Outsourcing Ethics: A Robot Speaks Our Violence

In the podcast episode, Hannah talks to artists Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid about their installation Requiem for an Exit - a piece featuring a towering robot delivering a haunting monologue about the darker side of humanity. The piece confronts audiences with the enduring legacy of human violence and the ethical responsibilities humans outsource to bureaucratic and technological structures.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Thomas Kvam & Frode Oldereid
https://www.oldereid-kvam.com/

Transcript

Thomas Kvam: I think we're essentially lazy in the sense that in complex ethical or moral decision making, we have a tendency to just outsource the answers to bureaucracies, the structures we live in, political ideologies, or soon now we will just outsource it to algorithms. We are avoiding our own evil basically.   

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea, and together with my colleague Hannah Balber, we discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. In this episode, we explore a fundamental question: “How much evil lies within human nature?” Hannah talks to Norwegian artists Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid, who work at the intersection of sound art, robotics and visual art. In their installation, Requiem for an Exit, they examine the darker side of humanity. At the centre stands a four-meter-tall robot: a skeletal steel construction with a seemingly human face that reflects on the historical legacy of war and genocide in a haunting monologue. For this work, Kvam and Oldereid received this year’s Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica in the category New Animation Art.  Enjoy the conversation.  

Hannah Balber: You both have known each other for quite some time. You first collaborated between 1994 and 2004 on a series of robotic installations. What brought the two of you together back then?  

Frode Oldereid: I think it was a fellow friend of ours that we had been working with, both of us. And I think it was her that actually said to me: You have to talk to Thomas. He's a good man to talk to, and maybe you can do something together.  

Thomas: Yeah. And quickly after we met, we started our collaboration on a project, so it was a good match.  

Hannah: Was there a specific moment or shared interest that sparked the collaboration?   

Thomas: I had created a robotic installation at that time. The robot head was made of just a video recording of my face projected on a plaster cast of my face. And the technique made this really believable three-dimensional face, which was moved by robotics. And then Frode was working with digital music and sound, and also video and documentary films. And then we just merged our creativity together.   

Hannah: What fascinates you about robots?  

Thomas: I mean, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Bladerunner, the robot as a metaphor or an allegorical device is always touching us humans, both with fear and fascination. What fascinates me, basically, is the robot as an existential threat. At the same time, the fascination we have as humans of seeing ourselves duplicated somehow as a mechanical being.  

Hannah: So do you see robots as more than machines? Maybe as something almost alive?  

Thomas: Well, we humans tend to project a lot of feelings into machines, don't we?   

Frode: And also when I first saw Thomas's work, it was so exciting. So alive at the time. And this head on the robot just fascinated me. Like Thomas is saying, it’s human-like and it's both machine and human.   

Hannah: Now, after 20 years, you've returned with Requiem for an Exit, a robotic installation again, but quite different in tone. Could you tell me more about this new piece? What is it about, and what inspired it?  

Thomas: In the centre, of course, there's the actual physical robot. And it's a huge, massive hydraulic construction. And then it also has this huge 1.5 m tall head. And for me, I was thinking a bit about Apocalypse Now, the movie. Marlon Brando in the role of Colonel Kurtz, giving his ethical monologue about evil. And it was somehow taking that scene and recreating it, as a robot, giving its monologue about the loss of humanity or the legacy of humanity's violence, our genocides and wars.  

Hannah: What does the title Requiem for an Exit mean to you? If this is a requiem, what exactly are you mourning?  

Thomas: I think we had, as a sort of working image, the idea of the robot being some sort of last message from humanity? Or is it the last message from an A.I.? It has this human tone to it. But at the same time, it also has this uncertainty of what is actually speaking here. Is it an A.I.'s representation of human emotion, or is it actually a human being recorded giving its monologue?   

Frode: It can be an exit, but it's also a requiem for the history and the future in a way as well.  

Hannah: I want to talk about the content of the monologue in a little bit. But let's take a look first at the robot itself. The robot at the centre of the installation is massive and unsettling. How did you develop and build this figure? What or who is it meant to represent?  

Thomas: We were playing on the idea of the robot as a character: Is it a prophet? Is it a totalitarian demagogue or a priest? You know, playing around with this representation of the totalitarian structures through their robot. The actual robotic structure is hydraulic. It's an old technology. And then we soldered together some computer interfaces, which were also based on very accessible technology. So, the most complex workflow was the actual creation of the video head, the sculpture's head. Workflow from 3D sculpting to 3D printing and making the actual head in 3D and projecting it onto that surface.  

Frode: And that was also a new, fascinating way to work and explore. Before we actually filmed Thomas's head and projected it. But this time we were using his voice and his face and got the data out of it, and 3D sculpted and took it into different programs. An exciting way to have this physical input going digital.   

Thomas: When we worked ten years ago, the video head was actually a video of a human face projected onto the robot. Now, to take it a step further and make it truly human in its presence, we had to make it 100% digital. So, it's a paradox there: to make the proper human representation of the face, we had to make it synthetic.  

Hannah: And the voice?  

Thomas: The monologue I recorded on an iPhone, and then it went through an A.I. and changed gender to a female voice. So, it's a combination of A.I. and the actual expression in the recording.  

Hannah: So its face looks almost human, but it's clearly a projection, an illusion. The robot speaks, but it can't move. It has no arms, no gestures, just its voice. Let's talk about the monologue the robot delivers. You say things like, and I quote: “I stand here a relic amidst the digital chaos…  

Monologue

A custodian of memories, emotions, and thoughts that have wrought havoc and devastation across the ages. The horrors I speak of are not just a product of modern wars and environmental cataclysms. It is the horror of realising that within us lies an abyss, a capacity for destruction that has manifested throughout history, from the Roman siege of Carthage to the Holocaust.  

Hannah: What kind of story are you telling us here?  

Thomas: There is an idea in a monologue that the remnants of Neanderthal DNA in Homo sapiens DNA are some sort of biological memorial of our first genocide. I mean, the disappearance of the Neanderthals is a mystery. We don't know. But as a philosophical provocation, in the monologue, the robot states that it was a genocide. Just the idea of this internalised biological memorial was more or less how the monologue started, that idea and elaborating on that idea.  

Frode: It is like an Apocalypse Now, and, you know, and it's also a question: is there hope? It's a warning. So the robot is also asking questions based on the fundamentals of the DNA.  

Hannah: Phrases like this stand out: “The Neanderthal genes screaming within me, a testament to our primordial capacity for violence.” The robot suggests we're programmed biologically or even algorithmically to repeat violence. Is that something you truly believe?  

Thomas: This is the robot's point of view. But of course, I mean, look at today. I mean, it seems like we're repeating patterns endlessly as a species.   

Frode: Yeah, it's one explanation of what is actually going on.  

Thomas: Yeah. And it's some sort of radical biological determinism from the robot’s perspective. But then, of course, one can ask, why does the robot present this perspective? Because that's a bit of an ambivalence when you actually see the robot in the space, and you see this massive head talking. It's also about an emotion and existential feeling.  

Ana-Maria: Thomas Kvam is a conceptual artist and author. His work – spanning painting, robotics, animation, and critical writing – often engages with controversial socio-political themes. He has spent years intensively engaging with the topic of war crimes. Frode Oldereid is a composer, sound designer and lecturer with a background in music production, experimental theatre, and robotic art. He has toured internationally with installations and performances. In their collaborative projects, Kvam and Oldereid explore the intersections of technology, ideology and collective memory. In Requiem for an Exit, the robot delivers a monologue. From its perspective, evil is not portrayed as a product of political ideologies, moral deficiencies, class distinctions, or religious beliefs. Instead, it is presented as an inherent disposition, deeply embedded in our genetic code.  

Monologue 

And me. I'm a relic, I’m a relic, a spectre 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 and burning forests. The horror is the realisation that we are the initiators of our own extermination. The stir of Neanderthal echoes the lust for extermination. Encoded in our DNA is our battleground.   

Hannah: How do you think technology influences the cycle of violence?  

Thomas: I mean, ok to make an example. Historically, children as soldiers were not a functional idea. Through lightweight, automatic machine guns, suddenly, a child could be a lethal soldier. You cannot do that with a sword. Technology gives us new possibilities of destruction, which is unimaginable historically. But at the same time, we live in the illusion that we as humans get some sort of upgrade together with our technology. But it doesn't look like it's happening, does it? 

Frode: And technology is new ways to actually make wars and violence.   

Hannah: Would you say that deep down, people are essentially good or evil?   

Thomas: I think we're essentially lazy in the sense that in complex ethical or moral decision-making, we have a tendency to just outsource the answers to bureaucracies, the structures we live in, political ideologies, or, I guess, soon now we will just outsource it to algorithms. We will have some sort of a United Nations controlled by an ethical algorithm. I'm just thinking of Hannah Arendt and her reading of Eichmann during the Nürnberg trials. How he sort of dispersed his ethical responsibilities to the system, the structure he was in. Now we're on this shift where technology is taking over from the bureaucracies. We have the A.I. getting into a position where we can have another place we can outsource our responsibilities to. And that's the laziness of humans. We are avoiding our own evil, basically.  

Hannah: When you look at the state of the world today, do you think there's cause for panic? And what do you think art can do in moments like these?  

Frode: I think one way that this project is doing that is that you are confronted with lots of ideas, and somehow I have to think for myself: What's in it? How can I participate in a better way, or not? The installation is confronting us. I have to make a statement in a way as a human being.   

Thomas: I think the function of art is, if you look through all the conceptual layers and everything, it's just about how to preserve our humanity or explore that humanity. For me, the Requiem for an Exit is almost like a Francis Bacon image. But instead of the human in centre, it's this ambiguous creature between an artificial intelligence and a human just stuck in a space where it can't escape.  

Hannah: What does this piece mean to you personally?  

Frode: I think it's lots of levels. It's in the making of it. It's in the collaboration of it. I think we somehow manage that people go into the installation and actually have to think. You don't leave the installation not touched in some way. And that has actually been one of the main really good things about all the work we've done. It's touching a feeling of humanity, and for the audience.  

Thomas: And for me as a conceptual artist, usually I have a very sort of rigid, strict framework: This work is about that, and it's made like this or this for a reason. And the beauty and the collaboration with Frode is that, 20 years later, we're still trying to figure out what did we actually do. And now we're at the same point again because together we think and we interact with these technologies and the concepts and other philosophies behind them. And then we have to sort of try to understand it afterwards, the implications of what we have stirred ourselves into. It's something about how A.I. is streamlining also cultural production. And this work is not about streamlining something to deliver a precisely crafted message. We have A.I.s to do that. This is about being human, and it's about ethics. It's about the existential dread of seeing the technological development, how it expands, but also how human violence expands with it.  

Hannah: How do you see the role of the audience in all of this? How do you want to make them feel? What do you want to spark in them?  

Thomas: Somehow, the installation takes something which one can see in a Sci-Fi movie or basically is taking a sort of a fantasy from a Sci-Fi movie and putting it into a three-dimensional space where you can actually physically experience that creature from a sort of imagined future. And when it delivers its monologue, it's constructed to be an ethical provocation, a philosophical provocation. And if we're lucky, it actually might help be a tool for people to think about how we deal with technology and ourselves being human.  

Hannah: Thank you very much for the conversation.  

Frode: Thank you.   

Ana-Maria: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.