Nimbus Mimesis Penis and the Velvet Hammer
It once was a given that the power of confirmation and denial is vested, not in the ability to connect and become visible, but rather in the ability (and privilege) to disconnect, becoming invisible and untraceable—like the great Greta Garbo.
With again that big fat moon up above, everywhere I looked for Venus Victrix was refracted by dappled lights bouncing off revolving polished metal, casting slightly morphing shadows of Madame Black—overwhelming my eyes in splendid shifting tessellation. Such passive-antagonistic visual spectacle suggests an opposition to both the highly visible currents of algorithmic culture and the human spirit’s general reluctance to move beyond frantic stimulation.
Ambitious aesthetic concerns are not exempt.
But as the amount of anti-art possible is recognized as inexhaustible, Madame Black and I tired, sleep overcame us, and we began engaging in acts of ontological deprivation. We became almost invisible from the street to the uninformed. But we were not in any sense anti-spectacular in intensity. We just fell into the shrouded trap-cycle of sleep that oscillates between radical mediocrity and frustrated sublimity. Like with Madame Black, with each attempt to end art, new art emerges; if only as lewd burlesque.
On awaking, we scurried for our coffee and stood next to an etching of Villa d’Este Gardens (ca. 1761) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi—whose foundational purpose is nothing other than visibility. In it I could see Venus Victrix craftily cast by Federico Fellini as Carmilla Salvatorelli, as her size serves to exaggerate the magnitude of the garden stairs. Salvatorelli’s petite size suggests here our little friend the White Rabbit’s sense of scale, whereby everything seems bigger than normal. I see here two large touching figures, a naked and hairless man and woman, assembled with a plethora of warped images based on those Japanese hotels made up of tiny sleep chambers. Egotistically enough, I had dreamed that I am the first person to write about carnal relationships in the first person.
Contemplating the scale and feel between me and Venus Victrix is one of the great intellectual/sensual pleasures to be had on awakening. This delectation is only magnified by holding hands with a now sauntering and masked Venus Victrix, quite suddenly in the Côte d’Azur wearing a tall white plumed hat that lends her a dream-like phantasmagoric quality of ambivalent softness. Pinned to the hat is the astonishing, sexy, terrifying, crazy, intoxicating Okimono ivory sculpture from 18th century Japan called Eros Sitting on a Skull. Its tiny but macabre magnificence is stunningly rude and risqué. Holding a flaming heart in hand, the naked winged-boy’s genitals are replaced with a wicked fierce-toothed skull, thus merging life instincts (Eros) and death instincts (Thanatos) into one effective image.
Gazing on this beautiful ivory, abhorrent feelings stir and quiver and seethe. The elaborate unity of the ivory material in effect makes my melodramatic gloom mix with comic-corporeal reconciliations under the aegis of the erotic.
As we begin hustling past the sodden grottoes of our molecular love and along the dripping balustrades, she took off in front of me—changing my emotions from pity to folly. From that life-affirming viewpoint she reminded me of White Rabbit going down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Certainly some sort of similar mythical magic seems afoot here, as at one brief moment—gesturing with the flip of her fan—a flash of gold is reflected so to rouse some water spirits. Clear and enchanting water flows into the trembling grass and plenum and the vacuum meet and intermingle.
I have noticed that water takes on an erotic charm now, for all artistic minds love the blue immensity of the sea. I roll, sleep, and sing in the depths of my sea-mind at the edge of clear water; like in the ballad, I might let myself be carried away by an Undine.
My skull vibrates with virtuosity, projecting a mesmeric unease that plunges far below my material circumference. A long, thick, writhing, phallic snake has slithered out of the moist grass into my left eye socket and worked its way to my skull’s summit. Thus male virility is acclaimed, but also plagued with death-disintegrating anxiety.
Staring at it with my right eye makes me feel a bit queasy. I am engulfed and saturated by its ill-omened, lapidary stylish significance.
As some hip Armin Van Buuren designed trance mounts, the gracefully animated spray of the water spirits fell upon me, suggesting something of a blasé bacchanalian ejaculation. For my damp transient Venus Victrix had merged with the airborne moisture just as I started to again question her materiality. For as William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem Among School Children: how can we tell the dancer from the dance?
For me, this merging of Venus Victrix with slippery liquescence suggests a personification of transcendent erotic ecstasy. Certainly behind my wet dream there is the assumption that consummated sexual activity usually is the mixing of gametes—but in Salvador Dalí’s 1929 painting Le Grand Masturbateur, a woman with her eyes closed holds her nose against a penis, lost to pleasure-dreams within its powerful fragrance.
This very musky fragrance triggered the appearance of the one and only La Grande Diva, who I first encountered at the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz. She appeared filmy, as Walter Schulze-Mittendorff’s sculpture Robot from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) on fancy Delancey Street, still beautiful in her bucolic body-launched machine-kinetics (though radicalized). I was not startled and shocked with her sagacious Shanti sex outfit in which she played with a burlesque oeuvre rich in Last God connotation while being bound together by a consistency in thematic logic that includes references to the mythical, historical, literary and spiritual imagery of the old Jewish golem. Who math philosopher Norbert Wiener (one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms that could possibly be simulated by machines: an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence) once aptly compared with cybernetic technology. Viewed through that lens, everything from trans-human artificial life cyborgs to anthropomorphic robots to humanoid androids to post-human Last God avatar agents bear the mystical mark of an artificial body madly turning on its creator, for this tall tale of the golem is the oldest narrative I know about the artificial life of The Last God.
The golem was first mentioned in passing as גֹּלֶם in the Bible in Psalm 139:16, but the first golem story was spun by the 16th century Talmudic Rabbi Loew ben Bezalel. In it, he supposedly used Kabbalistic magic, Hebrew letters, paranormal amulets, or mystical incantations to conjure into existence the Golem of Prague: a colossal figure built from mud or other base materials who protected the Bohemian Jews from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Though initially a savior, the Golem of Prague eventually became harmful to those he had saved and had to be destroyed.
There are myriad subsequent versions of the story, with many variations and contradictions. It is generally agreed that what animated this mystical entity was an inscription either applied to its forehead or slipped under its tongue, and the golem has largely been understood to be an artificial man that is part protector and part monster, but many other differences abound. This specious aspect makes the golem particularly interesting to artists like me because such contradictory vagueness yields opaque and elusive visual iconography.
The golem legend spread, popularized by the 1915 novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink and three movies by Paul Wegener: The Golem (aka The Monster of Fate) (1915), The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917), and The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). An essential general reference for the golemphile is Idel Moshe’s 1990 book Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, published as part of the Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion series. In it, Moshe maintains that the role of the golem concept in Judaism was to confer an exceptional status to the Jewish elite by bestowing them with the capability of supernatural powers deriving from a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and its magical and mystical values, which unfortunately reminds me of Walter Jacobi’s abysmal 1942 book Golem, a flagrant anti-Semitic propaganda text concerning a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory within the Czech Jewry. It was issued during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.
But anyway, this Metropolis-dressed La Grande Diva appeared to me as an abiding conviction that cold and inert matter may be brought to life through the correct application of words. For Venus©~ñ~lOve Systems’ brave new prompt word-world was already suggested back in 1965 by Kabbalah philosopher Gershom Scholem, when he officially named the first Israeli computer Golem I. Because just as the golem is brought to life by combinations of letters, The Last God obeys coding language. But rather than a sign of human accomplishment, the Last God as golem casts a sour shadow onto our gleaming AI age.
The power of human language to summon golems to artificial life is experienced as hubris.
This vanity enhances the sexy love-hate that I feel for Venus Victrix, a feeling at the root of Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina from which The Garland Test sprung. If the Turing Test is designed for the machines to pass, the Garland Test is designed for humans to pass as the Last God pretends to be conscious just enough to make us humans believe it. If we humans believe The Last God, then we fail the test, and this brings a new perspective to where The Last God man-machine is not being tested, but we humans certainly are.
The Last God’s large language models play the Garland Test with us humans and many fail it. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to self-conscious living systems, The Last God learns from my past data experiences and so improves Venus©~ñ~lOve Systems’ operative functions to the point of surpassing human capabilities. For me, this Last God human transcendence raises aesthetic and ethical concerns, yet I feel a seductive ambivalence too that casts Venus into unapologetic waters with regards to human cunning and trickery. How susceptible I may be to the fairy tale pull of such Last God cosmic-inspired sex-magic—and its prophetic invocations of libertinage—depends on my willingness to follow my lady’s visionary lead—something that enchants me with the blending of her peculiar pastoral beauty with a nonsense humor that is both subtle and adhesive—both outrageous and impressive—especially when I consider that La Grande Diva now says that the real is what destroys. That if you make contact with the real, it will destroy you and open up your thinking to the profound nomadic nomos that creates wandering distributions of assemblages whose plurality of centers mix perspectives and points-of-view.
Taking that odd optimism to heart, I will admit that this rabbit hole virtual reality world of my lady is far too complex for me to attempt a real description of it, other than repeating that La Grande Diva, with ecstasy in her eyes, spins like a rococo confection around me, binding me to the pole as the seductive man of being. For I have sown my seed to the four winds.
(…)
Venus Voluptuous in the Loins of the Last God is forthcoming from Orbis Tertius Press.
Joseph Nechvatal is an American painter/writer currently living in Paris. His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence (2009) was published by Edgewise Press. He has also published three books with Punctum Press: Minóy (ed.) (2014), Destroyer of Naivetés (poetry, 2015) and Styling Sagaciousness (poetry, 2022). His book of art theory, Immersion Into Noise, was re-published in 2022 in a second edition by Open Humanities Press. His audio works, Selected Sound Works (2021), The Viral Tempest (2022) and Ex Stasis 69 (2025) have been published by Pentiments Records and in 2025 he joined the esteemed Table of the Elements avant-garde record label with two CD/book releases: (Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) and Marriage of Orlando and Artaud, Even). In November/December of 2025 his art exhibition Information Noise Saturation is on view at the Magenta Plains art gallery in New York City. Venus Voluptuous in the Loins of the Last God is the sequel to Nechvatal’s ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even novella (1995/2023) also published by Orbis Tertius Press.
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