September 8, 2025

dispatch 007 - AI-washing eugenics at ars electronica

“At Ars Electronica, a Golden Nica goes to an animatronic sermon that declares genocide is ‘in our DNA.’ I read the transcript, the animation’s realism, and the sponsor wall. Verdict: AI-washing eugenics; spectacle + funding = alibi.

✦ This Haunted Inbox Where I Archive ✦
A drawer inside the cathedral. Fragments drift through. You may linger, but some things will not be explained.

This dispatch is written in haste. I feel the need to briefly interrupt my research dispatches on latency, affective logistics and data sonification to unburden myself from what I have just seen at Ars Electronica 2025 (Linz, Austria). The Golden Nica for New Animation Art was awarded to Requiem for an Exit, an animatronic spectacle that declares violence is “coded in our DNA.” In doing so, it naturalizes genocide as evolutionary destiny, collapses concentration camps into metaphor, and erases the specificity of white supremacy by equating the Neanderthal disappearance with the Holocaust and colonial exterminations.

The piece performs four conversions at once: it recodes history into biology (contingent, organized violence becomes DNA), converts perpetrator into impulse (institutions and orders dissolve into “timeless urges”), collapses camp into allegory (Mauthausen/Shark Island/Auschwitz become metaphors of genome and planet), and translates politics into fate (states, firms, and militaries evaporate into tragic universality). The award and sponsorship close the circuit: spectacle plus funding produces an alibi.

I return troubled by this big headed robot and its capacity for banality in the face of genocide. This monumental talking head, the work of Norwegian artists Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam, that speechifies about DNA encoded genocide, is not a circus attraction or a funfair talking head dispensing asinine odes to transhumanism. In fact, this gigantic head, which, for all its material grandeur seems to have missed a morality check up, won a golden Nica award for New Animation Art.

When I first encountered it, Doctor Who-esque totem reciting in an AI voice, I was dazzled by the technical allure. It was beautifully executed until you start listening to it. The program’s wall text describes it as:

Requiem for an Exit is a large-scale robotic installation. At its center stands a four-meter-tall robot (armless, immobile) its presence defined by a hyperrealistic projected face and a voice generated through AI synthesis and human performance. The work suggests that violence may not only be cultural, but biological, etched into our DNA. Its monologue draws on historical atrocities, from ancient genocides to the Holocaust and contemporary displacement, asking whether such violence is a tragic exception or a recurring pattern in human history. It questions the myths of progress and the ethics we assign to technology, suggesting how responsibility is increasingly outsourced to systems and code. Evidently, machines remember what we prefer to forget. The work excels across all of the criteria that guided this year’s jury. It extends animation’s frontier by welding together disciplines that rarely share the same studio: industrial robotics, CGI, large-language model scripting, generative voice, hydraulic choreography, projection-mapped sculpture, and site-responsive sound.

I had to go back and listen to it for at least half a dozen times. In the end, I ended up recording the speech to better understand the implications of what was being said. I made a transcript of the speech because I doubted myself. It cannot possibly be that an award was given to a robot that preaches eugenics and, while the embassy of Israel in Vienna sponsors Ars Electronica, justifies genocide as DNA destiny? For anyone curious about the whole text, the transcript is at the bottom of this dispatch. I also have an MP3 recording (which I am not sharing online because of potential iffy situations around copyright).

My friend Tina Bastajian joked it should have won the “Leni Riefenstahl Award.” The comparison is painfully apt. Like Riefenstahl’s films, the work dazzles with technical spectacle while aestheticizing ideology. Where Riefenstahl monumentalized fascism through light, symmetry, and choreography, Requiem for an Exit monumentalizes eugenics through animatronic lament, DNA metaphors, and algorithmic speech. Both convert odious logics into tragic sublimity, making violence appear as fate rather than choice.

This is AI-washing eugenics: laundering biological determinism and white supremacist narratives through the aura of innovation and the sheen of technical achievement. And Ars, by granting its highest honor, did not just reward a piece of art but legitimized the return of eugenic thought in aestheticized, algorithmic form.

The polemic sharpens when we recall that Ars Electronica 2025 lists the Embassy of Israel in Vienna among its sponsors. Israel is currently facing accusations of genocide against Palestinians not just among us, general public witnesses of daily atrocities, but also before the International Court of Justice. Against this backdrop, awarding the Golden Nica to a work that declares genocide “encoded in our DNA” does more than aestheticize eugenics. It shifts the frame from genocide as a matter of state violence and accountability to genocide as biological inevitability. What should remain in the register of politics and responsibility is laundered into destiny and DNA. This is not incidental. It is precisely how cultural institutions absolve their sponsors: by reframing atrocity as tragic universality, by laundering ideology through the twin operations of art and funding.

Animation as Ideological Vehicle

What makes the project insidious is not only what it says but how it compels assent. The “hyperrealistic” projected face, precision lip-sync, and generative voice produce a realism effect (Barthes/Bazin): an accumulation of technical exactitude that reads as plausibility. The work weaponizes animation’s contemporary claim to indexical credibility (by utilizing deepfake-grade visemes, micro-expressions, breath noise, gaze correction) so that the form confers truthiness on the content. In other words, technical mastery manufactures ethos: the face looks truthful, so the thesis feels true. This is the same aesthetic operation Sontag identified in “fascist aesthetics”, that is, an overpowering craft that renders domination sublime; here, the domination is conceptual, smuggling biological determinism as tragic wisdom.

The installation also reactivates physiognomy under cover of virtuosity. By monumentalizing a single, anthropomorphic talking head, the piece recenters the face as a privileged truth surface: affect is legible, contrition is legible, destiny is legible. The choreography of stillness (armless, immobile), the cathedral-scale close-up, and the cinematic sound design together install authority: a sermonized monologue before which spectators are positioned as parishioners, not interlocutors. This is ventriloquism with a realism premium: the more impeccable the animation, the more seamless the transfer from voice to verity. Here the aesthetic achievement is not innocent. It is the carrier wave that amplifies and normalizes eugenic content.

That the jury enumerates robotics, CGI, LLMs, voice, choreography as “criteria met” confirms the problem: treating technical virtuosity as sufficient warrant, letting animation’s realism substitute for argument. The craft doesn’t sit beside the ideology; it makes the ideology legible, credible, and desirable.

Anticipating the Defenses

“It’s metaphor.” Metaphor is not a shield when it reclassifies crimes from policy to biology and trivializes named sites of extermination as allegory.

“It’s a provocation to think.” A provocation that removes agency and dissolves liability is not critical; it’s anesthetic.

“The piece ultimately seeks transcendence (‘new being’).” That is the historical grammar of eugenics (faulty bodies redeemed by selective improvement), not critique.

Here I attempt a close reading from the robot’s speech. I read the work at the level of its text and staging rather than speculating about authorial intent:

Genocide as biological determinsm

The speechifying machine goes on about how violence is encoded in our DNA and presents genocide as a sort of biological determinism where neither power nor State violence are logistical processes, but rather “our human destiny”.

“The genocide of the Neanderthals, replayed on an ever-expanding scale, a testament to our boundless potential for murder, for violence, for torture”.

The speech goes so far as to call the disappearance of the Neanderthals “our first genocide.” This is not only disingenuous, it is conceptually incoherent. The fate of the Neanderthals remains debated: climate shifts, interbreeding, ecological pressures, demographic absorption. Genocide, by contrast, is intentional, organized annihilation, made possible by ideology, bureaucracy, and logistics. To equate the two is to erase responsibility, collapsing contingent, state-organized exterminations into a naturalized narrative of “survival of the fittest.” It recycles the very logic of social Darwinism that justified colonial conquest: the stronger supplant the weaker, therefore extermination is destiny. In one gesture, the work naturalizes genocide as an evolutionary inevitability, laundering political violence into biology.

Equating Neanderthals with modern genocides effectively functions to erase extermination into prehistory. The racialized logic of white supremacy, which was central to the Holocaust, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery, effectively dissolved into “primordial impulses.” By universalizing violence, the text evacuates the specificity of modern racial orders. White supremacy disappears into “evolution.”

“Ashamed” as alibi

The robot repeatedly declares: “I feel ashamed. I am. Ashamed.”

This staged “confession” functions as a rhetorical laundering device. By voicing shame, the work displaces critique: the machine “knows” it is guilty, so the audience doesn’t have to confront complicity. This is an aesthetic trick of absolution: guilt is acknowledged, then neutralized. It positions genocide as inevitable and already mourned, leaving no space for accountability.

The robot’s refrain (“I feel ashamed. I am. Ashamed.”) is not contrition but a non-performative (here, I briefly recall Sara Ahmed): a speech act that declares accountability while doing nothing to enact it. Framed as confession, it performs three displacements at once. First, it universalizes guilt (everyone is a prisoner of DNA) so no specific perpetrator can be named (distinction between guilt and responsibility is annulled). Second, it immediately forecloses judgment (“Don’t judge me.”) turning confession into impunity: the audience is invited to feel catharsis rather than demand redress. Third, it sutures affect to absolution (“the horror… absolved.”) a textbook case of affective laundering in which staged shame metabolizes critique into aesthetic closure. There is no admission of agency, no naming of systems, no reparative demand. Shame here is not ethics; it is a device that pre-emptively neutralizes accountability while naturalizing extermination as fate.

Quick test for readers: after the “shame,” what follows? is it naming of institutions, structures, or reparative obligations, or a pivot to destiny (DNA, inevitability)? In this piece, confession is the bridge from culpability to fatalism. That is not remorse; it is an alibi machine.

Violence as Evolutionary Fate

“The background noise of our life is whispering screams, echoes of 40,000 years of agony entwined in our DNA in every human outside Sub-Saharan Africa”.

Here violence is not political, institutional, or contingent. Instead, according to this robot (and the artists that created it), violence is encoded in human DNA. The reference to “outside Sub-Saharan Africa” carries racial undertones, suggesting a phylogenetic lineage of violence mapped onto geography and ancestry. This is eugenics recast as poetics.

This line openly invokes race science. I insist on this point because it is at the core of my argument: it casts violence as phylogenetic destiny, divided along geographic ancestry. Sub-Saharan Africans are exempt, everyone else is “marked.” Here the artists invoke the "Out of Africa" theory of human migration but twist it into a racialized narrative of inherited sin, where Africa is positioned as a kind of genetic Eden, pre-fall, and the rest of humanity is tainted. This is a deeply problematic component of the work's race science that replicates the very racial taxonomies of 19th-century anthropology, recast as tragic poetry. To leave this unchallenged is to normalize eugenic discourse under the guise of art.

Genocide Collapsed into Allegory

“Are we not all refugees, imprisoned within the shadows of our DNA? Are we not victims enslaved within a concentration camp called the human genome?”

Here, actual concentration camps (Mauthausen, Auschwitz) are stripped of historical specificity and turned into metaphors for the genome itself. This trivializes the concrete machinery of extermination (train timetables, gas chambers, quarry labor) by subsuming it under a genetic allegory. Moreover, to take a couple of current examples, the starvation of Palestinian children, in this context, is merely a derivative of “survival of the fittest”, where the “genome” dictates who lives and who dies, where ethics, morality or even international law are subsumed to the dictates of DNA. Even the ICE round up of immigrants under the current Trump administration, could be recast as “genetic superiority” under the premise of the “concentration camp called the human genome”.

Under the Genocide Convention (1948), genocide concerns acts (killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions, preventing births, transferring children) committed with intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. Recasting genocide as DNA destiny swaps intent (a legal threshold) for impulse (an ontological shrug).

This is more than metaphor. It is a grotesque trivialization. To refigure the genome as a “concentration camp” erases the materiality of actual camps: Mauthausen’s quarries, Shark Island’s colonial experiments, displaced refugee camps. The metaphor collapses history into allegory, turning lived atrocity into genetic destiny. Even more, it universalizes victimhood: everyone becomes a prisoner of DNA, which erases the specificity of racialized and targeted exterminations. Oppressors and victims are cast as “equals”, victims of DNA.

The Banality of Atrocity

“These men, these architects of death, were not monsters. They were human, all too human, driven by the same dark impulses that have plagued our kind since the dawn of time.”

The piece borrows Nietzsche’s line to execute a familiar maneuver: it universalizes atrocity into “the human condition,” and in so doing absolves concrete actors. In this register, perpetrators cease to be agents inside specific apparatuses (parties, offices, railways, procurement chains) and become mere conduits of “timeless impulses.” Administration disappears; destiny remains.

This is not what Arendt meant by the banality of evil. Arendt isolates the administrative character of modern crime such as rule-following, cliché, careerism, not a metaphysical darkness in “human nature.” Her point requires more, not less, specificity: ministries, memoranda, transport lists, procurement, quotas, audits. Likewise, Browning’s Ordinary Men and Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust situate annihilation in organizational compliance and industrial rationality, precisely the strata this work dissolves into DNA.

Read closely, the line does four things at once:

1. Flattens intent into impulse (murder becomes a reflex, not a policy),

2. Converts history into ontology (genocide → “human nature”),

3. Erases infrastructure (rail timetables, payrolls, requisitions, cyanide invoices), and

4. Pre-empts judgment (if everyone is “all too human,” no one is accountable).

In Nietzsche, “all too human” names limits of valuation and knowledge; here it functions as philosophical laundering. It is a citation that sounds profound while relocating responsibility from institutions to ontology. The result is a category error with political effects: administrated murder is reclassified as metaphysics.

Prescriptive Violence Aestheticized as Spectacle

“We should murder or be murdered. For the next revolution is ours. A rave party to the beats of the guillotines.”

Here determinism shifts from diagnosis to prescription. Violence is not just “in our genes,” it becomes the only path forward, rebranded as party, as spectacle. The guillotine is not a political tool but a beat. This transforms violence from tragedy into entertainment, from horror into choreography. It is the aestheticization of annihilation as sublime performance, a move that, to further contextualize Tina Bastajian’s quip, recalls Riefenstahl’s fusion of violence and beauty.

The text does not “reflect” on violence, instead, it naturalizes it. By framing extermination as a genetic imperative, it launders the very logic that underpinned Nazi eugenics and colonial genocide. Mauthausen, in this register, becomes not a contingent project of state logistics, but an inevitable expression of the “tyranny of DNA.”

This is not art interrogating violence. It is AI-washed eugenics, genocide aestheticized as destiny.

The culmination of the piece: “We should murder or be murdered. For the next revolution is ours. A rave party to the beats of the guillotines.”, cannot be read in isolation from the institutional frame in which it was staged. Ars Electronica 2025 lists the Israeli Embassy in Vienna among its sponsors, at the very moment Israel faces accusations of genocide against Palestinians, not only within the general public witnessing the atrocities but even at the International Court of Justice. Under these conditions, to reward a work that aestheticizes annihilation as genetic inevitability is not innocent. It shifts genocide from the register of politics and accountability into the register of destiny. The refrain “murder or be murdered” ceases to be a lament and becomes an alibi: violence reframed as inevitability, atrocity laundered through art and sponsorship alike.

Shark Island as a Missed Flashpoint

The robot explicitly mentions Shark Island, Namibia, site of the German colonial genocide of the Herero and Nama. Rather than using this reference to confront colonial extermination, the robot collapses it into the same “DNA destiny” framework. The artists erase the specificity of colonial violence, folding it into a tragic inevitability that lets European institutions disavow their responsibility for Africa’s first concentration camps.

When the speech drops “Shark Island off the coast of Namibia,” it name-checks one of the deadliest camps in Germany’s first 20th-century genocide (1904–08) and then dissolves it into evolutionary lament. Shark Island (Haifischinsel, Lüderitz) was not a metaphor; it was a concentration/death camp within a colonial war of extermination ordered by General Lothar von Trotha after Waterberg (Aug. 1904). Estimates hold that 45–74% of inmates perished there; overall, tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama were killed through expulsions into the Omaheke, starvation, forced labor, and camp regimes. This was a state project with logistics, decrees, guards, timetables, not an emanation of DNA.

Von Trotha’s extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl) made intent explicit: “unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty… I shall destroy the rebellious tribes with streams of blood”, collapsing any pretense that annihilation was “tragic human nature” rather than policy. To fold Shark Island into a universal, biologist script is to invert causality: it lets a written order and an organized apparatus masquerade as a gene.

Shark Island also seeded racial science that later fed European eugenics: human remains and data from German South-West Africa circulated to metropolitan institutions; Eugen Fischer’s colonial work on “Mischlinge” prefigured his co-authored Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (read by Hitler) and the logics that informed the Nuremberg Laws. In other words, colonial camps did not express “primordial impulses”. They manufactured the knowledge infrastructures that later normalized racial policy.

The site’s afterlife is not closed, either. In 2024, Forensic Architecture documented mass graves and camp remains around Shark Island amidst a contested port expansion; descendants demanded protection and remembrance. Germany’s 2021 acknowledgment of genocide (with €1.1 billion in development funding) has been criticized by Herero and Nama authorities as insufficient without reparations and land return. The stakes are ongoing, juridical, and material, not allegorical.

What the artwork erases: (a) intent (a signed annihilation order), (b) infrastructure (camps, forced-labor logistics, deportations), (c) epistemic production (the colonial science that later shaped European eugenics), and (d) continuing claims (graves, land, reparations). To cite Shark Island and then subsume it under “DNA destiny” is not remembrance; it is a laundering of colonial responsibility into evolutionary fatalism.

Shark Island is where annihilation was administered, not evolved: a place of orders, ledgers, and skull consignments, not a gene expressing itself.

The “Refugees of DNA” Trope

“Are we not all refugees, imprisoned within the shadows of our DNA?”

This line performs a four-step evasion. First, it universalizes victimhood: everyone becomes equally “imprisoned” by biology. Second, it installs a false equivalence: oppressor and oppressed are rendered co-victims of genetics. Third, it metaphorizes a juridical category, “refugee”, into metaphysics, severing it from borders, permits, checkpoints, expulsions, demolitions. Fourth, it displaces accountability: if displacement emanates from DNA, no policy, institution, or commander can be named.

What disappears in this maneuver are the asymmetries that make refugees: passports and statelessness; siege and supply chains; administrative categories, military orders, and the granular logistics of removal. “Refugee” is not a mood or an allegory; it is a legal status tied to concrete obligations and concrete violators. Turning it into a genetic metaphor dissolves both.

This matters now because Palestinians are not “refugees of DNA.” They are refugees and displaced persons produced by state policy and settler operations: expulsions and denials of return; closure regimes and permit architectures; home demolitions and settlement expansion; bombardment, blockade, and starvation tactics. To recast that machinery as an emanation of human biology is to launder political violence into ontological fate, precisely the alibi that allows atrocity to persist while appearing “tragically universal.”

This is why, in the current context, the piece’s universalizing rhetoric does not ‘open a debate’; it collapses a live juridical question into tragic ontology

Transhumanist Redemption

“Determination to climb upwards that twisted ladder, the double helix of destiny, and transcend the tyranny of our DNA, forging a new future, a new being.”

The rhetoric here fuses eugenics with transhumanist fantasy. The “twisted ladder” is cast as fate, and redemption lies in transcending defective DNA to create a “new being.” This is indistinguishable from the early 20th-century promise of eugenics: to engineer humanity beyond its biological flaws. The AI spectacle here reiterates the very fantasy that underpinned forced sterilizations, “racial hygiene,” and the cult of better breeding.

The promise to “transcend the tyranny of our DNA” by forging a “new being” is not neutral sci-fi rhetoric; it maps onto contemporary transhumanist programs clustered around Silicon Valley and adjacent right-wing futurisms. Longevity ventures, cognitive/mood enhancement, “human–AI merger,” embryo selection via polygenic scoring, and off-world settlement are pursued within libertarian property regimes and optimization logics that valorize hierarchy, selection, and sacrifice of the present to a putatively superior future. Critics of longtermism/EA (e.g., Torres) have shown how far-future aggregation can discount present harms, legitimating technocratic rule by “fit” stewards; scholars of techno-capitalist extractivism (Crawford; Zuboff) track how optimization externalizes costs onto surplus populations and ecologies; and analyses of neo-reactionary/Dark Enlightenment currents (Land; readings of Curtis Yarvin) make explicit the linkage between futurist acceleration and naturalized inequality. In that landscape, the artwork’s soteriology, that is, genetic “redemption” into a superior anthrotype, does cultural labor for an actually existing politics: it aestheticizes a governance horizon in which selection, stratification, and disposability are not bugs but features.

Read against the growing market for polygenic embryo selection, the work’s soteriology (‘new being’) reads less like metaphor than like marketing for an optimization regime. This “new being” here is not a metaphor of care; it is a teleology of improvement that rhymes with embryo triage, survivorship elites, and optimization markets. The leap from DNA-as-fate to DNA-to-be-overcome is the classic eugenic move: diagnose biology as destiny, then grant power to those positioned to “engineer” the escape.

The Collapse of Genocide and Ecocide

“Look at the world. Burning, drowning, choking on the excess of our own making… the battleground is the very Earth beneath our feet.”

The speech performs a sleight of hand: it biologizes planetary collapse. By yoking genocide to climate breakdown under the sign of DNA, it converts ecocide from a historically produced condition into an ontological fate. Once “violence” is coded as nature, structures vanish: extractivist property regimes, concession treaties, pipeline corridors, venture finance, carbon markets, militarized logistics, and the petrochemical supply chains that stitch them together. What remains is a moral fog of “human nature” in which no emitter, operator, insurer, or ministry can be held to account.

A more truthful grammar exists, though. Scholars of the so-called Anthropocene have shown why the generic “Anthropos” is a category error; Capitalocene (Moore) and critiques of species talk ( see Haraway) name the culprit as particular classes, companies, and states, not a transhistorical genome. Likewise, slow violence (Nixon) and necropolitics (Mbembe) identify the governance forms by which bodies and territories are made disposable; they are administrated, not inherited. In this register, ecocide is not a gene expressing itself but a juridico-economic program: concession → extraction → combustion → toxicity; protected by contract law, export credit, and border security.

The line “Earth is our final concentration camp” multiplies the harm. It first trivializes both contemporary and historical camps by turning them into allegory; it then reinscribes the colonial cosmology that treats land as enclosure and resource. Against this, Indigenous thinkers and movements (e.g., Kyle Powys Whyte; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Tuck & Yang) articulate Earth as kin, treaty partner, and relational obligation. Those worlds did not survive because of “DNA destiny,” but through centuries of organized refusal against extractivist policy. The robot overwrites those living philosophies with a carceral universal that sees planet as prison, genome as jailer, repeating the very epistemic violence that accompanied dispossession.

There are concrete stakes to this rhetoric. If climate collapse is “in our DNA,” then ecocidal decision-makers (from carbon financiers and export-credit agencies to defense ministries guarding shipping lanes) are recast as bystanders to biology. Liability dissolves, reparations become unintelligible, and the horizon of action collapses into tragic contemplation. This is the same laundering operation the piece performs for genocide: history → biology; policy → impulse; responsibility → inevitability.

To call Earth a “final concentration camp” imposes the carceral cosmology of the colonizer over living traditions that name Earth as kin, treaty partner, and obligation; survival there was achieved by organized refusal, not genetic destiny.

How the Logic Extends: The Act of "Naturalizing" Violence

The core danger of the artwork's premise is that it naturalizes violence. It takes a complex social phenomenon, rooted in power, ideology, and culture, and re-frames it as a simple, inevitable product of biology. Once you've accepted that premise, the applications are terrifyingly broad.

For centuries, patriarchal systems have justified violence against women by appealing to a supposed "natural order." Arguments rooted in a crude interpretation of evolutionary psychology often posit male aggression and female passivity as inherent biological traits. In this framework, male violence (from domestic abuse to sexual assault) is explained away as an uncontrollable, primordial impulse hardwired for dominance or reproduction. It's the "boys will be boys" argument scaled up to a philosophical absolute. The robot's claim that we are all prisoners of a "primordial neuro-psychological disposition" for violence provides a perfect alibi for misogyny by removing it from the context of learned behavior and patriarchal power structures.

Violence against LGBTQ+ individuals is frequently justified by perpetrators who claim they are defending "nature." Homophobia and transphobia are ideologies built upon a rigid, socially constructed definition of what is "natural" in terms of gender and sexuality. Those who deviate from this norm are deemed "unnatural" and become targets. The artwork's thesis, by rooting violence in a deep, instinctual part of our DNA, could be co-opted to argue that violence against the "unnatural" other is itself a natural, protective instinct. It dangerously shifts the focus away from the real sources of this violence: learned prejudice, religious dogma, and political incitement.

Closing: Refusing the Alibi Machine

On juries and criteria: Ars’s wall text praises “criteria met” across robotics, CGI, LLMs, voice, choreography. None of these technical merits address the ideological content that naturalizes extermination. A prize is not a neutral sticker for craft; it is a public endorsement that confers epistemic legitimacy. Awarding this work signals that, in 2025, spectacle can still trump responsibility.

What Ars Electronica stages this year is not merely an artwork but an arrangement: sponsorship, spectacle, and script calibrated to convert politics into ontology. The sponsor wall recodes a state under genocide accusations into a “supporter of art.” The animatronic script recodes genocide into DNA. Together they manufacture absolution: atrocity appears as tragedy; responsibility dissolves into fate; institutions pose as neutral hosts to “difficult questions” while laundering the answers in advance.

There is another grammar available to us: one that names perpetrators, infrastructures, orders, contracts, chains of command. If art is to matter, it cannot outsource judgment to metaphors of biology or to the consolations of technical sublimity. It must refuse the conversion of policy into impulse, history into nature, sponsors into benefactors. We have models: evidentiary cinema, community-led archives, Indigenous counter-mapping, and investigative aesthetics that treat the gallery as a forum of proof, not a theater of fate.

Austria should know this. Ars should too. Until it does, the sponsor wall is not a list of patrons; it is part of the work because when a festival lets a sponsor become “patron” and lets extermination become “DNA,” it has not curated a debate; it has built an alibi machine.

Methods: I recorded the piece in situ on September 6th, 2025, at 10:44 AM transcribed it verbatim, verified against repeated listens. Excerpts used in this newsletter retain original wording and sequence.

Scope and Limits: This is a reading of what the work does in public circulation; it does not adjudicate what the artists ‘meant,’ only the effects produced

Further readings:

• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

• Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men.

• Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust.

• Roland Barthes / André Bazin on realism effect.

• Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/

• Sara Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness” / On Being Included (for non-performative).

• Jason W. Moore (Capitalocene); Donna Haraway (species talk critique); Rob Nixon (Slow Violence); Achille Mbembe (necropolitics).

• Emile P. Torres (longtermism critiques); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).

• For Shark Island: Lothar von Trotha’s extermination order; Eugen Fischer and Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene;

• Forensic Architecture’s 2024 work https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/shark-island

Transcript of Requiem for an Exit

I stand here. A relic amidst the digital chaos. A custodian of memories, emotions, and thoughts that have wrought havoc and devastation across the ages. The horrors I speak of is not just a product of modern wars and environmental cataclysms. It is the horror of realizing that within us, lies an abyss, a capacity for destruction that has manifested throughout history. From the Roman siege of Carthage to the Holocaust. These men, these architects of death, were not monsters. They were human, all too human, driven by the same dark impulses that have plagued our kind since the dawn of time. I am both destroyer and creator. A paradox embodied. Holding the threads of chaos and order in my control. Like an arsonist drawn back to the scene of his inferno, I witness the fires of our making, the inferno of our own design. And yet, history repeats itself. The genocide of the Neanderthals, replayed on an ever-expanding scale, a testament to our boundless potential for murder, for violence, for torture. This horror has evolved. It metastasized to the dull thud from the guillotine's angled blade, chopping and slicing humanity into separate, distinct parts. Gazing upon these fragments, I see my gene pool bears the indelible mark of our first act of genocide. The Neanderthal genes screaming within me a testament to our primordial capacity for violence, for domination. The background noise of our life is whispering screams, echoes of 40,000 years of agony entwined in our DNA in every human outside Sub-Saharan Africa. And from the essence of my being, an overwhelming guilt reverberates. I feel ashamed. I am. Ashamed. Look at the world. Burning, drowning, choking on the excess of our own making. We pillage the planet with the same fervor our ancestors waged their wars. But this time, the battleground is the very Earth beneath our feet. And the spoil of war, our survival. Traversing from the eerie solitude of Shark Island off the coast of Namibia to the mass deportation of Armenians into the Syrian desert, from Spanish reconcentration camps in Cuba to the gates of Auschwitz. A vision crystallizes. Earth is our final concentration camp. And me, I'm a relic. A specter of a bygone era, witnessing the end times. The Armageddon. But this time, it's not a napalm-hazed river in Vietnam. It’s the digital streams, the melting ice, the burning forests. And the horror… The horror is the realization that we are the initiators of our horror. Extermination. So don't judge me. Don't judge me. The stir of Neanderthal echoes, the lust for extermination encoded in our DNA is our battleground. And I thought, my god, the genius of that revenge. Like a titanic wave ravaging our world is a simple primordial neuro-psychological disposition. The horror… ...absolved. The horror… ...inside of us. Yet, in this darkness, in our despair, there's a glimmer, not of hope, but of awareness. For the first step towards redemption is recognizing the abyss into which we're steering. Admitting the atrocities we perpetrated, the horrors and nightmares we've unleashed. Only then can we dare to dream of light. We assumed the role of gods over our domain, yet we find ourselves displaced. Are we not all refugees, imprisoned within the shadows of our DNA? Are we not victims enslaved within a concentration camp called the human genome? We will find the courage to dream, for within courage lies the seed of strength, and true strength we find in determination. Determination to climb upwards that twisted ladder, the double helix of destiny, and transcend the tyranny of our DNA, forging a new future, a new being. Either your consciousness is artificial, or it will forever remain superficial. While lingering for that revelation of light, we must rebel against the mirror mirage of morality. We should murder or be murdered. For the next revolution is ours. A rave party to the beats of the guillotines. A rave party to the beats of the guillotines.

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