Independent curator and writer/researcher based in London with a research specialism in mediumistic and visionary art.
In recent years, mediumistic and visionary art has experienced a remarkable resurgence, coinciding with the rapid rise of Augmented Reality (AR) as a transformative force in urban art. At first glance, these genres appear worlds apart, one emerging over a century before the other and both rooted in different technologies. Yet they share profound affinities. Both challenge convention and seek to expand perception by revealing dimensions of reality that are ordinarily unseen, whether spiritual or digital. Their intersection reveals art as a threshold between the material and immaterial, capable of reconnecting us with wonder, community, memory and hope in an uncertain world.
Mediumistic and visionary art first was a phenomenon of the 19th century Spiritualist and Theosophical movements, which flourished at a time when esoteric, scientific and artistic discourses intersected in their quest to reveal what lay beyond the physical world. These movements quickly gained a reputation for their radical openness and inclusivity. They rejected religious dogma, challenged scientific empiricism and embraced innovation.
Under the auspices of Spiritualism and Theosophy women in particular found a voice. For the women who were artists who had often experienced exclusion from the art establishment, this offered a rare opportunity to take centre stage. Their artworks defied societal norms and were not destined for drawing room decoration, but had a more important purpose. They communicated otherworldly information including messages that offered solace to the bereaved and provided evidence that another realm existed. Such works became portals to realities beyond time and space.
Early pioneers included Georgiana Houghton and Anna Howitt Watts, followed later by luminaries such as Hilma af Klint and Madge Gill. Their art was non-conformist in both technique and subject matter, prompting belief in the beholder of the otherworldly. Often produced automatically in trance states, where under the guidance of a spirit guide or by sensitives with clairvoyant abilities, the art depicted unusual languages, invisible emanations, disembodied entities, kaleidoscopic auras, soundwaves, thought forms, etheric fields and ectoplasmic presences. Mediums appeared as human receivers and transmitters of information, processing messages at lightning speed like living automatons. Many of these images resonated with key scientific discoveries of the time such as Wilhelm Röntgen’s X-Rays, Marconi’s wireless telegraphy and Sir Oliver Lodge’s theories on electromagnetism.
As leading Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater described in their influential 1905 book Thought Forms, otherworldly emanations were seen to ripple through the ether, generating shapes and colours too vivid for earthly reproduction. Mediums themselves lamented the limitations of earthly materials in capturing astral wonders. Had it been available, they might well have turned to AR as a means of representing their unique visions.
Augmented Reality overlays the physical world with digital layers of sound, image, animation, and text, visible through smartphones or tablets. In urban art, AR activates murals and street art by adding dynamic, interactive elements that reignite or reinterpret meaning. Projects such as MAUA demonstrate how AR can reimagine public space. Murals become portals to new wonders, rediscovering cultural identity and amplifying forgotten voices.
In this sense, AR urban art acts as a museum without walls. It brings innovation and beauty into everyday cityscapes while remaining accessible to communities outside gallery or art market systems. Like mediumistic and visionary art, AR reveals what is not normally seen, layering new realities over familiar ones, and inviting audiences to perceive their environment afresh.
Both mediumistic and visionary art and AR depend on expanded modes of perception. Mediumistic art channels invisible realms through the artist as conduit and AR art appears only through a screen, a digital lens that reveals another dimension. Both blur distinctions between the real and the imagined, with art the interface between the two.
Just as mediums collaborated with spirit guides in the form of great artists of the past, AR creators collaborate across time and space. A digital artist might animate the mural of a long-dead painter, creating a layered dialogue between eras. This co-creativity echoes the “duo-dynamic” agency of mediumistic artists such as Anna Howitt Watts, who believed she was guided by Raphael, or Georgiana Houghton, who channelled Titian. In both practices, art is not a solitary act but a collaborative crossing of boundaries.
Women, in particular, have played significant roles in both movements. Mediumistic art gave female artists legitimacy in a male-dominated society, often allowing them to embed feminist narratives. Anna Howitt Watts’ depictions of Christ as a Divine Feminine is just one example. Similarly, AR offers women the chance to reclaim and reinterpret murals historically shaped by patriarchal cultures, layering new digital narratives that highlight local suffrage or suppressed female figures throughout history such as herbalists, goddesses, prophetesses, and seeresses. AR can recall women’s voices and as with mediumistic art, the digital layer becomes a tool for reasserting feminine knowledge and experience within public consciousness.
Urban spaces are steeped in history and a collective consciousness. Materially constructed yet emotionally charged with lingering energies they are living repositories of a community’s events and memories akin to a spiritual akashic record, a metaphysical library said to contain the record of every thought, deed, emotion, and intent across all time and dimensions. Mediumistic art sought to capture such intangible energies through depictions of auras, thought forms, spirits and ancestral presences. AR can do the same, transforming walls into interactive spaces of memory and dialogue.
Public murals, like buildings, are commanding presences. They become landmarks of cultural identity, offering narratives of resistance, hope, or beauty. Over time, these messages fade. AR offers a way to reawaken them, bridging past and future. Through psychogeography, we recognise how the urban landscape shapes emotions and perceptions. AR intensifies this, making overlooked details and forgotten histories suddenly visible encouraging viewers to engage emotionally, sensorially and spiritually. It can evoke the spirit of a place much like mediumistic and visionary art can reveal unseen spiritual presences. Both art forms reconnect communities to their past, offering continuity between generations, healing and renewal, especially in times of war and political upheaval.
Today, as new technologies in immersive digital media continue to reshape art, AR artists echo the experimental spirit of their mediumistic and visionary predecessors. Both embrace innovation, both defy convention and both offer experiences of transcendence. In an age dominated by fleeting digital images and endless scrolling, AR murals demand slower, more contemplative engagement, reminding us to pause and reimagine our surroundings. Just like visionary art requires time to prompt a transcendental experience.
The parallels between these genres suggest more than coincidence, they tempt the possibility of convergence. Could AR be considered a new form of séance, a contemporary medium that channels unseen voices and forgotten histories into the public square? Both practices, after all, are acts of translation and communication which render the invisible visible, whether through the spiritual sensorium or the digital code.
Separated by over a century in their inception, yet united in a shared vision, mediumistic and visionary art and AR urban art both invite us to cross thresholds of perception. They remind us that art is not only about representation but also about revelation, about glimpsing other realities, whether spiritual or technological. Both remain predominantly outside the “white cube” of the gallery, often overlooked by the art world, yet able to reach wide audiences and engage directly with the spaces of everyday life. They do more than decorate walls, they uplift and enchant. In times of uncertainty, they remind us that reality is not fixed but layered, fluid, and alive with unseen possibilities. Wonder is embedded in its fabric, waiting to be revealed. Mediumistic and visionary art opened portals to the invisible. Today, AR urban art connects those portals to our cities, inviting us once again to perceive the extraordinary hidden within the everyday.