Max Hodak, who co-founded Neuralink before departing to build his own neural interface company, is taking the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to argue that the screen era is ending. Meanwhile, Sotheby's is preparing to auction rare early Keith Haring works that predate his subway drawings. The connection isn't decorative. It's structural.
The Body as the Original Interface
Haring's early work, made before the galleries and the pop iconography, was obsessed with the human figure as a signal-transmitting device. Radiant babies, crawling bodies, dancing figures wired with energy lines. He wasn't painting people. He was mapping how sensation moves through a body in a world overloaded with information. The screen, for Haring, was already the enemy. His work lived on walls, subway stations, and skin because those surfaces had a biological relationship to the viewer that glass never would. Hodak's post-screen pitch, that neural interfaces can deliver information and even medical assistance without the mediation of a rectangle, is philosophically downstream of exactly this instinct. The body is not the last interface. It was always the first one.
What the Early Works Actually Tell Us
The Sotheby's lots come from Haring's early collaborator Kermit Oswald, which means they are intimate, unguarded, and made before Haring knew he was building a brand. That context matters. The post-screen future Hodak describes is also, currently, unguarded: it exists in demos and investor decks, not in anything the public can yet hold or use. Both moments are pre-commercial. The difference is that Haring's pre-commercial phase produced objects of permanent cultural weight. Hodak's is producing press. The question the auction implicitly asks of the tech pitch: when the screen does end, what will the body-as-interface have actually made that is worth keeping? For more on where the brain-computer interface sits in the longer arc of art and technology, Jason Yuan's conversation on theory of mind and interface design is the clearest framework we have found.