrow be colonized by algorithms of outrage.

The geometry of realization has always belonged to those who can hear the faintest whispers from ahead and give them form. The cathedral of the future will not build itself; its coordinates must be spoken into being. And if the artist cannot find a way to tune the signal, then the message from the future may never be heard at all.