Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann, aka Quasimondo, was born in 1970 in Laatzen, Germany. He began programming at age 14 after receiving a Commodore 64, teaching himself to write code, create graphics, and understand the inner workings of digital systems. In the early 1990s, he worked in design and multimedia development, building interactive experiences in the nascent days of the internet. Though entirely self-taught, Klingemann's fascination with perception, aesthetics, and systems thinking shaped his trajectory toward experimental artmaking rooted in code.

Klingemann is widely recognized as a pioneer of AI art, with a practice that explores the nature of creativity, authorship, and machine intelligence. His work asks what it means to create, and to be human, when machines can imitate, generate, and even surprise. Rather than treating AI as a tool, he sees it as a collaborator and provocateur, capable of producing results beyond the limits of human intention. Using neural networks, GANs, and custom datasets, he has built systems that generate portraits, hallucinate faces, distort archives, and create visual feedback loops that evolve without direct human control. His installation Memories of Passersby I (2018), for example, presents a machine dreaming in real time—endlessly generating portraits of people who never existed. For Klingemann, this isn’t just visual experimentation, but a way of probing the thresholds of perception, meaning, and the uncanny.

He refers to himself as a "neurographer", someone who draws with the brain of a machine, and often trains his models on cultural artifacts from the past to reflect on how knowledge, aesthetics, and bias are encoded. By using public domain archives from institutions like the British Library, he connects the past to generative futures, questioning how machines learn history and how culture is continuously reshaped through interpretation. His work often moves between technical precision and conceptual play, using the errors, glitches, and unexpected outputs of AI as starting points for deeper inquiry.

Klingemann’s practice has gained international recognition, with exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, Ars Electronica in Linz, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Barbican Centre in London. He received the Lumen Prize Gold Award in 2018, was a winner of the British Library Labs Creative Award, and received an Honorary Mention at the 2020 Prix Ars Electronica. Between 2016 and 2018, he was artist-in-residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, where he developed AI-based tools for cultural institutions. Through his work, Klingemann has become a leading voice in the conversation around generative art and machine creativity, creating systems that challenge assumptions about control, originality, and what it means to create in the age of algorithms. He lives and works in Munich.