Sarah Ciston, a US media artist and researcher in the current CAIS fellow cohort, receives the prestigious S+T+ARTS Prize 2025 in the category “Grand Prize – Artistic Exploration”. The award, endowed with €20,000, is presented by the European Commission and will be conferred as part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, which takes place this year from September 3 to 7.
Project: “AI War Cloud Database”
What responsibility do users and developers bear in choosing AI tools when their use can also lead to deadly consequences on a large scale?
With AI War Cloud Database, Sarah Ciston reveals how AI systems are used both in warfare and in everyday civilian life. The interactive database catalogs more than 50 examples from the last 25 years and shows manufacturers, fields of application, as well as the technical and economic connections of these technologies. In doing so, it makes the often-hidden interrelations between military and commercial AI comprehensible.
For example, the project documents how household devices like robot vacuums – with their spatial mapping functions – can be linked to military applications. Chatbots that influence everyday search results also appear in similar technical forms in systems used for drone targeting. The database offers an interactive interface to make automated warfare and the everyday use of AI more comprehensible.
Sarah Ciston critically questions the widespread assumption that there are always “humans in the loop” in automated war decisions – since many decisions are pre-structured algorithmically. Their project puts ethical questions of responsibility, transparency, and accountability at the center.
Jury Statement
The jury of the S+T+ARTS Prize recognized Ciston’s work as an important and highly topical investigation into how AI systems work and what consequences they bring. The work shows how the same machine learning tools that drive recommendation algorithms, chatbots, and forecasting systems are also used in military decision-making processes – raising urgent societal and legal challenges in dealing with AI.
Sarah’s Fellowship at CAIS
Since April 2025, Sarah Ciston has been a fellow at CAIS in Bochum; her stay ends in September. During their fellowship, they are working on the project “Unsupervised Pleasures: Conscientious Datasets for Queer Futures”. This project explores how generative AI systems represent people beyond normative categories – and how machine learning can be made fairer and more inclusive through intersectional approaches, critical code studies, and community input. The goal is to critically interrogate existing training datasets and develop alternative models that promote digital justice.
Further information
- For an illustrated presentation of the project on the S+T+ARTS Prize website: https://starts-prize.aec.at/en/ai-war-cloud-database/
- For the full jury statement: https://starts-prize.aec.at/en/jury/jury2025/#statement
- To the podcast episode “Web of AI: Linking Homes and Battlefields” with Sarah Ciston on the Ars Electronica podcast “Art Is Not a Thing”: https://artisnotathing.buzzsprout.com/2273863/episodes/17421601-web-of-ai-linking-homes-and-battlefields