Transhumanism, or the Postmodern Prometheus?

The Artist, the Man, the Enhanced Man in Contemporary Art

Abstract

Among the many archetypal figures that are hidden behind transhumanist thought, the myth of Prometheus is, without a doubt, the one with the greatest semantic force. In the arts, hybrid artistic forms, at the border of different disciplines such as sculpture, performance, dance, biotechnology, information technology, seem to approach this sensibility. How do transhumanist artists use this post-modern "new grammar"? Through which iconographic, technical, symbolic elements the man of the transhumanists is translated into artistic representations? Our analysis, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural, aims to answer these questions through the reading of some works by artists closely next to transhumanism: Orlan, shaper of her own body through plastic surgery, Neil Harbisson, known as the first cyborg, or the Fronte Vacuo’s artists who hybridize themselves with computer slags and artificial intelligences.