Transhuman Page
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.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.
Natasha V. More
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
Other Sites
Natasha Vita More's Transhumanist
Art Center. 
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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
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.
Stelarc
Official Stelarc Home Page
Work
by Stelarc
Cyberhuman.
Another article about Stelarc, in the cyberanthopology
web.
Extended-Body:
Interview with Stelarc
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
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."
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.
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.)
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