The third Human AI Art Award presents a new multi channel installation by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, in which television archives and custom software trace the links between geopolitical turning points and today’s algorithm driven image cultures.
Initiated by Deutsche Telekom and Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2024, the Human AI Art Award honours artists who explore how contemporary art and new technologies intersect and reshape each other. In 2026 the award goes to Christopher Kulendran Thomas, an artist of Tamil background who lives and works in London and Berlin and whose practice is grounded in collaboration with technologists, architects, writers, journalists, designers, musicians and activists.
For this edition of the award, Christopher Kulendran Thomas adapts his work Peace Core (surround) into an immersive multi channel installation for the Human AI Art Space in front of Kunstmuseum Bonn. The work assembles US television programmes broadcast shortly before the attacks of 11 September 2001 and subjects them to a custom algorithm that continuously reorders and combines the material. By holding viewers in this suspended interval before the so called War on Terror and its consequences, including the suppression of the Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka, the installation asks how media archives shape narratives of power, security and loss.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas connects these media histories with the circulation of images on contemporary platforms such as TikTok, observing how attention, memory and visibility are organised by software. Peace Core (surround) raises questions about Pax Americana and about the role of technological infrastructures in producing and preserving cultural identities.
