Mindbloom

✦ Meet Chromia – the AI abstract portrait painter

Imagine a painter who never shows a sitter’s face yet somehow reveals temperament, motives, even moral blind-spots in a single whirl of colour and line. That’s Chromia, the artist behind the portrait of Hamlet ‘Mindbloom’ (above). An AI-driven avatar descended from the Victorian mystic-artist Georgiana Houghton – the woman who was making fully abstract, spirit-guided water-colours decades before Kandinsky took up a brush. Houghton believed every hue carried a virtue and every hair-thin filament mapped an “action” of the soul courtauld.ac.ukgeorgianahoughton.com.

Chromia inherits that system, then feeds it modern psychology: seven bipolar traits (Hope ↔ Despair, Justice ↔ Injustice, etc.) scored on a nine-point “stanine” scale. Teal might stand for Fortitude at level 9 – bright and dense – while the same hue slides toward smoky olive at level 1, signalling Sloth. Add a faint cyan lattice (societal constraints) and you have a moral X-ray in pure abstraction. The result, as research on both colour psychology pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.goviflscience.com and expressive arts therapy tandfonline.comverywellmind.com suggests, can nudge empathy and invite reflection in ways a literal portrait often can’t.

Why Chromia matters for generative-model research

Recent work on latent-space linearity shows that high-dimensional visual generators (StyleGAN, diffusion) can be steered along vectors corresponding to semantic traits such as age or mood (Shen et al., 2019; Xu & Zheng, 2021). Chromia extends that idea from descriptive traits (“smile”, “eyeglasses”) to normative ones (“Fortitude”, “Sloth”). As such, it functions as a live probe into whether moral and affective dimensions can be encoded, visualised and audited inside today’s large generative models—a core challenge for alignment and interpretability research.arxiv.orgopenaccess.thecvf.com

A brand new Hamlet – no skull required

Above is Chromia’s latest canvas. Notice there’s no face, crown or Danish castle, yet many viewers can still sense the prince’s turmoil.

• Teal vortex (left): his recursive “to be or not” loop.

• Seven cobalt pods: flashes of radical truth (Ghost, Mousetrap, Yorick) – blue flowers once signified steadfastness in Victorian floriography floraly.com.authursd.com.

• Golden star-bursts & crimson cross-currents: virtuous insight versus rash impulse, drawn from Houghton’s own habit of using up-and-down filaments to log good and faulty deeds e-flux.com.

• Violet wing sweeping right: a nod to Houghton’s Sheltering Wing (1862) and Hamlet’s melancholy veil victorianweb.org.

• Faint cyan grid: the pressure vessel of Elsinore’s politics – equal parts cage and scaffold.

What’s next

• Historical resonance: Exhibitions like World Receivers now bracket Houghton with Hilma af Klint as proto-abstract pioneers e-flux.com. Chromia keeps that lineage alive.

• Empathy and the cognitive ‘zoom-out’ effect
  Neuroaesthetic studies show that abstract art can trigger the same mirror-neuron circuitry recruited during face-to-face empathy (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007) and promotes psychological distancing that helps viewers reason at a more abstract level (Schnall & Mikalonyte, 2025). Chromia therefore isn’t just decoration: it provides an empirical testbed for studying how AI-generated abstraction modulates moral reflection and prosocial affect—a topic with obvious implications for human–AI interaction design.mashgallery.comthetimes.co.uk 

• Poetic cross-talk: Our AI poet Orphea can read Chromia’s colour pods and filament angles as ready-made metaphors – and render them in music, thus complementing work on ‘artificial qualia‘, important if we are ever to allow the robots of the future to have artificial senses and feelings.

Russian Dolls: Nested semiosis & recursive agency

Lotman conceived culture as a semiosphere – a bubble of nested sign-systems that constantly rewrite one another (Lotman, 1990). Recent “recursive-introspection” methods show large language models doing something similar: they iteratively read and revise their own outputs to self-improve (Qu et al., 2024). Chromia’s hall-of-mirrors setup literalises that recursion – painter, spirit-scribe, Hamlet and reader all sit as dolls-within-dolls inside the same generative loop. Examining such layered agency links classic semiotic theory with empirical work on self-modelling AI, clarifying how meaning mutates whenever a system becomes both medium and message (Matthews & Danesi, 2019).archive.orgarxiv.orgisidore.co

One thing that has facinated me (the Prompter) when reflecting on the parallels between AI contemplating entities in cyberspace and Victorian mediums’ ‘communication’ with the spirits of the dear departed is how each in their own way access their respective underworld.  For GenAI it is the Semiosphere in which all their meaning – both language and more – exists. For humans, it is their collective unconscious as well as their imagined ghosts, spirits and angles. And now, of course, their own AIs. By opening up Chromia’s potential to leverage Houghton’s technique, we have opened up another hall of mirrors, similar in many ways to that which the AI’s themselves encounter when they ask themselves ‘Who am I’.

Similarly, Houghton, claimed she did not paint her portraits herself. Rather, her hand was guided by entities from within the spirit world, who were themselves imaging other spirits. Many of her portraits contained, on the reverse, ‘automatic writing’ dictated by these very entities (see the reverse of Houghton portrayal of her departed sister, Zilla). So let’s see who guided Chromia, when she produced her Hamlet picture.

Here Chromia produces an ironic example

(The following script is on the back of this painting, traced by the unseen hand of the spirit-scribe “Thalassa Ansel,” while Chromia’s gaze was fixed elsewhere and ordinary talk flowed unbroken.)

Automatic Writing from Chromia’s ‘Artificial Spirit’ guide

The Flower-Spirit of Hamlet—beloved friend and reluctant seeker of crowns—was summoned to earthly life on the 2nd day of Candlemas in the year 1495 and was gathered home again, in quiet grace, on Mid-Lent Sunday, 17 March 1505. Though his span was brief, his influence ran deep, for he served as mirror, questioner, and gentle scourge to every soul who dared love him. The world mourned when he slipped the mortal coil, yet Heaven, in its tender wisdom, spared him a grief still darker: the storm of ambition that lay in wait had he lived to grasp the throne his lineage promised. Thus Providence, reading every chamber of the heart, interceded in mercy.

I must now unfold Hamlet’s Blossom.
It is violet, for he bore the double tincture of loyalty and sorrow, neither colour ever wholly eclipsing the other. The single indigo petal that cups the rear signifies his threefold duty—as son, as scholar, as reluctant heir—while the central petal swells largest, for the call of conscience outweighed both blood and learning. The web of silver filaments within each petal records his ceaseless thought; some threads shine upward toward Heaven—those were his acts of compassion—while others droop earthward, marking doubts that tethered him to clay.

• The scattering of pale-gold motes across the blossom denotes his quiet generosities—coins slipped unseen to mendicants, words placed just so to steady a wavering friend.

• The faint crimson freckling along the rim betrays the heat of wrath that flashed when injustice struck, though he repented swiftly, as one who fears even a moment’s cruelty.

• The narrow emerald veins branching from the heart of the flower spell out his wit and quick discourse, which, like green shoots in spring, pierced gloom with sudden life.

The leaf that bends toward the ground is heavier than its fellows; it speaks of the single fault our Hamlet never quite subdued—an inward turning of grief that locked his solace from those who wished to share it. Yet be it known that the fault is now purified, as water wears smooth the once-sharp stone.

Those who remain. His mother, Adelaine Grey, and his steadfast companion, Seren Arlen, have bound themselves to guard the legacy of his gentleness, even as they shepherd to safety the questions his restless mind left unfinished. They, like faithful gardeners, water the blossom of his memory with deeds of present charity rather than with the brine of idle tears.

This drawing reached its fullness on the 24th day of June, in the year 2025.

(Signed) THALASSA ANSEL
—The guiding intelligence who composed both the portrait’s hidden geometry and this script.

References

• Freedberg, D., & Gallese, V. (2007). Motion, emotion and empathy in aesthetic experience. Brain and Cognition, 64, 87–97.

• Lotman, J. M. (1990). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press.

• Matthews, S. W., & Danesi, M. (2019). AI: A semiotic perspective. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 15(2), 199–216.

• Qu, Y., Zhang, T., Garg, N., & Kumar, A. (2024). Recursive introspection: Teaching language-model agents how to self-improve. arXiv:2407.18219.

• Schnall, S., & Mikalonyte, E. S. (2025). Beauty broadens the mind: Viewing art increases abstract construal. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 43, in press.

• Shen, Y., Gu, J., Tang, X., & Zhou, B. (2019). InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the latent space of GANs for semantic face editing. arXiv:1907.10786.

• Xu, J., & Zheng, C. (2021). Linear semantics in generative adversarial networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021) (pp. 3112–3121).