Birk Schmithüsen is a media artist and co-founder of the theatre and performance company ArtesMobiles and of the design studio FlashClash for light, sound and performative interactions. He produces audiovisual installations and immersive social experiments that question technical developments – AI, surveillance, governance – against the backdrop of their impact on society.
His approach is to make complex systems tangible through audiovisual interpretation – and thereby open to debate. He has worked with machine learning since 2018, when he began SpeculativeAI: a series of aesthetic experiments that translate the processes inside artificial neural networks into light and sound, accompanied by his paper “Speculative Artificial Intelligence” (xCoAx, Madrid).
His work has been shown internationally, including at Ars Electronica Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, FILE Festival São Paulo and the Chaos Communication Congress, where he has co-curated the exhibition area art&play since 2018. He was an EMAP/EMARE resident at LABoral Gijón (2019) and a fellow of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality (2022).
