Art in the Age of Spiritual Machines: (with apologies to Ray Kurzweil)

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.