ELIAS NOVÁK
Elias Novák is a Czech artist whose practice merges data science and conceptual minimalism. Using AI algorithms trained on large-scale climate datasets, he transforms complex catastrophe models into single Pantone swatches. His ongoing series Extinction Pantones functions as both a scientific experiment and an aesthetic inquiry—translating future ecological collapse into color. Novák’s work investigates how abstraction, automation, and visualization shape our understanding of planetary emergency, questioning whether data can ever truly represent the end of the world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“My work begins where information ends. I use AI to process massive climate datasets—permafrost melt, methane surges, ocean-current breakdowns—and let it calculate a single representative color for each modeled catastrophe. The algorithm decides; I only frame the result. Sometimes it gives me violent reds, toxic greens, or a black so dense it seems to absorb light. Other times, it offers beige—the statistical average of planetary failure, disturbingly calm.
I’m interested in how these colors, from the lurid to the lifeless, reveal the emotional distance between data and experience. When catastrophe becomes color, science turns into prophecy, and our imagination of the end slips quietly into aesthetics.”
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction (2024)
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction uses AI to calculate the statistical “average color” of planetary collapse, distilling vast climate datasets and probabilistic catastrophe forecasts into a single Pantone swatch. The resulting shade—a muted, indifferent beige—captures the flattening of tragedy into information. It is a visual silence, an elegy that looks like nothing at all.
Part of Novák’s Extinction Pantones series, the work exposes how predictive systems turn the unimaginable into something printable and palatable. By compressing climate futures into color, Novák reveals the psychological fatigue of data visualization and the paradox of trying to represent an extinction we cannot yet see. His beige is not neutrality—it is surrender.
Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction (2024) — Gallery view showing the AI-calculated “average color” of total planetary collapse, a statistical distillation of extinction.
Methane Surge, 2061 (2024) — The algorithm computes the chromatic signature of a future methane release, turning unseen greenhouse escalation into hue.
West Antarctic Blackout, 2035 (2025) — Gallery view of the AI-calculated tone produced from Antarctic ice-sheet disintegration models, a chromatic forecast of irreversible melt.
Permafrost Carbon Release, 2089 – 500 Gigatons (2024) — AI-generated color derived from permafrost carbon-release simulations, visualizing invisible atmospheric tipping points.
AMOC Shutdown, 2047 (“The Year the Oceans Stopped Breathing”) (2025) — Exhibition view of the color representing the projected collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
5 questions with
Elias Novák
1. Why translate catastrophe into color?
Because data alone cannot move us. Climate reports, models, and graphs describe the end of the world in decimals and probabilities, but perception shuts down under that weight. Color, in contrast, is immediate — it operates before language. When I translate catastrophe into hue, I am trying to find a visual language that bypasses fatigue, that makes data felt rather than understood. But there’s a paradox in that: the very act of simplifying disaster into color also neutralizes it. The work exists in that tension between urgency and indifference — beauty and annihilation.
2. Why let AI decide?
Because I wanted to remove human bias — including my own moral and emotional filters. I design the parameters, but the AI performs the act of synthesis, calculating from datasets I can barely comprehend. It makes visible what no human could ever see: the statistical texture of a planet in collapse. It’s a collaboration and a surrender. In that sense, AI is not just a tool; it is a mirror showing us what objectivity really looks like when all empathy has been stripped away.
3. Why beige for mass extinction?
That was not my choice — it was the data’s. When the algorithm calculated the mean color value across all extinction models, the result was beige. A shade that embodies the slow violence of climate change: not cinematic, not explosive, but gradual, bureaucratic, and normalized. It’s the color of waiting rooms, offices, administrative paralysis. Beige is the visual tone of denial — the catastrophe that becomes background. That’s what frightens me most: not fire, but boredom.
4. Is this work science, art, or both?
It’s the place where science collapses into metaphor. The models I use are scientific, but their interpretation is emotional and political. I see the project as a counter-laboratory: instead of seeking precision, it exposes the emotional residue of precision. Science wants to predict; art wants to witness. In Extinction Pantones, both collapse into a single gesture — an algorithm dreaming in color.
5. What comes after the Pantones?
If black already marks a point of no return, then perhaps what follows is transparency — the absence of representation itself. A time when there is nothing left to visualize, because the systems that produced both data and meaning have ended. Maybe that’s the true final color: not black, not white, but invisible. The disappearance of information, and with it, of us.