Visual Storytelling
Narrative Visual Generation for Human ConnectionPoewell creates AI-guided visual narratives for trauma and grief support. Through generative art and shared ritual practices, it helps organizations offer scalable, meaningful healing experiences that integrate into therapy programs, veteran services, and wellness initiatives. It rebuilds the symbolic spaces grief demands, extending collective ritual and connection to geographically distributed communities.
Our Approach
Computational Hierotopy & Eudaimonic AII've developed two interconnected frameworks to describe Poewell's approach:Computational Hierotopy is the method of using AI to create sacred experiences through generative visual storytelling. Drawing from art historian Alexei Lidov's concept of hierotopy (Greek: hieros = sacred, topos = place); the creation of sacred space through orchestrated imagery, architecture, light, and ritual.Computational Hierotopy extends this ancient practice into digital domains. AI-generated visual narratives become the medium for creating sacred spaces for collective meaning-making.Eudaimonic AI is the philosophy of approaching technology explicitly from the non-deterministic perspective that the technologies can and should be designed to serve human flourishing (eudaimonia) rather than simply for profit or engagement metrics.This was, in fact, the original founding principle of OpenAI in 2015, established as a nonprofit "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity" rather than "the private gain of any person." The founders explicitly rejected technological determinism—the notion that technology development must follow an inevitable path driven by market forces—choosing instead to prioritize long-term human benefit over short-term gains.OpenAI's subsequent shift from nonprofit to for-profit structure and its 2024 restructuring as a public benefit corporation sparked widespread criticism that the organization had abandoned its eudaimonic mission for a "profit-driven AI arms race." This transformation exemplifies precisely what Eudaimonic AI seeks to resist: the erosion of human-centered values under competitive pressure.Computational Hierotopy, grounded in Eudaimonic AI principles, maintains that technology serving grief recovery and meaning reconstruction must remain committed to human sovereignty and flourishing over extractive value capture—not as idealism, but as the essential condition for sacred space to exist.This framework positions AI as a tool to advance the transformative experiences that traditional sacred practices provide, such as coherence-making, symbolic expression, ritual structure, and pathways through grief and trauma.How It Works
Just as Byzantine churches orchestrated mosaics, candlelight, incense, and liturgy to create immersive sacred experiences, Poewell orchestrates AI-generated imagery, symbolic narrative arcs, and guided rituals to facilitate transformation. The system is configurable; it can be tuned to different therapeutic contexts, spiritual traditions, or individual needs while maintaining its core function: creating thresholds between ordinary experience and sacred/healing space.Why This Matters
Our culture has largely lost the collective capacity to create and sustain the symbolic spaces that major life transitions demand. Traditional rituals for grief, trauma, and transformation once provided structured pathways through emotional wilderness. Computational Hierotopy offers a way to rebuild these spaces in digital form—not as a replacement for human connection, but as scaffolding that makes healing rituals accessible, scalable, and deeply personal.The Sacred and the Therapeutic
I recognize that "sacred" and "therapeutic" often overlap.The experiences that facilitate psychological healing, coherence-making, symbolic expression, witnessing, ritual container, are often the same elements that traditional sacred practices provided.Poewell operates at this intersection, using generative AI to create secular sacred space: environments where profound transformation becomes possible regardless of religious tradition. The individual brings whatever spiritual or philosophical framework works for them, and Poewell configures itself to support that journey.In Practice
When someone engages with Poewell, they're not just making art, they're entering a carefully orchestrated visual-narrative environment designed to facilitate movement through emotional terrain. The AI generates imagery that responds to their journey, creating a personalized hierotopy: a sacred space uniquely configured to their needs, yet structured by universal patterns we've discovered in how humans navigate grief, trauma, and transformation.This is Computational Hierotopy: ancient wisdom about how humans create meaningful space, reimagined through generative AI for a culture that desperately needs new ways to hold what's sacred.— Dennis Stevens, Ed.D.
Creator of Poewell and the Computational Hierotopy Framework
About
A Threshold Space for Grief and LossPoewell is a digital threshold space: a grove where grief can exist without being managed, measured, or made comfortable. It creates sacred architecture for experiences that have no place in modern life. This is not therapy. This is not a healing app.Shuddering (awe-filled dread) is humanity’s best part; though the world may try to make light of this feeling, when gripped by it, a person feels the monstrous (immeasurable) in the depths.
~ Rudolph Otto, The Idea of The HolyWhat Poewell Offers:+ Ritual forms for expressing what cannot be articulated
+ AI-facilitated and cohort witnessing without interpretation or correction
+ Visual tools that enable and facilitate encounters with self rather than simply the illustration of experience
+ Temporal structures that honor grief's non-linear nature
+ Sacred spaces that remember and accumulate your presence
+ Tools for cohort interaction and therapist participationWhat Poewell Does Not Promise:We don't promise you'll heal or find closure; there are other ways to do that work. We don't suggest grief has stages or timelines. We don't gamify suffering or celebrate progress.For VeteransPoewell isn't therapy, and it's not a mental health app.
It's a threshold space where you can work with experiences that don't fit into words or clinical categories. Some things can't be explained or retold cleanly. Poewell creates ritual forms for those things, giving them a place to be integrated.
Inside Poewell, you work with images, gestures, and forms that hold weight, and through them, you will experience yourself in motion.
Poewell respects what can't be said, and it advances your internal self-knowledge as much as you are willing to do the work.For Organizations
Poewell for Clinical and Institutional SettingsPoewell provides sacred threshold space for grief, trauma, and loss within organizational contexts—maintaining its core principles while integrating with institutional support systems.Core Offerings:+ Ritual space for experiences beyond clinical language
+ AI witness agent facilitating encounter with the numinous
+ Creative tools
+ Non-linear temporal architecture that resists progress metrics
+ Sacred architecture holding contradiction and paradoxAbout Dr. Dennis Stevens, Creator of PoewellDr. Dennis Stevens is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, visual artist, and the creator of Poewell's visual storytelling platform. With a Doctorate in Art and Art Education from Columbia University's Teachers College, Dr. Stevens developed Poewell while pioneering trauma-informed creative healing technologies at the Sempergeist Institute. Dennis is an alum of Save-A-Warrior Cohort 0268 and Warrior PATHH Cohort MTTAWP051.Dennis is the author of Sacred Descent of the Warrior, Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran and the founder of the Sempergeist Institute (Conway Cultural Development Corporation).
Contact
Work With Us
+ For Developers: Integrate Poewell into your platform
+ For Brands: Commission custom visual campaign arcs
+ For Researchers: Collaborate on trauma-informed creative technology
+ For Platforms: Explore white-label narrative generation