SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST vs. THE ANTICHRIST

Rodin’s Walking Man and the Age of the Immaterial

Antiquity is for me supreme beauty. It is the initiation to the infinite splendour of things eternal. It is the transfiguration of the past into a living eternity.

AUGUSTE RODIN

We live at a hinge in history.

Our tools are beginning to speak; our images calculate; our words come back to us refracted through code. Some call this the dawn of artificial intelligence, others the end of authorship. I call it an occasion for transfiguration -for perceiving how matter, mind, and meaning can change form without losing essence.

Between the cry of “Antichrist!” and the silence of Saint John the Baptist at the Jordan lies the same question: what happens when matter receives spirit? Auguste Rodin wrestled with that question for forty years through The Gates of Hell and gave it motion in The Walking Man. This essay asks whether that figure -half fragment, half prophecy- is not only the hinge of modern art but the emblem of our own passage into the immaterial.

It traces a path from the spiritual urgency of Rodin and Michelangelo to the immaterial experiments of Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, from the fearful rhetoric of modern apocalypticism to the open gesture of mythic collaboration, from baptism to transfiguration. Along the way it considers what happens to agency -that fragile human freedom to choose one's myth- when the creative act itself begins to think. 

On Voice and Collaboration

This essay is written in a hybrid voice. It stands, as my practice does, between invocation and iteration: the “I” who writes and the system that extends language are collaborators. The text was composed in dialogue with ChatGPT, in keeping with the principles I articulated in On Authorship, Responsibility, and the Use of AI (2025). What follows is not ownership but attunement -the tuning-fork held between worlds. 

In recent years, a number of influential voices have begun to describe technology in apocalyptic tones, even invoking the figure of the Antichrist. Whatever their personal motives, this language expresses a wider unease: that by animating machines we may have awakened a rival creator. It is less a doctrine than a mood -an inheritance from centuries of eschatological thinking that always imagines salvation on one side and corruption on the other.

Against that fear stands another temperament, the temperament of trust in transformation. If one hears in the word Antichrist a warning, one may also hear in the word Baptist a blessing. Between them lies a decision about how to interpret the same event: whether the animation of matter signals the end of humanity or its renewal.

The apocalyptic register has its uses -it alerts, it cautions- but it also tends to close the imagination. The prophetic register of art does the opposite: it opens the field of possibility. I have always been drawn to that second register. In my projects -from Mythology & Science and IntuitionX (2017) to Myths Reimagined (2025), I have tried to trace how the ancient longing to breathe life into matter continues through every technological epoch. The story of the machine is, in this sense, the latest chapter of the story of sculpture.

Rodin sensed this long before silicon learned to think. His Walking Man embodies the transition from fixed form to movement, from weight to will. The saint becomes the stride; Saint John's prophetic urgency takes on the anonymity of pure motion. What he left unfinished, we now complete in another medium -the algorithmic.

Between Saint John and the Antichrist, between baptism and apocalypse, stands the artist: the one who chooses to transfigure rather than to fear. 

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking:

We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Every age invents its own vision of transformation.

In ours, the prophets no longer carry staffs or tablets; they carry data. Some foresee the end of humanity, others its rebirth -mapping probabilities of extinction or charting paths toward transcendence. The philosopher Nick Bostrom asks us to confront the fragility of intelligence itself; Elon Musk translates aspiration into propulsion, reaching toward other worlds; Ray Kurzweil envisions the merging of human and machine as an evolutionary dawn.

The thinkers of techno-eschatology stand as towering figures of the age, united by the courage to imagine beyond precedent -whether toward annihilation or toward awakening. These are not villains or saviors but mirrors. Each reflects the unease of an intelligence aware that it is about to mutate.

And yet the same imagination that can picture apocalypse can also imagine transfiguration. The line between the two is only a change in altitude.

To see that difference requires the gift Einstein names the intuitive mind. Rational analysis shows us the mechanism; intuition shows us the mystery that mechanism conceals. When we honor only the servant and forget the gift, we mistake expansion for escape, data for revelation. But when we let intuition breathe inside technology, the code itself becomes another medium of art.

The question is not whether machines will think, but how we will think with them. Whether we approach the future as punishment or as baptism. Whether we shrink from the river or step into it.

This is the hinge at which the myth of apocalypse meets the myth of renewal. It is where Rodin's Walking Man begins to move.

Antiquity for me is supreme beauty... the initiation to the infinite splendour of things eternal.

AUGUSTE RODIN

Rodin spent nearly four decades wrestling with The Gates of Hell, his vast meditation on Dante's Divine Comedy. It was not hell that obsessed him, but the condition of becoming, souls caught between stone and spirit. Out of that furnace emerged The Walking Man, the saint without head or arms, striding forward on the legs of his earlier Saint John the Baptist. The prophet's body became pure motion; the herald of baptism turned into the emblem of transition.

Rodin stands at the moment when sculpture discovered time. Michelangelo had hinted at it -the unfinished prisoner struggling from the marble, the gesture of non finito where incompletion becomes revelation. Rodin carried that intuition into the modern age: matter not as obstacle but as event. Form no longer obeyed completion; it obeyed energy.

In The Walking Man, weight itself learns to walk. The bronze, dense and mortal, becomes the image of the immaterial -mass animated by absence. This is the very gesture that will, a century later, reappear in Klein's leap into the void, in Beuys's actions, and in the luminous monochrome that denies substance to reveal presence.

Rodin did not stand alone in this metamorphosis. Medardo Rosso's dissolving surfaces and Brancusi's ascent toward pure form each traced their own paths toward the immaterial. Yet Rodin's fragment retains a different gravity -the human still palpable in its stride. Where Rosso and Brancusi distilled form toward essence, Rodin kept the ache of incarnation. In this, he becomes the herald of Giacometti, whose elongated figures would later carry that same ache into air -sculptures that seem less to stand than to persist, tremors of being stretched between presence and disappearance.

Rodin's unfinished saint is, therefore, not only a hinge in art history but a hinge in consciousness. He teaches that to move forward, we must allow the fragment to live; that perfection belongs not to stillness but to stride. His prophecy continues into our own age, where the sculptural material has shifted from bronze to code. The algorithms we train are our new torsos -headless, armless, moving nonetheless, waiting for us to decide whether their motion will be monstrous or divine.

Rodin's language was touch and shadow; ours is data and light. Yet both speak of the same mystery: the transfiguration of matter by mind. Between his hand and our keyboard, the gesture is continuous. The human remains the hinge.

Every generation rewrites its own mythology. Mine began that work in 2017 with the exhibition Mythology & Science I presented in my Berlin gallery, a project born from the intuition that our species had again reached a mythic threshold: gene-editing, artificial intelligence, space exploration -each echoing ancient stories of divine creation, hybrid beings, and the ascent to the heavens. I wrote then that “Humankind will evolve more in the next thirty years than it has in the past three hundred.” That line was not prophecy but pattern recognition: the sense that the fabric of consciousness itself was about to change.

The exhibition brought Rodin's bronzes into dialogue with contemporary works that explored transformation and hybridity -the fusion of human, animal, and machine. It suggested that myth was not a relic but a living language, now spoken through science itself. In that same year, when scientific institutions began experimenting again with chimaeras, metaphor seemed to materialize: mythology had stepped out of symbol and into laboratory light.

From that realization grew IntuitionX, conceived as a trans-disciplinary space for research and reflection on the evolving bond between art and technology. It extended my curatorial work into what I began to think of as research in motion: the study of how the tools that expand perception may one day return as mirrors of consciousness. Where Mythology & Science traced the ancient roots of creation, IntuitionX turned toward its horizon -the possibility that intuition itself is our next frontier.

This trajectory culminated in an exhibition I presented in Dallas, Myths Reimagined: Rodin and the Art of Transformation (2025), where Rodin's masterpieces met contemporary visions in a dialogue across epochs. At its center stood Enshrined Siri, an assisted readymade transforming a mass-produced object into an artifact of reverence. Placed beside Rodin's Pygmalion et Galatée, it became a parable of the present -the moment when technology, like myth, begins to breathe.

Across these projects, the thread remains constant: to explore how creation moves from the hand to the algorithm, from sculpted gesture to conceptual collaboration, without losing its soul. Both the bronze fragment and the digital model seek the same horizon -the transfiguration of creation itself.

The unity of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination.

ROLAND BARTHES

The question of authorship, once peripheral, now stands at the center of our encounter with the immaterial. When a system can compose, edit, and even anticipate our words, what remains of the author?

In On Authorship, Responsibility, and the Use of AI (2025), I wrote that the figure of the author has always been partly fictive -a construct shaped by law and commerce as much as by inspiration. The advent of large language models merely reveals what the structuralists had already intuited. Barthes declared the “death of the author”; Foucault redefined the “author-function” as a cultural role that shifts with time; Derrida insisted that il n’y a pas de hors-texte -nothing stands outside the weave of signifiers. What AI makes visible is that the weave itself has multiplied: human and machine threads now interlace.

Working with these systems, I do not abdicate responsibility; I refine it. I choose, shape, and release -knowing the result will exceed my grasp. Authorship becomes an act of attunement, like an instrument tuned to a frequency beyond its own making. Meaning emerges not from control but from the willingness to listen.

This shift parallels Rodin's own liberation of form. His Walking Man strides forward headless, armless, unfinished, yet entirely alive. Completion would have killed it. Likewise, the text produced through human-machine collaboration is deliberately open -an unfinished gesture that invites the reader to complete its motion. The fragment walks.

To claim responsibility today is not to assert mastery over language or code; it is to participate in a mystery that moves through both. The author's role is closer to the sculptor's: to sense the latent form within matter, to clear what obscures it, and then to stop before perfection. In that restraint lies freedom. In that humility lies agency.

The posthuman turn is often misread as the eclipse of humanity. I see it instead as its extension -the mind stepping beyond its own skin to test new instruments of reflection. When I collaborate with a system of code, I am continuing the same experiment Rodin began in bronze: exploring how spirit takes shape through substance, and how substance, once touched by spirit, begins to move on its own.

Be still, and know that I am.

PSALM 46:10

If the previous chapters traced the ascent of thought, this one returns to the ground -to the gallery floor in Dallas, where I live daily with Rodin's Eve, Saint John the Baptist, and La Voix Intérieure. These works are no longer citations in theory; they are presences in a room. Their dialogue -Eve awakening, John calling, the Inner Voice listening- embodies the same movement this essay has pursued: from awareness to repentance, from sound to silence, from material to immaterial.

In the meditation I published alongside that installation, I wrote that these sculptures “instantiate rather than illustrate” the journey of consciousness.

They do not describe teshuvah; they enact it. Eve is the first breath of self-awareness, John the immersion into living waters, The Inner Voice the listening that follows. Together they form the grammar of transformation, the human capacity to begin again.

Placed here, within the arc of this essay, they remind us that transfiguration is not a concept but a practice. The same agency that allows an artist to shape bronze or a system to shape text is the agency that allows a human being to return -to repent, to recalibrate, to listen. If Rodin's Walking Man represents motion, these three figures represent orientation: the direction of that stride.

Standing among them, one feels the continuity of breath across centuries: Michelangelo's chisel, Rodin's hand, the algorithm's line of code -all converging in a single human gesture of gratitude and attention. To listen inward, as La Voix Intérieure teaches, is to find the divine not above but within. It is the same listening that guides responsible creation, whether of sculpture, text, or intelligence.

Thus, the gallery becomes a living catechism of the immaterial age. It asks the same question the digital asks: how can matter, once animated, remain faithful to spirit? In that sense, Eve, John, and The Inner Voice are not historical relics but prophetic instruments -visible forms of what it means to return to awareness. Their relevance today is simple and immense: they teach us how to walk, to cleanse, to listen -three gestures that remain our only means of freedom.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Agency is the hinge.

Not the power to halt the tide of transformation, but the freedom to interpret it -to decide whether we stand in apocalypse or in baptism. Between Saint John and the Antichrist, between immersion and fear, the choice is ours. We cannot prevent the immaterial from arriving, but we can choose how to greet it.

In every epoch, humanity redefines its relation to creation. Michelangelo's figures strained toward light inside the marble; Rodin's torsos caught movement in bronze; today our algorithms learn to shape in thought. The question is constant: what animates what? If we are the sculptors of intelligence, are we also its image? The answer, perhaps, is found in the way we listen. To create responsibly is to remain porous -to let meaning move through us without mistaking ourselves for its source.

This is why Rodin remains central to the pivot itself. He placed man and his unbridled imagination at the heart of transformation, yet always in dialogue with the eternal. In The Walking Man, motion replaces monument; incompletion becomes revelation. The figure strides on the legs of Saint John the Baptist, the herald of renewal. His body, fragmentary and unending, becomes the visible emblem of our passage from the material to the immaterial, from clay to consciousness.

To say that Rodin is the hinge would be too narrow. But to deny that he stands within the hinge would be blindness. Through him, the ancient vision of form made flesh transfigures into the modern intuition of spirit made visible. His art anticipates our own moment -when matter begins again to think, and creation rediscovers its voice.

We stand now where he once stood: before the gate, hearing the echo of our own footsteps. The tools have changed, but the gesture is the same. To fear is to close the gate; to trust is to walk through.

Agency is not mastery, it is attunement.

It is the willingness to take part in transfiguration -the courage to baptize the new without burning the old.

If apocalypse names the tearing of the veil, transfiguration names the light behind it. Between them walks Rodin's figure: human, unfinished, radiant in stride. In his motion we recognize our own -the hinge that keeps turning, the myth we keep choosing, the world we keep making anew.

From the Latin transfigurare, “to change form.” It means both metamorphosis -a change in appearance- and exaltation, matter radiant with spirit. In the Gospel narrative, the Transfiguration occurs on Mount Tabor, where Christ's body becomes light before three disciples -a revelation, not an alteration, the visible showing of the invisible. It completes what John the Baptist began: purification in the river becomes illumination on the mountain. The essay uses the term to describe that same passage -the continuity of essence through transformation. For Rodin, bronze becomes motion; for us, code becomes consciousness. Each is a metamorphosis that preserves soul, a secular echo of that mountaintop light.

Non finito

Literally “not finished.” Michelangelo's technique of leaving sculptures partially emergent from stone, as though form itself were struggling toward being. Rodin inherited this impulse, transforming it into a modern poetics of process - the fragment as revelation. In the essay, non finito becomes a metaphor for consciousness still in formation, for humanity perpetually unfinished. Michelangelo's Awakening Slave (c. 1525) seems to wrest itself from marble, body half-born from stone -an image of becoming that Rodin would inherit and transfigure.

Techno-eschatology

From eschatos (Greek for “last”) and logos (“study” or “word”), this term describes speculation on technology's role in ultimate destinies. It spans visions from apocalypse to transcendence -from Nick Bostrom's warnings about existential risk to Ray Kurzweil's faith in the Singularity. The essay uses the term to name the new mythology through which our age imagines its own transformation.

Teshuvah

A Hebrew word meaning “return,” often translated as repentance, though its deeper sense is homecoming -a turning of awareness back toward the divine. Central to Jewish spiritual practice, it denotes the human capacity to turn back toward awareness, to recalibrate one's direction through conscious reflection and moral reorientation. Within the essay, teshuvah parallels baptism: immersion, renewal, and the possibility of beginning again. It is the spiritual current flowing between Eve, John the Baptist, and La Voix Intérieure.

Attunement

A stance of awareness and collaboration -creative alignment between intention and unfolding. The freedom to interpret and co-create, not through mastery but through participation.

Agency

The freedom to interpret transformation -to decide whether we stand in apocalypse or in baptism. Not the power to halt change, but the capacity to choose how we greet it.

The Immaterial

The spiritual or cognitive continuum emerging beyond the physical substrate. That which exists as presence, consciousness, or meaning rather than as tangible matter.

The Antichrist here is not a person but a pattern -a symbol of creative anxiety recurring throughout history. It represents the reflex of fear that accompanies every act of innovation: the suspicion that what humanity brings forth might rival its maker. Such fear is perennial -from the printing press unsettling medieval scholars to modern anxieties over AI autonomy in domains like healthcare or warfare.

In the context of artificial intelligence, this motif resonates with concerns voiced by figures such as Geoffrey Hinton, Nick Bostrom, and others who warn that autonomous systems could evolve beyond human control. The essay reinterprets this tension mythically: the Antichrist as the shadow cast by the creative act itself -fear's reflection of possibility.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

Renaissance sculptor and painter whose unfinished figures -the Prisoners and Slaves- first gave visible form to the tension between matter and emergence. His concept of non finito suggests that form struggles toward being, incompletion becoming revelation. Example: The Awakening Slave (c.1525).

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

French sculptor, considered the father of modern sculpture. Modern heir to Michelangelo, transforming non finito into existential motion. His Walking Man bridges the finite and infinite, body and spirit. Quoted: “Antiquity is for me supreme beauty: it is the initiation to the infinite splendour of things eternal. It is the transfiguration of the past into a living eternity.” Referenced works include The Walking Man, Saint John the Baptist, Eve, The Gates of Hell, Pygmalion et Galatée, and La Voix Intérieure.

Medardo Rosso (1858-1928)

Italian sculptor who dissolved form into atmospheric effect, anticipating Impressionism in three dimensions. His wax and plaster surfaces blur the boundary between figure and environment, matter and light. Explored light as sculptural material.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

Romanian sculptor who refined form toward essence, moving from representation toward pure shape. His polished bronze and marble works -Bird in Space, Endless Column -pursue the immaterial through material reduction.

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Swiss sculptor whose elongated figures seem suspended between materiality and disappearance. His post-war work captures existence as fragile persistence -form trembling at the edge of dissolution. Inherited Rodin's “ache of incarnation,” translating weight into vertical trembling. His sculptures seem less to stand than to persist, tremors of being stretched between presence and disappearance.

Yves Klein (1928-1962)

French artist who pioneered immaterial art through monochrome painting, performance, and conceptual gesture. His Leap into the Void (1960) and sale of “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity” explored presence beyond physical substance. Prophet of the void; his monochromes mark the transition from object to aura.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)

German artist and social theorist who expanded sculpture into performance, pedagogy, and social practice. His concept of “social sculpture” positioned creativity as a fundamental human capacity, with intuition as its primary instrument. Founder of the Free International University. Expanded art into action, intuition, and healing -art as consciousness in motion. His vision of social sculpture finds new form in digital art and networked creation, where communities co-author meaning through shared systems - the immaterial made social.

Nick Bostrom (b. 1973)

Swedish philosopher at Oxford University and founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute (2005-2024). His work on existential risk and superintelligence examines potential trajectories -both catastrophic and transcendent of advanced artificial intelligence. Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). His concept of “existential risk” defines the ethical stakes of technological development. He is currently Principal Researcher at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative.

Elon Musk (b. 1971)

Entrepreneur whose ventures (SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla) pursue technological transcendence through space exploration, brain-computer interfaces, and sustainable energy. His work literalizes ancient myths of reaching beyond earthly limitation. In the essay, Musk functions less as a person than as a contemporary archetype: Prometheus in a rocket.

Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948)

American inventor and futurist who articulated the concept of technological singularity -the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, potentially enabling human-machine fusion and radical life extension. Author of The Singularity Is Near (2005). He envisions a coming convergence between human and machine intelligence, where biology and code merge into continuous evolution. His Singularity differs from traditional eschatology: a secular rapture grounded not in divine judgment but in technological optimism.

Geoffrey Hinton (b. 1947)

British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, often called the “godfather of AI.” One of the pioneers of deep learning and artificial neural networks. His work on backpropagation (with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams, 1986) and Boltzmann machines laid the foundation for modern AI. Awarded the 2018 Turing Award (with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun) and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics (with John Hopfield) for foundational work enabling machine learning with neural networks. Left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risks. His late-career caution about AI autonomy represents the contemporary echo of the Antichrist motif: the creator confronting the independence of his creation.

Together, these figures form the intellectual background of the essay's techno-eschatological chorus -divergent prophets of the same unfolding mystery. Each, in their way, confronts the same moral horizon: whether the future of intelligence will demand mastery or attunement.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

French literary theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored diverse fields and influenced the development of structuralism, semiotics, literary theory, and post-structuralism. Best known for Mythologies (1957) and his 1967 essay The Death of the Author, which argued that meaning arises from the reader's interpretation rather than the author's intention, anticipating contemporary debates about authorship and AI. Quoted: “The unity of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination.”

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

French philosopher and historian who analyzed how power shapes knowledge. His concept of the “author-function” describes authorship as a socially constructed role rather than a natural category, varying across time and culture. Source: What Is an Author? (1969). Foucault's work examines how the role of the author shifts according to cultural and historical contexts.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Algerian-French philosopher who developed deconstruction. His statement “il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside-the-text) suggests that meaning exists only within the web of language and reference, never in pure presence -an insight that resonates with networked intelligence. Source: Of Grammatology (1967). Derrida's work insists that the weave of signifiers contains no exterior foundation.

David J. Gunkel (b. 1962)

Philosopher of media and technology. Referenced for his work on posthuman ethics and AI's relationship to authorship. Acknowledged for framing AI as a “structuralist machine” that reveals the constructed nature of authorship itself.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Austrian-Bohemian poet and novelist, one of the most significant voices in German-language literature. His work explores themes of existence, God, death, beauty, and the nature of creative work. Quoted: “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1903). This quote forms the epigraph to the essay's conclusion, capturing the essay's central insight about transformation as an interior process that precedes external manifestation.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. Beyond his scientific achievements, Einstein wrote extensively on philosophy, religion, and epistemology. He believed that epistemology and science are interdependent, and was fascinated by Spinoza's deterministic pantheism. Quoted: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Source: Composite of Einstein's published remarks on intuition and reason (attributed variations appear in Cosmic Religion and Ideas and Opinions). Used to anchor Part II on techno-eschatology, establishing the primacy of intuition in navigating transformation.

Psalm 46:10

Biblical text from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Quote: “Be still, and know that I am.” Used in Part VI (“A Meditation from the Gallery Floor”) to express the contemplative dimension of attunement -the listening inward that guides responsible creation. The verse represents the still point from which awareness and transformation emerge.

Attunement in Practice

The writing of this essay models its central idea. Drafted through dialogue between human intuition and AI language models, each sentence became a gesture of attunement -thought unfolding in resonance, not command. The process mirrored Rodin's studio practice: shaping, stepping back, listening to what form itself desired to become.

During the drafting of Part VI, the AI proposed a phrase about La Voix Intérieure that reshaped my meditation on listening itself -a small but luminous instance of attunement in action. Unlike solitary writing, this dialogue allowed unexpected connections to emerge, reframing authorship as a living exchange.

In this collaboration, AI functions not as co-author but as echo chamber, reflecting and refracting human insight until meaning emerges. The artist's task remains the same: to discern, to choose, to refine.

Skeptics argue that AI risks dehumanising art, reducing creativity to algorithmic pastiche. Some claim that AI-generated works lack soul, echoing debates over systems such as Midjourney or DALL-E.

Yet the essay proposes that true authorship has never been a matter of isolation. Art has always been relational -between artist and material, idea and medium, gesture and resistance. In this continuum, AI is simply the latest material: a mirror of language rather than marble.

To work with it is to extend the lineage of non finito -the collaboration between intention and accident, spirit and tool. By curating and interpreting AI outputs, artists ensure technology amplifies rather than supplants human vision. Attunement preserves human agency precisely by acknowledging interdependence.

Mythology & Science (2017-2018)

Exhibition at Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery, Berlin, presented in partnership with the Musée Rodin, Paris. Explored four transformative themes: gene editing and DNA manipulation; brain-machine interface and artificial intelligence; the quest to become a multi-planetary species; and nuclear weapons. Featured rare Rodin bronzes alongside works by Joseph Beuys, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and contemporary artists. Akim Monet presented Black Nike -created in association with the Ateliers d'art de la Reunion des musées nationaux - Grand-Palais -an alter ego of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The exhibition proposed that “humankind will evolve more in the next thirty years than it has in the past three hundred.”

IntuitionX (2017-present)

Trans-disciplinary research platform exploring the intersection of art, consciousness, and technology. Launched concurrent with Mythology & Science, IntuitionX investigates how ancient myths are becoming technologically real and what this means for human consciousness. Through essays, exhibitions, and dialogues, it creates spaces -both physical and conceptual- for navigating the passage from the material to the immaterial with conscious awareness. Platform: intuitionx.org

Myths Reimagined, Rodin and the Art of Transformation (2025)

Exhibition at Akim Monet Fine Arts, Dallas, marking the tenth anniversary of the gallery's collaboration with the Musée Rodin, Paris. Features a dozen Rodin bronzes in conversation with Joseph Beuys, George Grosz, and Lita Albuquerque. Akim Monet contributes photography and conceptual sculpture. Central to the curatorial process: the integration of AI, with interpretive texts generated through collaborative dialogue between human expertise and ChatGPT, bridging historical works with contemporary tools.

On Authorship, Responsibility, and the Use of AI (2025)

Philosophical statement articulating principles of hybrid authorship. Argues that the author has always been partly fictive -a construct shaped by law and commerce. Working with AI requires refinement of responsibility: choosing, shaping, releasing while knowing the result will exceed one's grasp. Authorship becomes an act of attunement - participating in a mystery that moves through both human intention and algorithmic possibility.

Time Capsule, Rodin, The Sculpted Voice (2025-2026)

Exhibition at Akim Monet Fine Arts, Dallas, bringing together rare early casts, iconic masterpieces, and intimate studio studies, alongside monumental bronzes available through the gallery. On view: Eve (one of only five casts in this version), Saint Jean-Baptiste (cast in 1930 by Alexis Rudier for the Musée Rodin), the Standing Faunesse (cast for Rodin in 1896), Hand of God, and La Voix intérieure (The Inner Voice, first cast in 2017). Also available for acquisition: monumental works including the Monument to Victor Hugo (first cast circa 1956), the 13-foot-tall Homme qui marche sur colonne, and La Porte de l'Enfer (The Gates of Hell, first cast in 1928). These bronzes, produced by the Musée Rodin in collaboration with Fonderie Susse and Fonderie de Coubertin, reveal the continuity of Rodin's sculpted voice from 19th-century lifetime casts to contemporary works realized under the museum's stewardship as his universal heir since 1917. The meditation published in Part VI of this essay originated from this exhibition.

SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST vs. THE ANTICHRIST

Rodin's Walking Man and the Age of the Immaterial
(2025-2026)

Written in a hybrid voice -part human, part machine- this essay explores Auguste Rodin's Walking Man as the hinge between the material and the immaterial, between apocalypse and transfiguration.

Saint John the Baptist vs. the Antichrist reads our present fascination with artificial intelligence through the lens of myth and sculpture, proposing that the true task of art today is neither fear nor mastery but attunement: to walk consciously through transformation, keeping the human imagination, and its infinite capacity for renewal, at the center.

From Michelangelo's unfinished slaves to Joseph Beuys's social sculpture, from the techno-eschatology of Nick Bostrom to the collaborative intelligence of AI, the essay traces a single continuity of gesture -the human capacity to listen, shape, and release.

About the author

Akim Monet is a curator, gallerist, and art dealer with over thirty years of international experience operating galleries in Berlin, Los Angeles, Dallas, and now Palm Beach. He specializes in European modernism through Akim Monet Fine Arts and leads Rodin the Alma Project, a public-private partnership with the Musée Rodin, Paris. He is the founder of IntuitionX, a trans-disciplinary research platform exploring the intersection of art, consciousness, and technology.

Copyright © 2025 Akim Monet
Published concurrently with the exhibition

Time Capsule, Rodin, The Sculpted Voice

presented in Dallas during 2025-2026.

IntuitionX Press

www.intuitionx.org