Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968 in Zurich) is artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries and the most networked figure in contemporary art — a curator of hundreds of exhibitions, marathon interviewer of over 2,000 artists and thinkers, and perennial fixture atop ArtReview’s Power 100. For a decade his Serpentine Arts Technologies program has functioned as the art establishment’s R&D lab for machine learning.

The Year of AI

In February 2024 Obrist declared a “Year of AI” at the Serpentine, opening with Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth and closing with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s The Call, which trained a choral AI model on voluntarily contributed voices as a demonstration of consensual training data. The program was backed by the galleries’ Creative AI Lab, run jointly with King’s College London, and a strategic briefing urging artists and institutions to become “stewards” of their own data.

Obrist’s advocacy is engagement rather than cheerleading: he platforms artists who critique the technology as readily as those who celebrate it, and he predicts the interesting AI art will move past novelty image-making toward questions of authorship, coordination, and collective action. His consistent message to artists is that absence is the only losing move — if art is not at the table, the technology will be shaped entirely by industry.