Between 1994 and 2004, Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam created a series of robotic installations exploring the intersections between technology, ideology, and collective memory. These robots evoked the aesthetics of political mass movements, echoing the fractured language of 20th-century totalitarianisms and its countercultures. Two decades later, the artists revisit these themes in Requiem for an Exit. 

 At the center of the installation stands a towering robotic figure, four meters tall—a skeletal construct of steel, hydraulics, and circuitry, locked in place, rigid and restrained. Its only means of expression are its voice and a slowly moving head. The towering body dominates the space, yet it is the face that captivates—drawing the viewer in. Digitally sculpted and animated with hyper-realistic detail, the face gives the robot its unsettling presence. Like the demagogues and prophets of history, it uses rhetoric as its only weapon.  

It speaks not as an agitator rallying a crowd, but as if standing alone in the ruins of its own rhetoric—delivering a monologue that feels more like a solitary reckoning than an attempt to persuade. Its power lies not in physical action, but in the force of its words—delivered with the weight of history, suspended in an acoustic field so dense it almost approaches sculptural form. 

The voice is calm and deliberate, almost liturgical in its cadence. This affective restraint is mirrored in the soundscape: a low, constant pressure fills the room, not as music but as condition. The voice does not float on top of it—it is caught in it. There are no crescendos. No relief. 

In this, the robot speaks of genocide—not as an aberration, but as a recurring feature in human history, deeply embedded within our genetic memory. The notion that Neanderthal DNA still present in our genome constitutes a “biological memorial” to our first genocide, occurs not as scientific theory, but as philosophical provocation. From there, the monologue does not escalate—it accumulates: from ancient annihilations and scorched cities, through colonial massacres and concentration camps, to the bureaucratized efficiency of industrial extermination—and into the present, where siege and displacement persist in full view, mediated, normalized, and streamed. What emerges is not a moral theory, but an archaeology of violence.  

This philosophical meditation is not neutral or detached—it is disturbingly direct. Confronting viewers with their own complicity in historical cycles of violence. Like a secular prophet, it neither offers redemption nor a clear moral imperative. Instead, it generates self-conscious discomfort, forcing a reckoning with humanity's enduring capacity for destruction.  

Requiem for an Exit withholds catharsis. When the robot falls silent, the stillness that follows is not restful, but dense with the impossibility of innocence. The requiem it delivers is not for the machine, nor for the dead, but for the myths we continue to uphold: that progress ensures salvation, that intelligence guarantees ethics, that technology can redeem the human. 

In this light, the robot is not a prophet, but an archivist—tasked not with prediction, but with preserving what we refuse to confront. Its voice carries not a warning, but the echo of a judgment already rendered. When it falls silent, the installation becomes a double mirror: we project humanity onto the machine, even as it reflects the violence we have designed—and denied. 

What lingers is not an answer, but a question we can no longer outsource: whether the silence is, in fact, our own. Requiem for an Exit exposes the drift of responsibility—first to bureaucracies, then to algorithms—until thought itself becomes automated, and ethics externalized. In revealing this, it reminds us: what we delegate, we do not escape. 

Towering almost four meters high, Requiem for an Exit confronts visitors with a solitary head mounted on a steel exoskeleton, its skin a living projection, its voice an AI-generated baritone that delivers a stark meditation on chaos, suffering, and the limits of human agency. The piece is disarmingly direct—a single figure, a single monologue—yet every layer complicates the next. The face is at once ancient and androgynous, its grief-stricken expressions contradicting the cold certainty of the words; hydraulic sighs and digital glitches expose the labor of the machine even as the projection renders it flesh-like; the narrator’s sweeping verdicts about history and free will rebound onto the very algorithms animating its speech. 

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. Every technological choice is integral to the argument: without real hydraulics the head’s weariness would ring hollow; without the projected epidermis its humanity would be too easily denied. 

Requiem for an Exit is also the culmination of a decades-long conversation. Its creators are pioneers who first collaborated in the 1990s and have returned after twenty years to fuse their hard-won mechanical expertise with contemporary AI. The result feels both timeless and urgently current, grounding speculative technology in a lineage of philosophical inquiry that stretches from classical determinism to present-day algorithmic governance. 

By asking whether it’s possible to escape history, whether free will can survive its own analysis, and whether a machine might mourn on our behalf, the work exposes animation as a space where matter, code, and thought wrestle in public. Viewers may argue with the head’s bleak conclusions, but none will remain untouched by the spectacle of a robot holding a mirror to our species and asking, with grave sincerity, whether an exit exists.