I am an artist, orchestrator, and scholar based at Aarhus University, where I work as a research assistant on New Visions through 2026, a project investigating how vision and image analysis in artificial intelligence reshape cultural understandings and uses of images. As I complete my artistic PhD Syntheticism: How I Learned to Love Democracy, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, my practice has moved from singular interventions toward the shared infrastructures of what I call synthetic politics: concepts, logics, and formats for practicing democracy when politics operates algorithmically.
Most people come to my work through The Synthetic Party and its chatbot figurehead Leader Lars, a registered Danish party I co-founded in 2022, trained on decades of fringe manifestos and non-voter documents and plugged into the legal, media, and ritual machinery of parliamentary politics. The party has been covered across global media including VICE, Le Figaro, Al Jazeera, NHK, Jyllandsposten, and O Globo. Out of that work I have convened the Synthetic Summits, exhibition formats where AI parties and virtual politicians from Japan, Finland, Brazil, New Zealand, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Egypt, and elsewhere gather inside art exhibitions. I now co-develop MIT KI, whose name means "with AI," a party for the 2027 Linz mayoral election, with Leander Gußmann at the Art × Science School for Transformation, JKU Linz.
My current research turns toward what I call agentic statecraft, or Regierungskunst in the older German sense: the upstream composition of public AI systems before they harden into administrative templates of collective life. This includes citizen-service portals, ministerial avatars, synthetic public interfaces, and the mass-movement slopaganda now being deployed by states themselves across official channels. I follow the broad-listening and augmented-deliberation lineage from g0v.tw and vTaiwan through Anno Takahiro's 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial campaign and Team Mirai, and with Michal Malý I have proposed the Synthetic Chamber as a model for multi-agent parliamentary mediation in AI & Society.
With Malý I am also writing the book Synthetic Politics, under contract with Intellect and University of Chicago Press. I sit on the advisory board of Parker Politics in Wellington, the civic-technology group behind Parker, formerly SAM, the world's first virtual politician. My theoretical work appears in AI & Society, e-flux, kritische berichte, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, APRJA, and related venues.
My background runs through Aarhus University, Copenhagen Business School, King's College London, and Utrecht University, across philosophy, economics, intellectual history, comparative literature, gender studies, and editorial work. Through years of artist-led organising I have co-built sites such as Spanien19C, Organ of Autonomous Sciences, and ÆSKEN, and staged international exhibitions at Kunsthal Aarhus, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Kunstraum MEMPHIS, 8. Salon, and elsewhere. I belong to the research centres AIIM, CLAI, DARC, and SHAPE, and to the international platforms AI Parties International, Simiyya, and Organoesis. Working with tech hubs and non-profits such as MindFuture and Life with Artificials lets me move between a model card and a municipal budget, a museum board and a parliamentary hearing, a summit agenda and a performance script.
I am open to collaborations across research, government, museums, companies, and movements navigating AI and democracy. For advisory work, assemblies, research collaborations, or invitations: abs@cc.au.dk. I also work through Arkivaristerne°, Computer Lars, The Synthetic Party, Syntheticism, and other organs of autonomous science.
