‘Typist’, Anton and Arturo Bragaglia (1911)
The word Transhuman first appears in Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia (1312), yet it was not until the technologies of the Modern age via Futurism (Italy 1908) and Dadaism (France 1915) that the concept of Transhumanist Media found a wider audience. Futurism celebrated contemporary life by rejecting traditional norms via two key themes - the kinetic machine and the fusion of art and science. Dadaism was more a way of life than a style, aimed to shock the public into challenging accepted aesthetic values thus transhumanist in nature. While Dadaists were often irrational and negative and Futurism was short-lived, Transhumanist media is dynamically optimistic and life-extended. Arguably, the philosophical works by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin like The Future of Man (1959) which explored both the application of bodymind technologies and the acceleration of technologies to a Singularity has greatly influenced contemporary futurists like Kurzweil and Moravec.
Comments