A timely exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological change. New Humans traces a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures. The book – and its accompanying exhibition that will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu – connects the age of automatons to the burgeoning era of generative AI and brings together a cavalcade of humans becoming machines and machines becoming human.
