Ever since the 2022–23 polemics around Documenta 15 and artistic freedom, I have been attempting to consider the possible emergence of a specifically twenty-first-century subject. This subject is neither the autonomous subject of modernity, organized around self-consciousness, intentionality, and the possibility of self-determination, nor the relativized, dispersed, and deconstructed subject that became paradigmatic in the later twentieth century. Instead, this subject takes form within computational environments whose structures of mediation, prediction, delegation, and exteriorized cognition alter the conditions through which subjectivity itself is produced. What interests me is precisely the coexistence of apparently contradictory forms—autonomy and submission, heightened technical agency and diminished individual agency, hyper-connectivity and withdrawal, memory externalized into machines and an unprecedented availability of stored information, and of course the place of the body and of the ground throughout all this.
In 2020 during Covid, I began to consider the subject of artistic freedom at the time of the post–Documenta 15 discussions about whether this freedom was being censored or whether it could be limited. I began to ask what it means to live under a canopy of thousands of partially interconnected satellites circulating above us. Freedom seemed at the time to be an outdated concept used to describe a feeling of non-oppression, of movement, of choice, of potentiality to act, of self-determination—co-opted as well by techno-libertarian circles. Freedom of individual choice could no longer be just that in an era of predictive statistics, when algorithms direct attention towards personalized choices and the invisible prisons of our smartphones already produce chronic distraction. Freedom of expression could no longer be just that in an era of self-absorption and “dividuals,” continuously expanding since the selfie turned the camera back onto ourselves, now a narcissistic society relentlessly requiring tangible and intangible self-expressive goods.1 The urgency of qualifying freedom and safeguarding artistic freedom seemed to me increasingly prescient, with artistic freedom itself appearing as a possible counter to the Angel of History: an intellectual, imaginative, and tender horizon online and offline, capable of producing singular and collective consciousness. Could Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus have actually portrayed the angel of art, not history? Satellites, like stars, became the stuff of angels.
1. Angels and Agents
The question of freedom gradually opened onto the figure of the angel, and subsequently onto its close but structurally distinct counterpart, the agent. The Greek angelos designates a messenger; the Latin agere (from which “agent” derives) means instead “to act.” Angel and agent are therefore both intermediary figures, but their modalities of mediation differ. One carries a message; the other acts toward an outcome. The angel is not the author of the message it transmits and does not necessarily comprehend it fully; its function is one of appearance and address in transmission. The agent, by contrast, is defined by action and, in its contemporary computational form, increasingly by execution, optimization, ranking, and the accomplishment of a task.
The distinction between action and transmission has become difficult to perceive due to a historical reversal that has taken place at the level of technological appearance. For much of human history, instruments of agency were tangible, material, and visible: stone, knife, plough, weapon, machine. The angel (or its many other names all over the world, such as ancestor, etc.) was the intangible intermediary, appearing between earthly and divine orders, between immanence and transcendence. This already began to shift in the late nineteenth century with X-rays and electromagnetic waves: The invisible tools were upon us. The contemporary digital agent, finally, has itself become intangible. It appears phenomenologically across interfaces, addresses us linguistically, advises, predicts, performs actions and disappears, makes images and movies, while its substantial material infrastructure—servers, mines, cables, energy systems, cooling systems, labor—is displaced elsewhere. The digital agent can therefore assume the appearance of the angel without acquiring its semiotic structure. The agent even masks itself as an angel. The instrumental and utilitarian function begins to resemble the messenger, and calculation acquires the appearance of prophecy. But this resemblance should not be mistaken for equivalence. Prediction is not prophecy, just as agency is not angelicity.
The scene of an Annunciation offers one of the most exact historical forms through which this difference can be considered. In Sienese artists Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi’s Annunciation (dated 1333), the angel Gabriel has only just arrived; the movement of his mantle swirling in the wind retains the force of landing, while the greeting Ave – gratia plena – Dominus tecum (Hail, full of Grace, the Lord is with you) crosses the pictorial interval between angel and Virgin as materialized language, words written in relief on the gold surface. The angel holds an olive branch that partially covers the word “gratia.” Mary withdraws, folding her body into her cloak, her finger still holding the place in the book she had been reading. The message does not confirm an existing trajectory and does not function as information derived from what precedes it. Rather, it interrupts Mary mid-reading.
The book is usually identified as a specific Biblical text, Isaiah 7:14—the very prophecy of the Virgin’s immaculate conception (“Ecce virgo concipiet, et pariet filium, et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel”), which Mary is reading at the moment the angel arrives to enact it. The message she receives is the fulfillment of the message she already holds in her hands. In a temporal loop, the angel doesn’t bring new information so much as collapse the distance between text and event, between prophecy and its actual occurrence, compressing all time into an eternal moment of conception.
Painters consistently show the Virgin Mary in this moment startled, hand raised, or still reading—the moment is composed around the break in reading, not the content of what Gabriel says. Reading is its own form of locative attending, and her attention was already present before the angel arrived; the angel doesn’t introduce attention, it redirects it. Mary receives the gratia of which she is already full. Her traditional response of stupor depicts her, even after the angel speaks, as not fully possessing the meaning of what’s been delivered. She carries it before she understands it—like the angel, message-bearing without full comprehension. The olive branch partially covering the word “gratia” seems to say: grace enters a space first shaped as empty or welcoming by peace (the olive).
In the Ranieri Annunciation by Perugino, painted half a century later during the full Renaissance, when Gabriel appears announcing the Emmanuel, the book has fallen to the ground, between the angel and Mary. It thus separates them and connects them. The dropped book is a broken index, an orphaned object of technology between angelic orders and the human. Archive and dataset have dropped because a fragment after “now” has arrived and no longer needs mediating through text.
Thomas Aquinas’s account of angelic presence is relevant: The angel is present in a place through its operation, i.e., its mode of being is locative insofar as it is present where it acts.2 Gabriel is therefore present in a particular encounter, addressing a particular person. The Annunciation concerns the future, but it is not prediction in the computational sense of replacing the present with a statistical simulation of a probable future. Rather, it enters the present as an event, because in Christian theology what is announced becomes (or rather is already) embodied in the here and now. Prediction extracts the probable future from patterns accumulated in the past and introduces that probability into present action. Annunciation introduces what could not have been extrapolated from the data on any preceding state of the world. Temporality is compressed in both prediction and the Annunciation, but in radically different ways.
The Annunciation interests me less as a pursuit of religious transcendence than as a highly elaborated historical image of address, reception, interruption, location, and embodiment—qualities that distinguish the angelic from contemporary computational agency. The angel does not optimize Mary. It addresses her.
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus of 1920 also modifies this distinction. Walter Benjamin’s celebrated “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was written shortly before he committed suicide in 1944 in Portbou while trying to flee a Europe under Nazi fascism. Benjamin describes Klee’s figure as the Angel of History, its face turned toward the past while catastrophic wreckage piles before it, the storm called progress propelling it irresistibly into the future:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.3
Yet Benjamin’s pessimistic ekphrasis reverses something fundamental in the actual visual composition of the work. Klee’s angel does not rush towards the right in the image. It faces us frontally, outward, toward the viewer. Our visage looks at its visage as an encounter.4 Benjamin also gazed frontally at this work he owned, so if we take his description literally, we, and Benjamin himself, are the progress toward which it looks, and we produce the rubble; we are the force that pushes the angel backwards into the pictorial depth. I do not believe this was the intention of Klee.
Klee’s technical procedure intensifies this ambiguity. Angelus Novus is a monoprint—a procedure situated between reproducibility and singularity, between mediated transfer and manual intervention: a printing technology that can be used only once. This tension between reproducibility and uniqueness is important to Klee’s position immediately after World War I: The artist’s practice is situated within the technical reproducibility of the image, while resisting its conversion into pure printed repetition through a unique one-time mediated image. After WWI Klee painted many fish and angels—what is above us and what is below sea level, since the ground had been poisoned with bombs, gasses, and bodies in trenches. His Angelus Novus, I believe, is the angel of art, and this angel is the artist himself, a self-portrait, not a selfie, carrying a salvific and hermetic message matter.
Benjamin was likely to have been reading Klee through Rainer Maria Rilke’s prophetic angel, described by the poet in 1912 while writing elegies for humanity in Duino Castle, before modernity turned into war—a terrifying angel for the human, and an angel whose presence, as the expansion of air, is also felt by the birds.
At the beginning of the first Duino Elegy, the encounter with the Angelic Orders is unbearable because the angel exceeds human existence. Beauty is the beginning of terror that can still be borne. The angel designates an alterity and an asymmetry. It marks the point at which the human encounters something that cannot be incorporated within its own measure.
2. Grace Fills Empty Spaces
Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1994–98) responded to Benjamin with a much more optimistic outlook. Two hundred tons of weathering steel stand above the A1 road in Gateshead, UK, on the ground of a former colliery, a homage to the miners. The work is simultaneously earthbound and winged, industrial and angelic, a body of enormous gravitational weight whose wings propose another vector, able to resist winds up to 180 kilometers per hour. It does not scan, compute, register, or optimize those who pass it. It performs no instrumental service. It stands, waits, weathers, and rusts.5
Gormley’s sculptures, since his lead body-cases of the early 1980s, have not been representations of generic human figures, but skins constructed around the void left by a particular body molded in plaster at a particular moment, and then covered in lead, one of the densest materials we know. The void inside the mold becomes the philosophical center of the work: a presence that cannot be shown, the air a body breathed, the darkness of an interior that cannot be entered. The body-case holds the shape of absence.
From that position of a self unseen and protected to the Angel of the North rusting in the landscape (the only thing left after the apocalypse in Danny Boyle’s 2025 sci-fi movie 28 Years Later, from the cult series), Gormley does not make agents and does not make robots. He makes body sculptures. The sculptural act—casting, molding, standing in rain or on a roof or in the sea—becomes an act of attention in philosopher Simone Weil’s sense of the self-emptied, the void preserved, the other given space to be: “Grace fills empty spaces, but only where there is a void to receive it.”6
The distinction between angelic and agentic can therefore also be approached through the opposition between reception and procedural production. The machine has no void. The computational agent possesses no interiority corresponding to embodied human experience. The algorithm generates; it does not attend in the sense in which Weil uses the word. It produces and extracts; it does not receive, also in Weil’s sense.
Mathematician Paolo Zellini’s distinction between the mathematics of the gods and the algorithms of humans adds an epistemological dimension to this opposition.7 In a number of ancient Western traditions, number and mathematical order could be understood as preexisting their discovery by human operations through deduction. The modern algorithm belongs to a different regime. It is made; it consists of a finite sequence of operations leading to a result. Invoking Giambattista Vico, Zellini returns to verum et factum convertuntur: Truth and the made are convertible into each other. The epistemological revolution of the algorithm lies precisely in this procedural certainty. What is true is demonstrated through the reproducibility of the procedure that produces it. Therefore the numbers increase exponentially to the point of being no longer intuitable and having some sort of physical substance (such as data centers).
The consequences of algorithms are entirely material—energy consumption, heat, labor, spatial infrastructures, and, increasingly, decisions affecting human and nonhuman lives—yet the operation itself remains procedurally enclosed. It produces results but cannot itself ground the conditions through which those results acquire meaning. The angel and the agent are thus not two names for the same intermediary function. They indicate different epistemological regimes: what is received and what is made; what addresses and what executes; what may transform the receiver through encounter and what transforms inputs according to operations.
The twenty-first-century subject is constituted precisely where these regimes begin to overlap. In a way not totally dissimilar from an autistic engineer subject almost idealized in certain tech circles, experience can be reduced to calculation, systematization, or the absence of empathy, shuttled between extreme perceptual sensitivity and the construction of filters, systems, or forms of withdrawal through which an overwhelming environment might become inhabitable.
3. Embodied Subjectivity and Art
What is the difference in the quality of knowledge produced by the absence of a body versus its presence—between AI’s thinking and my thinking? What does it mean to possess knowledge with or without a body? AI operates through disembodied knowledge while art, according to the traditional definition, remains an embodied practice.
If an artificial intelligence is trained on fifty of my essays, it may increasingly reproduce patterns of association, vocabulary, and argument specific to my writing. But if I eat an artichoke and I am allergic to artichokes, what I produce that day will differ from what I would have produced had I not eaten it, even if beginning from the same “dataset.” Such a proposition seems obvious, yet exposes the persistence of a Cartesian epistemology in which knowledge is abstractable content separable from the knower’s physiology.
Take the knowledge of loss. There is a physical sensation of loss—the pull in the chest when we associate with the knowledge that somebody has gone away forever, and the melancholy produced by that absence. Can an artificial intelligence, when given Tracey Emin’s work Meet me in Heaven—I will wait for You, a simple handwritten phrase in neon, recognize the textual signs of how such an experience of loss has entered language, without the bodily experience from which those signs emerged?
I am not asserting an ontological privilege for the human because technologies alter the humans who use them. Marshall McLuhan calls the universal psychological and physical numbing reaction to technological invention “organ atrophy.”8 Technologies exteriorize faculties that previously were interior to us. A capacity delegated to a technical object may cease to be exercised in precisely the same way within our organism. We invent the clock and can no longer tell the time of day using the sun. Yet such loss cannot simply be narrated as decline. Writing and subsequently the book transformed memory and produced a lack thereof (requiring the medieval memory theater exercises); calculation was progressively delegated to calculator machines and the intuitive sense of embodied quantity—its size and scale—were lost; GPS navigation determined a loss in the capacity to map territory as a surface: The land became a line winding through streets. Each transformation entails losses, but each also permits forms of knowledge and imagination that could not have emerged otherwise. In this sense, the history of humanity is made of lost abilities transforming the human.
So what does artificial intelligence atrophy? What is being exteriorized is no longer only muscular force, storage, calculation, or orientation, but aspects of what modernity grouped under the category of “mind”: memory, association, analysis, synthesis, linguistic production, image-making, comparison, pattern recognition, and increasingly certain forms of decision-making. One might say that AI produces a form of dementia—not as clinical diagnosis, but in the etymological sense: de (without) mens (mind), or de-mentia: the mind outside of itself: a demented twenty-first-century subject. Not Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, but a body without mind in the sense of a decreased ability to analyze and synthesize data, make associations based on critical thinking.9
The problem cannot lie in the technological contamination of an allegedly original human wholeness, since such wholeness is itself a fiction. Human beings have always constituted themselves through technical, linguistic, social, animal, and material relations of co-emergence, losing and gaining capacities. The relevant questions become: What kinds of faculties are being displaced? And what is emerging through that displacement? Might prolonged coexistence with computational systems alter not only cognitive procedures, but forms of emotional and empathic knowledge as well? What are we losing, and in what direction are we transforming?
A 2016 work by artist Khaled Sabsabi titled At the Speed of Light considers science, philosophy, and art in the digital era from a Sufi perspective. Sabsabi begins with kashf, a Sufi concept concerned with knowledge of the heart rather than of the intellect, with disclosure and the uncovering of the heart allowing divine light to enter. He then turns to the Divine—nur (light) and the unseen realm of angels created from light. Sabsabi asks whether, if one could travel at the physical speed of light, one might enter into or interact with unseen realms—of angels, for example.
In Sabsabi’s words,
At the Speed of Light is a personal and artistic approach that considers science, philosophy, and art in the modern digital era.
In Tasawwuf (Sufism) it is very difficult to explain the true meaning of the Arabic word Nur and in sacred text, the Divine describes Itself as Nur.
Muslims believe in the existence of Angels and Angels are an accepted part of the unseen world. Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him), said “Angels are created from light and that physical light is only a reflection of the true Light, and one can only think about this light in terms of their experience in the phenomenal world.”
We are also taught that “Light is the purest entity that exists” and that there are different unseen realms and worlds around us, with each realm having a functional and sustainable existence.
Having considered these teachings and known scientific fact that, physical light has limitations posed by its physical nature and is dependent on energy, space, and time; I propose a question, that if we are able to travel at the speed of light, will we be able to enter and interact with these unseen realms?
To realise this question creatively, I have constructed a 1 second video at the speed of light. The rationale, methods and processes used to create this artwork are listed as follows:
We know that planet Earth’s rotation speed is measured at 40,075 kilometres per 23hr 56min 4sec. We also know that light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second.
Using the radius of Earth; R_Earth, specified in the Nautical Almanac of 6378136.6m, Sydney, Australia’s latitude as 33deg51min40.3sec, and assuming a spherical Earth and that we are calculating the speed at Sydney’s sea level, then the speed is 2*PI*(R_Earth)*cos(33d51m40.3s) / 24 / 3600 = 380.59 m/s, also considering the equation factor that Earth’s speed increases with height as well as moving northward and decreases moving southward consequently we are able to accurately calculate that the speed of Earth’s rotation at Sydney is 381 metres per second.
Having arrived at these calculations and applying them to the work’s rationale I’m able to construct this work by capturing and record 218hrs 34mins 28secs continuous video footage, which is required to create and simulate the 1 second video at light speed. Once captured and recorded the video footage was accelerated through several production stages and various digital tools to ultimately become the 1 second video.
My intention is to prompt access, insight and inclusivity.
Khaled Sabsabi10
The work’s significance does not lie in calculation becoming revelation. Sufficient speed does not render the agentic operation angelic; calculation does not abolish the distinction between what is computed and what is received. Rather than merely representing duration, time in the work is compressed until lived time and calculable time become violently disproportionate. This compression seems particularly important to the contemporary subject. Computational systems are not only for producing answers; they are also machines for changing temporal scale. Processes that might otherwise exceed a human body’s lifetime can be simulated, calculated, or searched instantaneously, in turn bringing a transformation in duration, waiting, and experience itself.
4. A Fraction After Now
Faced with apparently infinite data, the human subject, rather than being engineered by algorithms, reengineers the self through self-imposed rules that filter and order input from the media and online world. An example of this is EVERYDAYS, a work by digital artist Mike Winkelmann (known as Beeple), created daily since 2007 from source material gathered throughout a single day’s online attention as measured by social media engagement.11 Another Beeple work, HUMAN ONE, provides an additional image of this reengineered temporality. Dated 2021–?, its physical structure persists while its digital environment remains open to successive alteration. The explorer-traveler-astronaut-biker originally described as the “first Human of the Metaverse” was born out of Covid in a rotating box of four screens. This traveler continues to walk as worlds are replaced around it at every presentation. Across its successive chapters, the traveler itself changes, becoming damaged, burdened, prosthetic, increasingly machinic. The environment can be overwritten, but the figure bears a cumulative history. In the seventh version or “chapter” of HUMAN ONE, Pre-Human Feedback, audiences responding to prompts concerning human emotions had their images judged by AI. Knowing in advance that an artificial system would evaluate them, participants could begin to adapt to what they imagined the machine would recognize and reward. Beeple explained to me: “The idea is that we are teaching AI to be human. And it is judging us. And we are trying to please it. Competing against other humans to gain the favor of AI.”
The recursion is striking. Humans train intelligent systems through language, images, selections, prompts, and corrections; those systems alter how humans write, see, choose, and formulate their desires; humans then begin to produce themselves in forms that the systems can more readily recognize. The reflected subject modifies itself in response to its computational reflection. The older opposition between human and machine comes to be replaced by how subjects form themselves through the machines they have produced.
This is also where prediction becomes central. Human cultures have always attempted to know what has not yet happened: through prophecy, augury, astronomy, oracles, calendars, weather observation, insurance, military intelligence, economic modeling, and gambling. Yet computational culture has made prediction infrastructural and continuous. Recommendation systems anticipate what image may hold attention; navigation anticipates movement; financial systems price probable futures; predictive text anticipates language; machine-learning systems calculate patterns of likely behavior from immense accumulations of what has already occurred. The future therefore begins to act before it happens.
When a prediction modifies behavior to produce the future it anticipates, it is no longer prophecy. Prophecy historically remained hermetic, bound to mystery and interpretation.12 Even where the future was announced, the meaning of the announcement was not exhausted by the information contained within it, like Apollo’s mythological priestess Sybilla Cumana’s prophesies on leaves, mixed up and jumbled by the wind. The myths surrounding prophecy are filled precisely with failures of interpretation. Computational prediction seeks instead to diminish that interval: What was once interpreted is increasingly calculated. Gambling becomes particularly revealing here because it translates uncertainty into numbers. The irrationality traditionally associated with betting meets the hyperrationality of statistical probability. The unknown future becomes odds.
The modern subject was largely teleological. It projected itself toward futures organized by projects: political revolution, social progress, personal development, education, production, construction. The future could fail; and indeed, modernity repeatedly encountered the catastrophe of its own projected futures. But a horizon remained. The computational subject occupies a different temporal arrangement. Predictions become increasingly short-term, immediate, and continuous. The temporality becomes increasingly “short of breath.” Project-politics risks becoming wager-and-gambling politics, and a fragment from now is pulled in to fill the space of now, evacuating its existence. The predictive computational subject brings the future into the present because the present becomes that prediction.
A navigation system provides the most banal instance. Orientation once required interpretation and decision. One might get lost. The computational instruction says to turn right, continue for two hundred meters, then turn left. One no longer has to construct the route from within the space through which one moves. The future destination is progressively pulled backward into the present through a series of instructions. Predictive language operates similarly. The next word is proposed before it has been formulated. The next image is recommended before it has been sought. The next desire is inferred before it necessarily appears to the subject as desire. This is the condition I call “A Fraction After Now.”
The computational subject increasingly lives in a fractional interval between the accumulated past on which prediction is based, and the probable future generated from it. The status of the present—which has become processing—changes when action is increasingly organized by anticipated future states generated from recorded past behavior. The future is drawn backward and the past pushed forward until the interval between them narrows. There is no air, nor space in their interval, and it is here that the absence of the present begins to resemble the absence of the body. The AI system has an enormous material body in one sense—servers, cables, mines, electricity, cooling systems—but no lived body through which its knowledge is situated in the way human knowledge is. The computational human subject, meanwhile, remains embodied but increasingly exteriorizes faculties that had seemed constitutive of mind.
Let us return to the Annunciation—which also introduces the future into the present. Mary is already with child when the message is spoken at the manifestation of the messenger, but not as probability. Gabriel does not calculate what is statistically most likely to happen to Mary. The message arrives from outside the preceding causal sequence. It is received by a body in a place. The Annunciation therefore retains the present precisely because it interrupts it. Mary draws back. There is astonishment, hesitation, fear, reception. The event is not already contained within the prediction of itself.
This is not an argument for transcendence (the angel) against technology (the agent). Computation is radically material and at the same time phenomenologically intangible. We have produced an invisible technological order that seems to arrive from elsewhere while being entirely made by us. One might say that we have engineered transcendence. And yet, an engineered transcendence remains made. It does not make space for grace.
The body is not merely one more substrate for processing information. It is the ground through which experience occurs. Gormley’s hollow body-cases make this materially visible. The void within them is not an abstract emptiness. It was produced by a particular living body that occupied that place and has moved away. In the body-case, absence is the trace of having been there. An artificial intelligence may lack phenomenological interiority, but this is not an emptiness created by the withdrawal of embodied presence. Nothing has departed.
According to Simone Weil, grace requires emptiness, and this involves suspending the self, creating a void in which something other than the self may appear. Grace cannot enter where everything has already been filled by intention, possession, prediction, and action. Grace fills empty spaces, but only where there is a void to receive it.
Artists are like angels—prototypes of a forming subject—not only because artists give their works wings and beautiful bodies like birds or bees, but because grace belongs to what cannot be manufactured as the calculable outcome of a procedure. The question of twenty-first-century subjectivity may therefore finally concern not whether humans can preserve an older autonomy or freedom, or a form of agency to resist computational systems, but whether a subject already constituted through those systems can retain—or reinvent—a void in which something unforeseen can still be received. In Nolan Oswald Dennis’s diagrams, for instance, symbols of birds appear, somehow framed by invisible angelic and agentic orders. We can listen to them. While Nadia Markiewicz’s Lonesome Wing is a proudly angelic and differently abled being, Bracha L. Ettinger’s series of paintings called Angel of Carriance provide messages of resonant “co-emergence.”
The computational subject may increasingly inhabit a fraction after now, between the recorded past and the predicted future. But bodily experience will remain in another temporality as well: the temporality of being changed by what occurs. And where there is a body capable of holding a void, a demented body, grace can still enter.
Angels are graceful. I have met some in my life.
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, no. 59 (Winter 1992).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1265–74.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968), 257–58.
For Levinas, le visage d’Autrui (face of the other) is both where we connect with the other but also the limit of that relation. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969).
In the terms I developed while working on Gormley’s recent exhibition titled “Geestgrond,” it is geest and grond, spirit and ground.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (Routledge, 2002), 10.
Paolo Zellini, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (2016; Pegasus Books, 2020).
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
Pope Leo XIV’s wonderful first encyclical (May 15, 2026—see →) is of essential importance in addressing and thinking through our relationship with AI from ethical and philosophical perspectives. However, his recent tweet (October 2, 2026—see →), which also embraces the importance of art, does not consider that the history of humanity is a history of successive technologies, each dehumanizing at first: “In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.” In fact, the human has always transformed subjectivity creatively. Artists have always used the technologies of their time, whether a tool to carve stone, a camera to take a photograph or create a film, a 3D printer, or AI agents today.
Email to the author.
Beeple’s use of self-imposed rules resonates with his interest in Danish avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogme 95, founded in 1995 by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Dogme 95 operated according to a strict set of rules.
The god Hermes is a Mediterranean precursor to the Abrahamic angels.