Charting a forgotten lineage of artists, scientists, and fringe figures who wired the body into machines.
From 19th-century mesmerists and prosthetic dreamers to the neural ecstatics of contemporary biohack culture, Flesh Circuits traces a hidden continuity: the merging of body and machine as an erotic, spiritual, and political act. It tells the story of how desire became circuitry — how the skin, once sacred and inviolate, turned porous to signals, pulses, and digital ghosts.
But Flesh Circuits is not only a history — it is a diagnosis and a prophecy. In the present, the cybernetic body is no longer experimental; it is normative. Our gestures are mediated, our emotions quantified, our intimacies algorithmically managed. What was once avant-garde performance is now infrastructure: prosthetic identity, synthetic attraction, the constant feedback loop of surveillance and seduction.
Speculating forward, the book imagines the next evolution of flesh and code: post-biological ecstasies, neural marketplaces of sensation, and the rise of affective systems that no longer distinguish between organism and interface. It asks whether the future of desire will belong to humans at all — or to the sentient architectures we have trained to want on our behalf.
Part cultural archaeology, part speculative ethnography, Flesh Circuits maps the electric dream of a species teaching its machines to feel — and finding, in the process, that its own capacity for feeling has been rewritten.
Neon Psalms: The Sacred in the Age of Electricity
Alexis Fergus