Transhuman Page


Cultural Sphere

 

Transhumanities

The Transhuman Artist is committed to his/her own individual growth and optimism. The medium through with the Transhuman Artist explores his/her work is secondary to the goals of his individual Transhuman beliefs. The Transhuman creative mind recognizes no boundaries.
Natasha V. More
What would we be without vision and beauty? Beside seeking to overcome all present limits of biology, psychology, technology and physics, transhumanism also seeks to overcome limits of art and aesthetics, to integrate art with technology, science and life itself.

Transhumanist art has been defined by Natasha More as art that is based on the transhumanist principles, visions, goals and sentiments. It is in general optimistic, creative, combining intelligence and emotion in unexpected ways and is future-directed instead of backward-looking. Especially important is the automorphism sub-movement, which seeks to make self-transformation and living itself into art. On the other hand it should not be confused with techno and futurist art, which it overlaps with.

Not everything on this page is transhumanist art, but I feel it is more or less relevant. A great deal is techno or futurist art, and some links are just plain aesthetics.


Sections

Other Sites
Architecture
Automorphism
Evolutionary and Organic Art
Film
Meta
Multimedia
Music
Poetry
Roleplaying Games
Performance Art
Paintings, Images and Graphics
Sculpture
Books
See Also
 

Other Sites

Natasha Vita More's Transhumanist Art Center.

# Contemporary Renaissance Futures. "Contemporary renaissance futurists find knowledge in the past and experience in present, but our inspiration lies with the future. By understanding the past, we each seek to gain the analytical and synthetical tools to create that future. By experiencing the present we appreciate the context in which such creativity is to be exercised.".

Transhuman World Culture InfoMark

Architecture

Arcosanti: arcologies in theory and practice. A fine example of a practical endeavor.

The Nanotechnological Influence on Architecture (ed. Hugh Aldersey-Williams). How inspiration may cross from science into art, from molecules i nto buildings.

Transarchitectures - visions of digital communities. The architecture of virtual worlds.

Automorphism

Natasha V. More

Being As Art. A quotation by Walt Whitman, with a comment by Romana Machado.

Art, Body and Technology: Some Performers are Trying to Get over Traditional Limits of Human Body. (In Italian).

I am an artwork. A political automorphic artwork.

Orlan

Orlan: Carnal Art / This is my body... This is my Software... Orlan's homepage.

Me, My Surgery and my Art

Stelarc

Official Stelarc Home Page
Work by Stelarc
Cyberhuman. Another article about Stelarc, in the cyberanthopology web.
Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc

Cosmetic Changes to the Body

Evolutionary and Organic Art

Organic, Genetic, and Evolutionary Art. Art that evolves or mimicks organic form.

Evolution as Artist by Thomas S. Ray. Evolution is a creative process. Today, artists and engineers are beginning to work together with evolution. In the future, it may be possible for artists to work in collaboration with evolution to produce works of art whose beauty and complexity approach that of organic life.

Evolutionary Computer Graphics by Linda Moss. A thesis, visual tour, bibliography and links to evolutionary art.

Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau. Interactive computer installations, sometimes involving evolving structures.

Biota.org, and organisation seeking to create and deploy digital tools and environments for research and learning about living systems. Biota.org will seek to provide all of these experiences to a large audience through the medium of virtual environments on the Internet.

Avolve. About an interactive evolutionary artwork.

TechnoSphere. An artificial biosphere running on the WWW where you can add creatures.

Computer Artworks Ltd. Organic art and programs.

Cybertation by Notting Hill.

Curiosity Junction. Fractals, hypertext, spirituality and utopian ideas. Very pleasant.

Turbulence. A menagerie of synthesised forms, `evolved' within the computer using a process of artificial selection.

BioGraphy by Aaron Davidson. A Java application for evolving pictures.

See also the Complexity Page and the biotechnology page.

Films and Documentaries

Synthetic Pleasures. A documentary about how people are starting to change themselves and the environment. Covers a lot of transhumanist topics.

Meta

The Extropic Art Manifesto by Natasha V. More.

Transhumanist Art Statement by Natasha V. More

Recreating Reality -- Redefining Art, A continual process by Natasha V. More.

Post Human? All Too Human by McKenzie Wark. About "posthuman art" and its relationship with the nature-culture debate.

Biotech at the barricades (Matthew DeBord, The Atlantic, November 11 1998). About transhumanist art.

We're not in Kansas Anymore by Steve Alan Edwards. On extropic art.

Multimedia

Posthuman by infinity. An ironic web-artwork about self-transformation.

SWARM by Jane Prophet. A website based on an installation inspired by some of the current thoughts about biological machines and `hive minds. See also a description of the installation and a critical essay on the installation.

Music

Interview with Andrew Lagowski about "Ashita".

Artichikin. Experimental industrial music about creative forces, human insanity, artificial consciousness, and science fiction.

See also the transhumanist entertainment page for some filksongs.

Poetry

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan. A classic poem among computer people.

Into the era of cyberspace by Geoffrey Landis

An Extropian Poem by 'Discord'.

Gods Can Be Made by Narayan Uchigaki

Poems by E. Shaun Russell

Immortal Poem by David de Been.

I Play The Game by David Musick.

If They Could Keep A Severed Head Alive by QueeneMUSE@aol.com.

Two Scenes from "The Automorpher" by Natasha V. More

Event Horizon by Michael Bowling

Morning Light by Sarah Marr

Today is Yesterday's Tomorrow by QueeneMUSE@aol.com

Love and Tensor Algebra by Stanislaw Lem.

Leaf Cutter Ants by Richard Fein.

It Couldn't Be Done by Edgar A. Guest

Summer Sonnet by Romana Machado

Replicator by Joel Meulenberg.

Virgule Reality by Keith Allen Daniels

The SciFaiku Manifesto. (SciFaikus are haiku-like poems with science fiction topics. Many are of transhumanistic interest).

Cyberpoema by Joseph Nechvata (computer aided poetry).

Poems at the Transhumanist Art Centre

Roleplaying Games

Roleplaying games have developed from a simple pastime to a complex art form (even if they still are meant to be entertaining), allowing the players to explore different scenarios, exercise their creativity and mental flexibility and stimulating critical thinking about the world.

There are a few roleplaying games which transhuman relevance, which allow players to explore ideas and problems from transhumanism. In addition, some scenarios have been written up by transhumanists.

Big Ideas, Grand Vision. Scenario by Anders Sandberg describing a number of future cultures and their human, transhuman and alien inhabitants.

Men Like Gods

A transhumanist roleplaying game by Phil Goetz (with some additions by me) set in a neo-medieval future after the Apocalypse, when nanotechnology, AI and complexity theory got out of control. But some people still hunger after the forbidden knowledge...

Men Like Gods Homepage
Latex and Postscript files.

The City Scenario

These files are part of a roleplaying scenario I wrote up, loosely based on the Entelechy scenario by Loren Miller. The City was built long ago by humans close to a Singularity, and is now inhabited by people i gnorant of its true nature.

The Buildings of the City
Religion in the City
Humans and Near-humans in the City

Performance Art

The Robot Group A forum for interaction between artists and technologists.

Paintings and Graphics

If transhumanist art has a patron saint, it must be Leonardo da Vinci:

The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo in Yahoo
Leonardo in Google

Ebon Fisher. The bionic codes could be letters in a posthuman alphabet.

Liquid selves/Primordial Dance by Karl Sims. Primordial Dance explores "visual music" with changing patterns, and Liquid Selves how our selves may dissolve in a virtual world.

Mark Stanley Sherwood "There is something about the beauty of the human figure which stimulates contemplation of the deeper mysteries of life. So far as we know, man is the most complex, god-like creature in the universe. In him resides, at least in potential, all the complexity and beauty of the cosmos. In my art, I try to portray these ideals."

Terranova: Planet of the Day.

The Creation of the Computer by Toribio Hidalgo

Achille Ghidoni. Surreal pictures with elements from cellular biology.

Techno-Impressionist Museum. Art movement with imaginary artists of Tony Karp. Impressionism meets modern technology.

DNA Renga Museum by Etsuko Miyamoto & Paul Thiessen. It is very natural to do renga with DNA, after all, that is what it is doing all the time.

Art by Gina "Nanogirl" Miller

Octav. A diagram of the human proportions from a design book.

Raytracings by Anders Sandberg. See especially The Transhuman Condition and Ethics of Creation.

Algorithmic Art

Algorists. Art with or from algorithms.

CA and Computational Aesthetics by David Griffeath. On using cellular automata and other means to create art.

Fractalus. Fractals are definitely the most popular form of algorithmic art, with broad appeal but also many interesting artistic challenges.

Techno Art

This is art celebrating or otherwise dealing with technology, science or our exploration of the universe; not transhumanist art per se, but still close to it.

The Beauty of Technology. The beauty of circuit boards, words and cities.

Pictures by Chesley Bonestell. Classic space images; quite possibly posthuman artists will paint stillebens like this.

Space Colony Art from the 1970s. Classic pictures (although they remind me a bit the pictures in the pamphlets of Jehova's Witnesses - always sunny, happy people and pleasant parklands. Reality will probably be quite a bit less elegant.)

NASA Space Art

SSI Sample Slides

Millennial Project Images

Ringworld Images by James W. Williams. Renditions of the classic Niven ringworld (see also my Dyson sphere page).

Shoji Hasegawa & Nobumitsu Kobayashi's 3dcg artworks of terraforming.

Japanese Temple Geometry by Tony Rothman (Scientific American). About the mathematical tablets placed in temples during the period of national seclusion. In many ways the purest form of techno art, a celebration of mathematics.

Pop Science. An interesting meld of pastiché and popular science, seeking to present results from physics to the general audience through art.

Sculpture

The art of Motion Control. Bruce Shapiro uses robotic tools to create complex designs in metal, based on L-systems, fractals and Escher.

Beauty and Magnets (Discover Magazine, March 1997). About the electromagnetic sculptures of David Durlach.

Abstract Sculptures links collected by Carlo Séquin. Mathematical, polyhedral sculpture.

Art, Math, and Computers -- New Ways of Creating Pleasing Shapes by Carlo H. Séquin (Educator's TECH Exchange, January 1996).

Sicherheitsglaeser: Sicherheit Zuerst by Steve Mann.

Books

Orlan This is my body…This is my Software…Art Books Intl Ltd; ISBN: 0952177366 (1996)

Latham

See also

Transhumanist Books and Prose

Anders Sandberg / asa@nada.kth.se
2000-03-11