Mario Klingemann (a.k.a. Quasimondo) was born in 1970 in Laatzen, Germany. His father was an engineer who brought home the bleeding edge of 1970s technology: electronic chess computers, programmable calculators, the latest gadgets that blinked and computed. His mother painted. Klingemann existed between these two worlds from the beginning.

At his father’s office, he watched massive pen plotters drag ink across paper in geometric patterns. The machine was drawing. The machine was creating. On one of those calculators his father brought home, Klingemann started teaching himself BASIC.

By the 1980s, he was programming seriously, but universities had nothing to offer him. No art school taught what he wanted to learn. No computer science program cared about aesthetics. So he taught himself everything and started working in advertising and design. In 1994, he built websites when the web was still a curiosity. In 1997, he co-founded coma, a media artist collective.

But he was waiting for the right technology to arrive.

Neural networks changed everything. Suddenly machines could do more than calculate. They could interpret. Misinterpret. Hallucinate. In 2016, Google Arts and Culture made him Artist in Residence for two years. He started feeding neural networks data they weren’t designed to process, breaking them deliberately to see what emerged from the chaos.

He called it Neural Glitch. Take a trained neural network and randomly corrupt its weights. The AI starts misreading reality at both texture and semantic levels. The glitches weren’t errors. They were glimpses of something autonomous, something that looked disturbingly like creativity.

In 2018, he built Memories of Passersby I. A black monolith housing custom hardware running neural networks that generate portraits in perpetual real time. Two screens show faces, one male, one female. Each face unique, never repeated, created by algorithms interpreting their own output in an infinite loop. The faces look almost human but fundamentally wrong. Eerie. Uncanny. Like something dreaming about what people might look like.

The following year, Sotheby’s sold it for £40,000. One of the first AI artworks auctioned by a traditional house. But Klingemann insisted people misunderstood. The art wasn’t the faces. The art was the code. The system that would keep generating faces long after everyone involved was dead.

When one-click AI art generators exploded in popularity, Klingemann didn’t celebrate. He found them predictable. They pushed him deeper into the wilderness, into the territories where AI behavior becomes genuinely strange and unpredictable.

In 2023, he unveiled A.I.C.C.A., a sculpture in the form of a dog that generates art criticism using AI. It’s absurd. It’s also serious. A machine judging art made by other machines, while humans stand around trying to figure out what any of it means.

He lives in Munich, running Dog & Pony with paper artist Alexandra Lukaschewitz. The space is part gallery, part Wunderkammer, part laboratory for experiments that don’t have names yet. He describes himself as a skeptic searching for the places where human and machine creativity blur into something neither.

His strengths: Pioneer in artistic applications of GANs and neural networks before the mainstream caught up, technical depth allowing manipulation of AI systems in ways others can’t replicate, philosophical rigor questioning what creativity means when machines generate beauty, willingness to explore the unsettling rather than the commercially safe.

Career highlights: Memories of Passersby I sold at Sotheby’s, Google Arts and Culture residency, Lumen Prize Gold Award, exhibitions at MoMA and The Met, Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention, founding Dog & Pony in Munich, A.I.C.C.A. performative sculpture, work in permanent collections across 23 countries.