Requiem for an Exit

Between 1994 and 2004, Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid created a series of robotic installations exploring the intersection of technology, power, and ideology. After a 20-year hiatus, their collaboration resumed with Requiem for an Exit.

At the center of the installation stands a four-meter-tall robotic figure—an ambiguous fusion of machine and human likeness. Is it a guardian of our darkest memories, an echo of ourselves trapped in machinery, or something entirely new: a consciousness emerging from the ruins we leave behind?

From this perspective, the robot delivers a monologue probing the historical legacy of genocide and war. It argues that Neanderthal DNA—still present in modern humans—is a biological memorial to our first genocide: a primordial crime reverberating through history, from the siege of Carthage to the Holocaust.

The monologue blurs the boundary between biological determinism and algorithmic fate, presenting a post-Anthropocene perspective in which humanity’s fate is a self-inflicted genocide, encoded in both DNA and data.

The robot’s hyperrealistic, projected face appears disturbingly human, yet it is nothing more than an illusion—an ephemeral simulation of consciousness. Beneath this façade, its exposed skeletal structure and tangled wires, evoke an incomplete war machine, a relic of industrial automation, or a forsaken instrument of mechanized judgment. 

Trapped in a static, confined position, it is bound by the very legacy it speaks of. Its lack of arms and physical expression forces it to rely solely on speech—its only weapon. Like demagogues throughout history, it wields rhetoric as a tool of influence, its words more potent than any physical gestures.

Through its unsettling presence, the robot amplifies the existential horror of its monologue, transforming it from an abstract meditation on evil into a direct confrontation with the audience. Is this speech a warning, a confession, or a declaration of war?