Does an AI God Have an Ass?

Does an AI God Have an Ass? traces historical connections between Michelangelo’s depiction of god’s bum on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in his 1511 fresco The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants and the ways in which religious conceptions of AI are imagined and visualized in the tech industry and popular culture. This lecture-performance introduces Silicon Valley’s AI religiosity and its heretical counterparts through the figure of Salb Hacz, an AI mystic and self-proclaimed AI heretic. Reckoning with Hacz’s revelatory visions of backsides and their heretical fissures, the lecture suggests that the absence of buttocks in major AI image generators and large language models alike is an index of the tech industry’s erasure of embodiment in its religious fantasies. If an “ass of god” exists, then Hacz claims to see it in the invisibilized workers and the ghost labor they perform that is essential for AI to automate and generate words, images, politics, and beliefs. 

Does an AI God Have an Ass? is part of Blas’s Silicon Traces series, a trilogy of moving image installations and related works that contends with the histories, philosophies, beliefs, fictions, and fantasies that shape Silicon Valley’s visions of the future as means to domination. This lecture-performance connects to CULTUS (2023), part two of the Silicon Traces trilogy, and the artist book Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz (2024), published by the Vienna Secession and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.

Live performance, single-channel audio-visual presentation (length variable, 45-60 min.)