Now, let’s pause for a moment to consider my axiom: “We slay with technology and save the victim with art.” In paleolithic cultures, the victim is the animal. In neolithic cultures, the dying male is the victim that is saved in art, as we see in the images of the male placed in the vulture shrines of death at the Çatal Hüyük of 6,000 BCE. In the shift from prehistoric matristic cultures to ancient patriarchal societies, there is a shift in sexual valuation and woman becomes the victim – as we see in the classical mythic stories of Persephone and Eurydice, or of Tiamat in Babylon. In industrial societies, nature and traditional religion become the victims saved in art, and so we have romanticism, or, in the medieval court of the Crystal Palace of 1851, the Gothic Revival in which industrial society becomes fascinated with the middle ages – with Catholicism in the Oxford movement, and with Pre-Raphaelite visions of Arthurianism and the age of faith. Potted plants and ferns are moved inside living rooms and iron sewing machines are decorated with vines. In the shift from industrial to post-industrial through television, the mind becomes the victim, as politics, sports, pop culture, and entertainment become one in collective media feedlots where our minds are prepared for slaughter. And now in the realm of artificial intelligence, Ray Kurzweil of MIT prophecies that by the year 2030, humans will be passed up in evolution by machines. According to this commercial for MIT, we humans will become the house pets or potted plants of “the Age of Spiritual Machines,”¹² or, if we are lucky, like the tiny mitochondria that moved inside the eukaryotic cell and were able to keep some of their ancient DNA. In this shift from evolution by natural selection to evolution by cultural intrusion through genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and inserted nanotechnologies, the human genome becomes the victim. Expect to see an art that crosses genes, DNA spirals, music and vibration into some new form of installation art. In fact, the poster that came with the publication of the guide to the human genome in Nature was already suitable for framing and placement on a wall. In the terms of McLuhan’s famous tetrad, now it is human sacrifice that is being culturally retrieved. Kids unconsciously sense this and can feel that they are now evolutionary waste, and so they microwave their brains with long conversations on cellphones, insert metal all over their bodies, and turn their tattooed skin into elegiac broadsides marking the dehominization of the primate, homo sapiens.