Nozomu Kubota’s video work AI’s Silent Omissions has received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Humanity category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2026.
Nozomu Kubota’s video work AI’s Silent Omissions has received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Humanity category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2026, one of the world’s longest-running and most prestigious international competitions in media art.
Founded in 1987, the Prix Ars Electronica is an international competition that has continually examined the relationship between art, technology, and society. The Digital Humanity category recognizes artistic and social practices that critically engage with the transformations digital technologies bring to individuals and society, while contributing to the creation of a more inclusive digital future. Kubota was the only Japanese artist to receive an award in this category. In 2026, the competition received 4,329 submissions from 106 countries. AI’s Silent Omissions was selected as one of 15 officially recognized works from among 754 submissions to the Digital Humanity category.
AI’s Silent Omissions reveals how AI, even as it makes society more efficient, can unwittingly contribute to the exclusion of minorities. Through this recognition, we hope that the questions raised by the work will open up new dialogues across national and disciplinary boundaries.
Jury Statement
In AI’s Silent Omissions, Nozomu Kubota exposes a quiet violence: the systematic erasure of bodies defying coded norms. By pairing forensic dataset audits—including bypassing NSFW filters—with interviews with people living with cleft hands, the work interrogates the politics of visibility and digital dignity. It shifts bias debates from abstract ethics to lived embodiment, showing how AI misreads difference as error or obscenity. The jury commends its refusal of techno-solutionism. Employing a “reflexive methodology,” Kubota, an AI engineer, exposes his own implicit biases during the process, critiquing both the system and its creator. AI’s omissions are not empty; they are social decisions sedimented in code. The project speaks with rare clarity, restoring human density to those the algorithm sought to erase.