German filmmaker and essayist Hito Steyerl presents her first solo exhibition at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) under the evocative title "Humanity has had the bullet go in one ear and out the other," borrowed from Viennese writer, publicist, and satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). The exhibition features two multimedia installations that offer a critical examination of artificial intelligence and its societal implications.
In her works "Mechanical Kurds" (2025) and "Hell Yeah Fuck Die" (2016), Steyerl condenses her diagnosis of the irrational self-purpose of artificial intelligence in the race for technological development, highlighting both its fatal ecological and political consequences. A century after Kraus wrote his prescient observation under the impression of World War I, doubting the possibility of societal change through better insight alone, his words seem remarkably relevant to our current moment.
Steyerl transforms Kraus's sentence from future perfect to perfect tense, adopting a post-apocalyptic stance that suggests the feared conditions have already arrived. While conventional cultural criticism of AI may inadvertently provide promotional material for the Promethean promises of tech startups—many of which don't even know if they can develop killer applications beyond the defense industry to recoup their massive investments—Steyerl approaches these complex issues through equally complex artistic methods.
Her artworks function like intellectual stopovers, suddenly enabling viewers' thinking to take new directions. She develops non-linear narratives spanning different media elements—video projections, spatial and sound installations—each adding new layers of meaning to the overall experience.
The videos in "Hell Yeah We Fuck Die" document laboratory tests where robots are trained through violent disruptions of their orientation—being pushed and kicked—to rescue humans in disaster areas. These scenes are displayed within the installation's course set in the destroyed Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. The title itself comes from the five most frequent words in pop songs from the 2010s, serving as subcutaneous symptoms of crisis.
"Mechanical Kurds," Steyerl's newest video work, invites viewers to get truly comfortable by taking seats on two golf carts. The slightly elevated seating position provides a kind of executive perspective on the events—a Mar-a-Lago view, if you will. The opening sequence shows a drone's-eye view of the uniform, checkerboard-like layout of a refugee camp in the areas of the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq.
At ground level, the camera follows light vehicles through narrow alleys between barracks and tracks a female pedestrian who speaks from off-screen about her life in the camp and the time before. The unspectacular nature of these images becomes an alienation effect, avoiding everything that ignites outrage potential in social media discussions about refugee camps and exhausts interpersonal capacity for empathy.
The people Steyerl has visited there over recent years, shown and given voice in her work, are trapped in the stasis of ongoing civil war. Often torn from their studies and careers, economically weakened by lack of mobility and insecure residency status, these frequently highly qualified individuals form the supply chain for a new digital proletariat that keeps the machinery running behind the virtual facade.
The title "Mechanical Kurds" clarifies a chain of references that alludes not only to the legendary "Mechanical Turk" with which Viennese court official Wolfgang von Kempelen fooled first the imperial court from 1769, then the public in European capitals. In this life-sized apparatus, a reproduction of a human torso in Ottoman dress with a movable arm appeared to move the pieces on the board, while actually being operated by a chess player hidden inside. Amazon now mediates gigs for IT workers through its platform called Mechanical Turk.
Walter Benjamin's image from "On the Concept of History" completes this reference chain. Here, a small, ugly dwarf sits inside the chess-playing automaton, which becomes historical materialism, driving it with messianic thinking. The microworkers in the camp were busy feeding an AI system they didn't even know with image descriptions.
In the recordings, colorful frames regularly pop up, perspectively tracing the edges of a cube, their colors neatly distinguishing buildings, vehicles, and people. Meanwhile, they are unemployed again—the AI now recognizes the image elements on its own. Whether they provided data for autonomous driving, surveillance that could also affect them, or automated target identification from a first-person shooter perspective, they cannot know. The region was an experimental field for military repurposing of consumer drones long before the Ukraine war.
Colorful frames also extend beyond the screen into the space between viewers in the installation. They open the projection surface to a three-dimensional setting, involving viewers and making them physically feel the discomfort of gamified perception. Eventually, everything shifts as silhouettes of cities appear that seem strangely placeless.
Their facades sum up unique selling points of different tourist destinations into a grotesque yet boring average. They no longer have any reference point in reality. AI-supported image production replaces causality with probability. They are essentially not images but graphic representations of forecasts derived from the entropy of enormous amounts of data.
Suddenly, the vehicles from the beginning are illuminated in glaring fluorescent colors. Microworkers wave torches: trapped in the dream of artificial intelligence, we begin to dance. Weightless ecstasy whirls them through the air. The scene is still disturbing—couldn't images of explosion-torn bodies have also found their way into the dataset? Beauty that harbors danger could be a final weapon against the hallucinated mediocrity of statistical image generation.
The exhibition runs at the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts Vienna until January 11, 2026, offering visitors a profound meditation on the human cost of our increasingly automated world and the invisible labor that sustains our digital reality.
