hot tub mysticism for the AI era

Most “AI art” is a slot machine with a mood disorder. You pull the lever, get a vibe, call it a day.
Kate Armstrong’s Spa at the End of Time is the opposite: an artist with an actual obsession using a model like an instrument, then making the instrument’s weirdness the subject.

What you’re walking into

This debuted as a 360° immersive dome work at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver (Feb 19, 4:00–4:45). Not a gallery wall. Not a laptop flex. A planetarium dome… the format that punishes weak composition and exposes empty spectacle like a crime scene.

The project is built from a custom AI Flux LoRA trained on Kate’s drawings and paintings of hot tubs, made across a multi?year investigation into the relationship between hot tubs, techno?spiritualism, the body, the night sky, and emergent media. So the AI isn’t the concept. It’s the amplifier. The obsession came first.

The framing is explicit: the piece is accompanied by audio voiced like a medium receiving transmissions from the astral plane, drawing a line between late?19th?century spiritualists (Hilma af Klint territory) and the contemporary urge to “work with” non?human intelligence.

Which is a polite way of saying: the work treats AI less like software and more like a séance tool. Not metaphorically. Functionally.

The images: comfort tech turns into cosmic interface

In the dome, the hot tub stops being an amenity and starts behaving like a metaphysical device. The visuals feel less like “scenes” and more like systems: glossy shells, cut?out basins, interlocking cavities, luminous cores embedded like organs or suns. Space is a black void, but the shapes aren’t cold. They’re wet. Warm-coded. Too intimate.

From your projection snaps, the palette hits like synthetic minerals: deep blacks, cobalt water-blues, milky whites, bruised purples, and aggressive pinks and reds — like leisure infrastructure got dragged through a cosmic particle accelerator and came out with a new religion.

There’s a recurring “eye” motif that lands hard: glowing circular cores with warm halos nested in fleshy rings. It reads as eclipse, aperture, lens, wound, portal — pick your poison. The work keeps asking whether you’re looking at the universe… or the universe is looking through you.

And then there are moments where a tube/rod slices through the form like plumbing, probe, or ritual wand — the exact kind of detail that flips the whole vibe from “pretty abstraction” to “this is bodily, engineered, and maybe not entirely safe.”

Psychedelic, yes. Beautiful, yes. Also a little grotesque in the way a deep-sea creature is grotesque: not trying to shock you, just built for a physics you don’t fully understand.

The voice: a medium, not a narrator

The audio doesn’t explain. It transmits.

It speaks in the cadence of revelation, but the content is systems-thinking dressed as mysticism: basins and shells as “architecture,” filtration as theology, light as nourishment, immersion as transformation. At one point it drops the line that basically keys the entire work:

The cosmic machinery isn’t a wormhole or a god’s eye. It’s a hot tub.

That’s not a gag. That’s a cosmology. The voice keeps building: a “revolving array” of interlocking chambers, radiant pools, endless filtration, cascades of light. The astral plane described like a spa manual written by someone who also reads quantum papers.

What made it stick is the way it toggles languages without apologizing: “astral plane” beside “field,” “quantum entanglement,” “probability.” Entropy becomes not just disorder, but distribution of awareness. Jets become regulators of phase transitions. Interference patterns become lace at the rim of a basin. Immersion becomes entering and encoding a data field.

It’s not trying to sound smart. It sounds like a translation attempt from something too big for our file formats.

And it slips in a brutal kind of tenderness: the idea that we become the boundaries of our tubs as the tubs take on the shape of us. That line is funny until it isn’t. Because it’s also a statement about tools, and the way they reshape the user.

The AI part: a haunted paintbrush

The important detail here is the pipeline: Flux + LoRA + her own paintings/drawings.

LoRA (low?rank adaptation) is basically a lightweight “personality patch” you bolt onto a larger generative model. You’re not rebuilding the whole brain — you’re steering it with a tuned set of weights. That matters because it mirrors the concept of the work: not AI replacing the artist, but AI being trained to speak inside an artist’s existing visual language.

So the model isn’t the author. It’s the haunted brush.

And because it’s trained on her hot tub studies — not scraped aesthetics — it doesn’t feel like the usual generative mush. It feels like an obsession being pushed through a non-human collaborator that hallucinates adjacent realities at speed, then lets the artist curate which hallucinations deserve to exist.

That’s the ethical and aesthetic pivot. It’s not a blanket absolution — the base model still comes from the big messy world — but it shifts the power dynamic. This is an artist using the machine to extend her own investigation instead of renting someone else’s visual DNA.

The dome does something to your body

A planetarium is a sensory weapon. You don’t just “watch” it. The dome wraps your peripheral vision, yanks your sense of orientation around, and makes your body part of the render.

That’s why this format was such a clean choice. The work is literally about immersion — spas, bodies, post?embodied futures — and the dome forces immersion as a physical condition. You’re not in front of the piece. You’re inside its operating environment.

I watched it three times. The first pass is pure capture: your eyes trying to keep up, your brain filing everything under “holy hell, shapes.”
The second pass you start seeing the grammar: repeating basins, cores, shells, filtration motifs, the way void and warmth trade places.
The third pass is where it gets rude: you notice your own cognition doing what these models do — stitching coherence out of a probabilistic field. You’re pattern-matching meaning in an unstable system, because humans can’t not.

That’s the real “AI” content. Not the tool. The mental behavior it exposes.

The room: artists, weirdos, and people who actually make things

This wasn’t a tech demo audience. It felt like her people: art folks, culture hackers, friends, the kind of room where people are comfortable sitting in ambiguity without demanding a conclusion in 140 characters.

That matters because the piece is, quietly, about community. The voiceover talks about distributed systems and “disembodied potential” — but the experience is emphatically shared, embodied, collective. A room full of humans staring into a non-human image engine and feeling things together.

That’s a different vibe than scrolling AI output alone at 1:30am and calling it “the future.”

Why it landed: it’s a spa, it’s a warning, it’s a love letter

This work isn’t “anti-AI” or “pro-AI.” It’s anti?bullshit.

It points at something most discourse avoids: AI doesn’t just generate images. It generates belief. It produces coherence on demand. It’s an oracle factory if you treat it that way.

Kate leans into that, hard — not to worship it, but to show how easy it is to start worshipping comfort, pattern, and prediction.

Her hot tub becomes an interface. A divine waiting room. A post?embodied fantasy where you can finally dissolve into the warm system and stop carrying a body around like a fragile liability.

And she doesn’t sell that fantasy as salvation. She makes it beautiful and a little nasty, like it should be. Because the future is not sterile chrome. It’s wet. It’s intimate. It’s engineered. It’s full of leaks.

The piece doesn’t answer whether that’s good or bad. It just builds a world where you can’t ignore the question.

Receipts

Spa at the End of Time: A 360° Immersive Dome Experience
Creator/Host: Kate Armstrong
Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver (elevator to 4th floor)
When: Feb 19, 4:00–4:45 PM
What it is: 360° immersive audiovisual work made by training a custom AI Flux LoRA on the artist’s hot tub paintings/drawings; audio framed as astral-plane transmissions; parallel drawn between spiritualist mediums (Hilma af Klint era) and contemporary “non-human intelligence” collaboration.
After: screening followed by an event at Monica Reyes’ space in the Museum of Vancouver, opening an exhibition of prints related to the project. Ticket sales support the Space Centre.

Challenger idea

Stop asking whether AI art is “real.” That’s courtroom drama for people who don’t like uncertainty.

Ask a better question: what kind of ritual are you building when you build with a non-human mind?
Because tools don’t just extend capability. They extend belief. And belief is infrastructure — the kind you end up living inside.

Kate’s piece doesn’t preach. It just hands you a towel, opens the hatch, and lets you feel the temperature of the era.