Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann (born 1970) is a German artist, self-taught coder, and former Google Arts & Culture resident widely regarded as a founding figure of neural-network art. Working under the handle Quasimondo, he spent the 2010s coaxing generative adversarial networks into producing unsettling, painterly faces — winning the Lumen Prize gold award in 2018 for The Butcher’s Son.

First through the auction-house door

In March 2019 Sotheby’s sold his Memories of Passersby I — a self-contained machine whose GANs, trained on thousands of 17th–19th-century portraits, generate an endless, never-repeating stream of new faces on twin screens — for £40,000. It was the first AI artwork ever auctioned at Sotheby’s, and its deliberately modest price against the previous year’s Christie’s AI-portrait frenzy made it a benchmark for the genre’s market.

Klingemann’s stance on machines and creativity is unsentimental: he argues human creativity is itself combinatorial and sees the machine as the honest continuation of his own practice. In 2021 he pushed the logic to its conclusion with Botto, a “decentralized autonomous artist” that generates thousands of images weekly while a token-holding community votes on which to mint — a project that has earned millions at auction and forced the question of whether an artist needs a body at all.

Unlike later text-to-image tools trained on scraped contemporary art, Klingemann’s canonical works drew on historical, public-domain corpora — one reason he is cited as the movement’s craftsman even by observers wary of generative AI, alongside institutional peers like Refik Anadol.