Mario Klingemann

Born in Laatzen in 1970 and based in Munich, Klingemann taught himself programming in the early 1980s. His practice developed through design, moving images and generative software into an investigation of machine creativity. He builds systems that can surprise their maker, treating their rules, errors and unexpected associations as artistic material.

From 2016 to 2018 he was an artist in residence at Google Arts & Culture. His work with digital archives and neural networks connects classification with invention: the same technologies that organize cultural material can also be made to misread, transform and generate it. In his Neural Glitch experiments, begun in 2018, he deliberately alters the weights of trained neural networks to disrupt their output.

Memories of Passersby I (2018) generates an ongoing succession of portraits. In Appropriate Response (2020), a language model addresses a kneeling visitor through a mechanical display, making the expectation of wisdom part of the work. At Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025, the existing installation gained an NFT edition, allowing attendees to claim and mint the phrase from their encounter.

Klingemann’s interest in autonomous creativity led him to creating Botto, launched in 2021 with a team of collaborators. Its community votes on machine-generated proposals, feeding collective judgment back into the system. Across these projects, authorship extends beyond making an image to designing the conditions under which images and ideas are generated, selected and interpreted.

Klingemann received the British Library Labs Artistic Award in 2016, the Lumen Prize Gold Award for The Butcher’s Son in 2018, and an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica for Appropriate Response in 2020.