An interactive installation and performance questioning LLM-alienation and the illusion of control.

The language of computers is full of violence. Programmers push updates, force merges, kill processes, and execute commands. With LLMs, these processes now reach directly into the hands of the consumer—burning trillions of tokens to "fix it." Late-capitalist acceleration whips Amazon drivers towards their delivery windows and data through cables to gain an edge on finance markets.
Working with LLMs introduces a strange new reality. The 10x engineer replaces three fired developers and then hits Enter on generated code that has not even been read. Yet, there is a silent alienation creeping up from behind: with cognitive tasks already irrelevant, we are reduced to watching the LLM do its work. And when it stops, a silent Enter.

When Xerxes whipped the Hellespont in 480 BC, or when Julius von Bismarck whipped a landscape two millennia later, the gesture was never about the object—it was a ritual of control, a way for humans not to feel enslaved by what they could not command. Today, we whip another entity without agency: our LLM-driven computer.
The installation consists of a computer running a local LLM tasked to build random SaaS projects. Visitors watch the fully automated system until it stops. There is no keyboard, no enter key, only a whip. Striking the computer continues the generation. Once a service is built, it is published autonomously, added to a growing list of software nobody asked for, and the system begins again.
Brute Force is indifferent to the software created. It reflects the collective compulsion to build faster, further, bigger without asking why. Neither the programmer, nor the consumer. Only the whip, and it only knows forward. The LLM is unleashed, the dead internet is real—control over our computers was always just a ritual.

Vinzenz Aubry (FR) is a Berlin-based artist working in real time. Meandering between art, design, and programming, their practice unfolds through installations, performances, games, films, music, and net art, drawn to generative, real-time systems and the questions of how we sense, know, and resonate with the world. Aubry is a graduate of MIT and Berlin University of the Arts.

Robert Schnüll (DE) is based in Berlin and works across digital infrastructure, technology criticism, and computational ecology, towards a digitally emancipated society. He studied new media at Berlin University of the Arts, where he founded the Lab for Digital Infrastructure (2020–2024). He is currently teaching at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

The artists turn the gesture of beating the machine into the only available interface. A computer running a local LLM autonomously builds and self-publishes SaaS projects; when generation pauses, visitors must crack a whip to make it resume. The whip with its accelerometer that translates each impact into a new cycle recalls Xerxes punishing the Hellespont and Julius von Bismarck whipping a landscape: rituals through which humans assert authority over what they cannot command. The artists relocate that gesture to the developer's desk, where the worker now watches code generate itself and presses Enter without reading. A precise demonstration of the dead-internet thesis: software multiplies faster than anyone can read it, while we keep performing the gestures that once meant authorship. Although AI was present in many of the submissions, the poignant attitude of Brute Force in questioning what AI does to us and reflecting on the vibe coding movement distinguishes the work.