Ars Electronica X HTWKD
AGE OF MONSTERS
AI, Neurotechnology and the Negotiation of Humanity

This exhibition begins where AI and neurotechnologies have become forms of governance over the human: infrastructures that translate behaviour, affects and convictions into profiles, scores and forecasting bases. Configured by institutions, developers and users, and driven by the hegemony of markets and their logic, the monstrous arises not in code alone, but in the coupling of data hunger, predictive models and displaced responsibility.
Five experimental setups over-fulfil this logic until it collapses: neural activity becomes a projected surface, prescribed stillness a stressor; AI-mediated closeness, agent-based processes of persuasion and algorithmic "truth tests" make tangible how intimacy, publicness and moral judgement are technically framed. Here active participation replaces passive observation – but this involvement does not only empower, it implicates. Visitors become the material of a diagnosis in which participation carries responsibility for these framings.
The age of monsters is a transitional order in the making, in which the same infrastructures can be access and exclusion, empowerment and regulation – depending on which use prevails. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." — Antonio Gramsci

