Seattle’s Meghan Trainor Puts the “A” in STEAM with STEM-Infused Art

During a recent conversation about her upcoming show Wormhole Animism at Capitol Hill’s Steve Gilbert Studio, Meghan Trainor takes us on a brief journey from her nascent influences in spiritual tradition to her current work that takes inspiration from the poetic nature of physics in the universe.

Trainor’s work has always had spiritual connections. With a practice firmly rooted in her own ancestral Irish Catholic imagery and iconography in her early art-making days, she found new inspiration via Mexican folk art when she was exposed to the work of Frida Kahlo and later from a nearby shop when she worked at Pike Place Market in the 1990s. Importantly, a 1980s show at Seattle Art Museum about African spiritual objects left a significant impression.

“The material culture of spiritual systems was a huge imprint. If I go back and look at my sculptures from the time, they were covered in medieval charms and crows. And then, I just swerved hard…and started working in New Media. I was really influenced by a lot of ‘70s performance art: Rebecca Horn, Donna Haraway, Marina Abramovic. So I had this underpinning of spiritual iconography, then I tossed that out the window…to make material, physical things that are digital, interactive, robotic. And I wanted to be a cyborg [laughs].” —Meghan Trainor

Trainor’s cyborg aspirations continued, artistically at least, in a 2005 project where she injected an RFID chip into her shoulder to become “part of” an RFID-triggered audio database that she created. Like many others, working as a woman at the intersections of art and technology (Trainor also designs and builds websites and does graphic design and branding), Trainor experienced the rampant sexism common in those fields, which, in part, influenced her WitchTech project:

“The thing about the art world, tech world, the world in general, is that it's very male dominated, it’s overt and covert sexism. And you kind of go along with it, but there’s a point where, you're like, this is bullshit. There was that guy who wrote this manifesto about how women can’t program, and that would be so laughable if that wasn’t a voice that won out. Except that, women, we’re the programmers! The name “computer”, as an occupation, primarily referred to women. It’s comical, and yet, it lands.

‘Oh, why aren’t women in tech’, well they were, but when the money showed up, that’s when women got pushed out. So there was a lot of hand wringing about ‘what can we do?’. And I have nothing bad to say about bootcamps to try to get people into coding [Trainor offers her own Python course], but they didn’t actually fix the problem. And it’s like, how is that working? Well, actually it got worse. And what happened is that a lot of women got into tech, and then left because it was so toxic.

So my artist brain was like, look, when men write manifestos about how women can’t program, we can’t respond with, ‘yes we can’. You need something mythic to counteract that. Why don’t I just rewrite the history of tech to repair it?

Meme from WitchTech / Meghan Elizabeth Trainor

First, I started making memes—that’s the Meghan Trainor WitchTech project. Then Sharon Arnold at Bridge Productions asked me to write something, which became The Familiar Algorythm, in the Sigil box set with Jazz Brown and Guy Merrill (2016, Bridge Productions, Seattle). The Familiar Algorythm positions witches in opposition to alchemists, and the alchemists win out, but they’re both proto scientists.

I continue to point at this, where, if you look at alchemists like Kepler, who was one of the witchiest people on the planet. Kepler wrote an entire book called The Dream, and he cast himself and his mother [persecuted for witchcraft in real life] as Icelandic for some reason. So this little boy and his witch mother traveled to the moon with the aid of a daemon. And it's heralded as like the first science fiction novel, but it's all about the power of witches and spirit in astrophysics.

And you have Newton, who was an alchemist. He was trying to find the mythic Philosopher’s Stone. But they are heralded as these proto scientists in the Age of Enlightenment. Then you have the ‘witches’ who were practicing medicine.”

Trainor’s retelling is a bit different: “The witches are creating robots in the early medieval period, this is what leads to persecution by the Church. Like, these “demonic” things they're doing, they're actually creating automaton familiars, which is not too far up from what is possible.

And then I positioned the problem so that they had this sort of intuitive relationship to the universe and the ability to travel to the moon, but they ran afoul of logic. It worked, but it interrupted their logical capabilities, and so they had to move away from a more connected relationship to the world around them, into a space of empiricism, logic and rationality. And in doing that, they have to start using technology because they can’t access other forms of intuitive knowledge. They can't do certain spells and rituals that are now ‘above’ them because they've embraced logic. So they're like, Okay, we're going to go hard on logic and tech, and so that's how you wind up with, centuries later, these robotic systems to replace the animal familiars.

Meghan Elizabeth Trainor with in-progress Abismo Chrysalis at Centrum Curator's Residency June, 2024.

Courtesy of Meghan Trainor

Then I felt like I should build material evidence of that role. What would it look and feel like? What would it look like in that historical moment, and what would it look like as a culture today?

And at the time (c. 2016), there was a surge of people identifying as witches, which seemed to map pretty directly to the Administration that came to power. And it wasn't like everyone suddenly became a witch. I think people just felt it more publicly or it's more political, or they're more free to say that. I think anyone, no matter what age when they decide they’re a witch, it’s just giving a name to something that has been prevalent in them for a long time.

Sometimes I think the word ‘witch’ is a terrible word, it's so distracting, because I think for a lot of people, it just means being more connected with nature. More holistic, paying more attention to natural systems and rhythms around you, which is a pretty universal thing, until you get into more subtle, more hierarchical, more industrial cultures, and then that all falls away.

As I started to do more research, everything I thought of with these really fantastical made-up ideas were like, this is mostly what happened though, this is sort of true. And the erasure of people, the cutting of lines—in the Western canon, we keep going back to Ancient Greece. But what happened before that? The Ifa Divination system from the Yoruba people. It’s the earliest use of binary in recorded history. It wasn’t Liebniz. Who got us to the moon in real life? It was women like Margaret Hamilton, whose ignition sequence included the Black liberation phrase, ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ It always seems to be an erasure of women and people who are not European. So I try to mend that.”

Cosmologicos, Meghan Elizabeth Trainor, 2024. Gouache on found copper objects. / Meghan Trainor

Materiality is not the first thing that springs to mind when we think of New Media art. The term conjures images of screens, soundscapes, and digital works. Trainor takes this genre into a slightly different direction, utilizing natural elements such as moss, seaweed, salt water, and wood alongside copper, motors, and programming to achieve works that compose something that Trainor calls "WitchTech".

Trainor’s projects seemingly vary quite widely, but all examine connections around spirituality, tech, a passion for science and mysteries of the universe, and shining a light on hidden histories.

Trainor began offering online WitchTech classes that provide a brief history of women and witches in technology, as well as instructions on creating a tarot deck using Python. As part of reconstructing narratives around women in STEM, she started crafting objects to support this new mythology, building bog batteries to generate electricity and making "hedgewitch portals" from materials like moss, lichen, and string models of Einstein-Rosen bridges.

Trainor's exploration of advanced concepts and obscured histories, coupled with her lifelong fascination with black holes, led, in turn, to her current show Wormhole Animism, which feels like a culmination of Trainor's life's work thus far.

Logical Connectives, 2023. Ink on paper. / Steven Miller

The show features a mix of reworked creations like Logical Connectives. Trainor builds models of complex theories of sacred elements, such as electricity, and here, expands her reach into space with her new work, such as The Unfinished Aleph, which utilizes the words from Borges’ The Aleph, inscribed on the outer folds of a large, multidimensional circular object, as if being pulled toward the center. This center, made of black velvet, represents a black hole, or infinity, which appears to devour all that came before.

Trainor: “I love finding more and more stuff out about how the universe works at these deep, cognitive levels. I'm fangirling deep space. I build these artworks, in part, to build these little scaffolding models to try to get my brain there. I was looking more at how black holes operate, and this thing about haunting radiation and just trying to figure it out, I think that I think the germ for all of this was for me was the EPR theory. What that theory says is that there are these massive wormholes that, theoretically after the kind of portal between space and time, maybe even dimensions, right?

Trainor’s comic featuring ideas about quantum foam / Meghan Trainor

But then there are these infinitely small wormholes, and they can only pass information about two paired quantum particles, right? And so the spooky action is a distance—that is literally the term—spooky action at a distance is the fact that you can take two quantum particles to the pair and move them a huge distance apart, and you still understand what the other one is doing. I think it's that they rotate opposite each other.”

Alignment, 2024. Seaweed, reed, red thread, painted birch panels, cloth covered wire, custom electronics.

Courtesy of Meghan Trainor

One of the most intriguing works, Alignment, illustrates this theory. Utilizing seaweed, reed, red thread, painted birch panels, cloth covered wire, custom electronics, Trainor has programmed two models of black holes which rotate separately at random, only occasionally aligning in “spooky action”.

She continued: “I'm not sure what the actual reason is, but they're basically connected. And it's like how is this happening? What seems to be going on, is that there's these infinitely small wormholes and they connect all the quantum particles. This is called quantum foam. And it’s this giant thing that like probably doesn't exist. We think this is what's happening, but half of this is just completely theoretical. We have no proof, nothing.

Do white holes exist? We don't know. And I live in a world where I'm like, yes, they do.

The idea that this thing I’ve been chasing for all my life is inside of me by the billions that I, you, everything around us, the air, the copper, water, that everything is filled with like an infinite amount of wormholes. I get goosebumps thinking about this, right? It's so fucking beautiful.

We have been taught to view science and technology as servants. The alchemist, and the proto scientist, and then the scientist, and then The Enlightenment, and then Capitalism—they see all this acquired information is something to be subjugated in order to get rich and win wars.

What if, instead, we were using these pieces of knowledge or unique skills to just marvel at the fucking universe. What if we were using them in ritual? In connection?

Wormhole Animism is asking, ‘What is your orientation to these things?’ Animism on Earth is important because it’s literally linked to our survival. Even if you can’t go there, we’re killing the planet. You have to believe that rivers have rights, you have to believe that water is sacred. You have to believe that we honor the animals outside—because if you kill all these things, if you consume them all, then you consume yourself. It’s violence.

But if we expand that out into the furthest reaches of the imagination of what space and the universe are, then it becomes kind of a sacred orientation to the world around us. For decades, I've been pulling out the magic feeling of this wormhole portal in the sky. And what do I find out? Just minutes ago in my lifetime, below my skin, below the atoms, I’m made up of an infinity of wormholes. How could I go after that in an aerospace way? In a military-industrial way? It’s sacrilegious, to start with ‘how can I monetize this?’”

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Wormhole Animism exhibition poster

Meghan Elizabeth Trainor

Meghan Trainor’s Wormhole Animism can be enjoyed through a purely aesthetic lens. But the artist’s passion for the wonders of the universe shines through in her creations and encourages the audience to take a closer look—to ponder the secrets of the universe at large, and on a microcosmic level through our relationships to ourselves, the Earth, and each other. Wormhole Animism is on display at Steve Gilbert Studio opens on November 14, 2024.