Art in the Age of Spiritual Machines

Abstract

Humanity is evolving towards a "post-human" society that may include enhanced human beings, hybrid humans, and artificial intelligences. As an artist working in digital media and network culture, I believe that the crucial issue of the time is to clear the path for networked art and to create the foundations for a new aesthetic discourse emerging from networked culture. In order to do this, one has to be willing to create art that may not be readily recognized as artwork. In this essay, I trace the common roots of structuralist philosophy, developmental psychology, reductivist art discourse, structural linguistics and neural nets in an attempt to create a basis for this new aesthetic discourse.

Fig. 1.

Orlan's The Mouth of Venus with grapes, 1990.

Fig. 2.

Stelarc's Exoskeleton: event for extended body and walking machine, Kampnagel, Hamburg, 1998.

In a recent Internet Broadcast Panel discussion [1], Josh Harris, a New York Silicon Alley entrepreneur/artist, suggested that the human species will very soon evolve beyond its current form and exhorted artists to make art for that new type of human. But what form will this post-human take?

One can readily imagine a new race of genetically engineered or enhanced humans. Indeed, for the past few years, there have been a variety of programs involving nutrition and exercise to create physically enhanced humans. The human body has become the site for various manipulations. These range from beauty enhancements by means of plastic surgery to athletic enhancements through the use of performance drugs and steroids.

Artists have also begun to work in this field of human enhancement. The works of the French artist Orlan [2], for example, use the process of plastic surgery to create a procedural discourse on the performative process and the ideational location of beauty (Fig. 1). The Australian artist Stelarc takes a somewhat different approach by creating robotic extensions to the human physiology and offering his muscles up to remote stimulus (by means of electrodes) via the Internet (Fig. 2) [3]. In these examples, science and technology penetrate the human body, thereby altering its meaning. The human body is understood as having limitations that can be overcome only through external intervention. Contrary to the religious notion of the human body as a sacrosanct temple for the soul, the body is seen to be an imperfect vehicle that needs to be altered in order to bring it up to date with technological culture. Orlan, for example, uses her body as a site-specific art work that explores the language of beauty: "Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a 'modified readymade,' no longer seen as the ideal it once represented" [4].

In his latest novel, The Elementary Particles, the author Michel Houllebecq traces the ontological development of American post-war consumer culture and the cult of the individual: "The opposite is true of the sex-and-advertising society we live in, where desire is marshaled and blown up out of all proportion, while satisfaction is maintained in the private sphere. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more, until desire fills their lives and finally devours them." [5]. Houllebecq posits a new type of cloned human that functions beyond sexual desire and lives forever. In his fictionalized account he writes:

His first work, *The Topology of Meiosis, published in 2002, had a considerable impact. It established, for the first time, on the basis of irrefutable thermodynamic arguments, that the chromosomal separation at the moment of meiosis which creates haploid gametes is in itself a source of instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.[6]

The machine intelligence side of this debate around the question "What form will this post-human take?" focuses on the field of artificial intelligence...