Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann, who works online as Quasimondo, was born in Laatzen in Lower Saxony in 1970 and taught himself to program in the early 1980s. He describes himself as an artist and a sceptic with a curious mind whose preferred tools are neural networks, code and algorithms, and says the common thread across everything he makes is a wish to understand, question and subvert the inner workings of systems. Long before machine learning reached the art market he was writing image tools and visualisations, including StackBlur, a blur algorithm still used widely in software. He was a Google Arts and Culture resident from 2016 to 2018, won the Lumen Prize Gold Award in 2018 for The Butcher's Son, and took an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2020 for Appropriate Response. In 2019 his installation Memories of Passersby I became the first work made with artificial intelligence to be auctioned at Sotheby's. He is represented by ONKAOS and by DAM Gallery Berlin, and his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou and the British Library. In 2021 he conceived Botto, a decentralised autonomous artist that produces work continuously while a community of thousands votes on what counts as art. He lives in Munich.

Klingemann trains and then deliberately breaks generative models. Neural Glitch, which he began in 2018, works by randomly altering, deleting or swapping the trained weights inside a finished GAN so that the damage surfaces in both texture and structure. Alongside the still and moving image work he builds machines and installations that generate endlessly, including Memories of Passersby I, Uncanny Mirror and Appropriate Response. His earlier practice covers data visualisation, collage systems and image algorithms going back to the mid 2000s.

• Memories of Passersby I, first AI work auctioned at Sotheby's
• Neural Glitch and Mistaken Identity
• Creator of Botto, the decentralised autonomous artist
• Lumen Prize Gold Award 2018 for The Butcher's Son
• Google Arts and Culture resident 2016 to 2018
• StackBlur, a widely used blur algorithm

On the show