“I promise, I will serve your wishes – hereA slave who does your bidding faithfully; But if we meet each other – there , why, you must do the same for me”
MEPHISTO (GOETHE)
The Last FaustHumanity’s Faustian Pact
The Last Faust re-situates Goethe’s tragedy at the scale of civilization, where the Faustian pact is no longer signed by a single will but by humanity itself. Artificial intelligence figures as the culmination of a long metaphysical error: the attempt to escape finitude while retaining control, to pursue power severed from love, and action severed from responsibility. Revisiting Goethe’s tensions between desire and devotion, striving and meaning, the work treats lust, greed, and abstraction not as moral failures alone but as structural conditions of modernity. The apocalyptic rise of AI thus appears not as rupture, but as fulfillment, the logical end of a bargain humanity has been renewing for centuries. A Gesamtkunstwerk with 200 artworks and a feature film starring legendary Steven Berkoff.
The Last Faust Novella
Humm’s adaptation tackles sexual harassment, artificial intelligence, the troubling ethical ramifications of technological innovation, the stuff of a million comment pieces. Humm’s Faust is no longer a medieval doctor-magician but an AI guru who yearns to emulate God by creating life.
– Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian
Originally published in 2019, the Novella is the work from which the entire project emerged. Combining Goethe’s Faust I & II with Philipp Humm’s pencil drawings, this illustrated book became the foundation for the feature film, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and writings that would later form The Last Faust’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
Set in a Silicon Valley shaped by artificial intelligence and technological acceleration, the novella explores the consequences of a modern Faustian pact around AI advancement long before the topic entered mainstream debate. In this book Humm explores questions such as non-human intelligence, technological power, and humanity’s gradual displacement from the centre of its own world.
The book is freely available for online reading in high resolution and as a downloadable PDF. The Ebook is also available on all major platforms.
Collector's Edition DVD
An exclusive limited edition of the film’s DVD is available to interested collectors and for research or archiving. Contact info@philipphumm.art for more information.
