Terminal Beige: The Average Color of Mass Extinction (2024) 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.