ARC
The Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture

ARC is currently exploring the impact of digital technology upon the arts and religion. We held a panel discussion on Oct. 30, 2009, at Barnard College and a follow up meeting on Feb. 5, 2010, at Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan.

Next: a Wine Cellar Conversation

Digital Soul: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and the Fate of Religion and the Arts

Thursday, May 6, 7pm, Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer Room.

It is increasingly difficult to imagine that computers will not, in the fairly near future, attain a state of “sentience.” Will they then, by definition, have a soul? And how must we then regard them? End-of-history visions of exponential growth of artificial intelligence--as smart machines build machines smarter still--emphatically beg the question: Will artificial souls be capable of empathy, without virtue of having suffered or ruminated on mortality? Will they need art and religion, perhaps more than we ourselves do? Or will we be able to program empathy into them, as it has been programmed into us by evolution and / or God? And as our virtual (augmented) realities become ever more immersive, while maintaining their distance from real suffering and un-resettable death, will we ourselves lose the capacity for empathy? Will we lose our soul? Or will virtual religious experiences and emerging creative media herald a new era of democratized fellowship, unpredictable epiphany, and nascent artistic expression?

For further information see our
Facebook Page. 

We will also be announcing an awards program for those with outstanding projects, written or performed, that address this topic.
If you are interested in joining this timely conversation or hearing more about the awards program, please email, or sign up on Facebook. 

More about ARC
including membership information and news about our recently published book:
 The ARC Story

From time to time the Board of Directors elects as Fellows individuals it identifies as having made a distinguished contribution to their respective fields. The list of Fellows elected over a period of nearly four decades thus exemplifies what the Society understands as the necessary and vital connections between art, religion and culture.

ARC Fellows

PROGRAM ARCHIVE

Fall 2008
THE BRAIN
And Its Effect on the Arts,
Gender, Mythologies and Cultures

Winter 2008
BODILY CONSCIOUSNESS
An Alchemical Concert
The Recent Video Art of Hans Breder

Fall 2007
Continuity and Change in the Arts, Religion and Culture:
Blasphemy, Buddhism and the Bible

Spring 2007
Footpath Spiritpath
Intersections of Pilgrimage Travel
and Spiritual Journey

Spring 2006
The River is a Magic Thing

Fall 2005
Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be

Spring 2005
Theology and the Arts as Play

Winter 2005
Alpha-bet:
Uncertainty Principles in the Atoms of Language

Fall 2004
Languages that Shape the Soul

Spring 2004
The Moving Image

Winter 2004
Religion and the Visual Arts

Fall 2003
Theology and Music

Spring 2003
Theology and Poetry:
Languages that Shape the Soul

Winter 2003
Tracing the Garden

Fall 2002
Drawing on the Human
Spirit

Spring 2002
MoMA's PAPA:
Alfred Barr and
the Religious Dimension of Modernism

Winter 2002
A Theology of Beauty

Fall 2001
Lifting the Veil

May 2001
Utopia/Dystopia

February 2001
Antigone
Performance and Symposium

November 2000
Illuminations & Transformations:
Cross-Cultural Spiritual Dynamics 
in Music, Text, Dance and Film

May 2000
Alternative Readings: 
Sacred Text Embodied in Visual Art

February 2000
The Meaning of Myth

November 1999
Myth, Ritual and the Mediation of Violence

May, 1999
Writers' Ways with Loving and Dying

February, 1999 
The Divine Image
Implications for a changing image of God.

October, 1998 
Uneasy Constellations of Meaning
Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth Century Europe &
The Religious Art of Andy Warhol

May, 1998 Meeting
AYNI: The Andean Concept of Reciprocity

Webpage design courtesy CrossCurrents
Charles Henderson, Executive Director