Kathrin Köppert (HU Berlin)
The idea of a technology that seeks to predict the future by referencing the past is only partially comprehensible. For those for whom recursion is associated with a return to a place of brutal violence and a time of lawlessness, the mechanization of recursive operations signifies the closure of the future and, in more than a few cases, death. This lecture presents a chronicle of cybernetics as “a death foretold.” The lecture focuses on suicides, primarily among racialized youth, resulting from communication with chatbots. I examine this form of “Racial Death” as the materialization of an AI that technologically conjures up the death of those who do not conform to the new fascist body (Herzog 2025). Using the relation of AI chatbots and suicidality as example, the lecture addresses the question of the extent to which AI rejects all aspects of racialized life (McKitterick 2020) and, through them, provides a matrix for fascism. To this end, I introduce the concept of “preemptive fascism.”
Katrin Köppert is an art and media scholar whose work focuses on media theories of digital colonialism, critical theories of computation at the intersection of art, design, and visual cultures, digital memory studies, queer media studies. She is professor for art history / popular cultures at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Recent publications include Knowing memes means knowing the internet as irrevocably black as fuck. Memetische Enteignung und/als Emanzipation (2025) and Hologrammatiken der Gewalt: Digitale Erinnerung und Computational Blackface (2026).
