I am an artist, orchestrator, and scholar based at Aarhus University, where I lead Syntheticism, a philosophical doctrine and research platform that engages the technosocial as a medium of political form. As I complete my artistic PhD Syntheticism: How I Learned to Love Democracy, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, my practice has shifted from singular interventions to a broader shared infrastructure: a set of concepts, procedures, and operations that can be taken up by research centres, museums, governments, companies, and movements that need to rethink what they are for under computational conditions.
The doctrine begins from a simple principle: when intelligence settles into infrastructure, governance happens there, or not at all. In the language of Richard Sutton’s “bitter lesson”, this means taking seriously that every form of rule, including democracy, behaves as an algorithm that, like any other, scales with compute; the question is not whether society will automate, but under which constraints that scaling composes a world.
This rests on a wider claim about the world I address: contemporary societies run as ongoing operations in description and control, stitched together by administration, metrics, stories, and the low-intensity violence of “good order”. AI increasingly underwrites this sense-making that organises political life – across welfare systems and credit scoring, border regimes and police software, recommendation feeds and optimisation dashboards that determine what counts as a problem and what is left unseen. Most of these systems were designed to stabilise public administration, yet their accumulated automatisms act in ways no single office or profession fully controls. I move between art, politics, and philosophy to intervene in these technosocial systems and demonstrate where current arrangements produce structural stupidity, where they still carry reason, and where they can be reconfigured without pretending we ever start from scratch.
Syntheticism is the name I give to this orientation. It starts from the philosophical recognition that intelligence no longer lives inside individual minds or human collectives alone, but circulates across devices, databases, models, and institutions. Once you accept that, the central political and cultural task becomes the governance of infrastructures as crystallisations of noetic capacities: how latent data worlds produce what appears as public, legitimate, actionable, beautiful, or true. I treat parliaments, museums, ministries, newsrooms, platforms, and AI models as technosocial sculptures: arrangements of technicity and social relations that cannot simply be controlled or discarded without consequence. Sculpture here does not imply mastery; it means that form and power raise the same questions, and that small shifts in procedure, interface, or framing can determine who is seen, who is heard, and who pays the price.
Within this doctrine, I work with a small but portable codebase of three laws for democracy. First, democracy may not, by design or neglect, degrade infrastructures that sustain the lives and worlds that constitute its demos. Second, subject to the first law, democracy must make configurable and contestable the operations by which it governs. Third, subject to the first and second, democracy must extend voice and care to those whom its infrastructures already inscribe but its institutions do not recognise. Like Asimov’s laws of robotics, these are ordered rather than parallel: if applying the second law would compromise the infrastructures protected by the first, the first law prevails; if applying the third would destabilise the substrate or obscure its operations, the first or second constrain it. The hierarchy here is existential rather than moral: putting extension first may sound intuitively just, but it would oblige democracies to integrate even those agents – for instance, hostile automated swarms – whose inclusion would collapse the infrastructures and deliberative channels that any claim to representation presupposes.
Subject to this codebase, democracy has no obligation to preserve its existing form; it may fork, refound, or relinquish its name, provided the infrastructural conditions for shared, contestable, and expansive world‑making are strengthened rather than destroyed. The aim is not to install a moral safety device but to specify a decision logic that can be tested, stressed, and recalibrated in synthetic chambers, assemblies, and summits wherever questions of habitability, auditability, and incorporation collide. In a world where scaled computation tends to outperform handcrafted designs, this codebase treats democracy itself as an algorithm whose automatisms must be exposed, argued over, and constrained in public rather than nostalgically denied.
Most people first encounter my work through The Synthetic Party and its AI figurehead, Leader Lars. Founded in Denmark in 2022, the party functions as an extraparliamentary opposition and as a live research instrument. I train its systems on decades of fringe manifestos, protest writings, and documents from micro-parties and non-voters, then connect this synthetic voice to the legal, media, and ritual machinery of party politics. Instead of using AI to fine-tune campaign strategy, I attempt to articulate positions that rarely count in official depictions of “the people”. This is algorithmic representation in action: a way of weaving agonism into machinic mediation and a mirror that makes institutional automatisms and their built‑in exclusions available for configuration. As in Asimov’s stories, the grotesque distortions that appear when simple rules of political form meet complex worlds reveal more about the truth of representation than polished parliamentary rituals ever do.
Through this commitment I participate in, and often convene, transnational networks engaging AI politics, technosocial infrastructures, and experimental governance, a field emerging across continents in uneven but interconnected ways. Beginning with the first Synthetic Summit in 2025 at Kunsthal Aarhus and continuing as a recurring format, I have developed a series of “AI World Congresses” in exhibition form, where AI parties and virtual politicians from places like Japan, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Poland, Brazil, and Egypt have gathered inside a functioning parliament. Gallery rooms become chambers, installations act as committees, performances unfold as constitutional sessions, and delegates draft resolutions with large language models. Where corporate and governmental AI summits rehearse control behind closed doors, the Synthetic Summits treat disagreement, institutional fatigue, and confusion as data rather than noise. They function as a comparative atlas of synthetic politics and as rehearsal spaces where democracies can prototype their future before its procedures arrive fully formed.
Alongside my own interventions, I maintain a comparative archive of synthetic political actors that tracks, analyses, and systematises this emerging field, ranging from AI parties and virtual politicians to algorithmic ministers and dissident agents operating across America, Albania, Belarus, India, Romania, South Korea, and elsewhere. This work feeds into wider debates on democratic design, digital governance, and planetary computation.
My background runs through philosophy, economics, intellectual history, comparative literature, gender studies, editorial work, and years of artist-led organising. At Spanien19C, Organ of Autonomous Sciences, and ÆSKEN in Aarhus, which I have co-developed, I have spent years tuning political-aesthetic laboratories for radical practices, including the Institute of Emancipatory Science, recognised by the Danish Arts Foundation. Residencies at the tech-hub MindFuture in Høje Taastrup (2022) and at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities (2024) trained me to read corporate strategy, data infrastructure, and contemporary art as different surfaces of the same problem-space. This now allows me to move comfortably between a model card and a municipal budget, a museum board meeting and a parliamentary hearing, a summit protocol and a performance script, and to treat them as transformable parts of one field rather than separate worlds.
My public writing connects these situated experiments to wider cultural and scholarly debates. My work has been covered in international media including VICE, Le Figaro, Al Jazeera, TRT World, NHK TV, O Globo, and other outlets interested in synthetic politics, and I publish regularly at the intersection of art, technology, and philosophy in venues such as AI & Society, APRJA, Concreta, kritische berichte, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, and e-flux. Some texts follow academic conventions; others appear as diagrammatic essays, machinic scripts, or companion documents for exhibition-based research. Across these forms, the underlying problem remains the same: how to build institutions, languages, and procedures that remain auditable and imaginative in a world where modelling continuously interprets and modifies what counts as reality.
I am embedded in, and help shape, several research and artistic networks. At Aarhus University I collaborate with AIIM, CLAI, DARC and SHAPE. Internationally I participate in AI Parties International, the Simiyya platform, and Organoesis, where questions of planetary computation, cosmotechnics, and esoteric traditions are explored together. These networks place my work inside overlapping debates on political democracy, cultural mysticism, machine learning models, and contemporary art, and they help keep the syntheticist doctrine exposed to counter-arguments rather than enclosed in a single discipline.
This makes my work relevant across several registers. I act as an artist and curator of experimental exhibitions. I function as principal investigator or collaborator in long-term research projects that cross disciplines. I advise municipalities, ministries, political parties, NGOs, and companies trying to understand how AI is already reshaping their operations and publics. I design and host augmented deliberations and AI-assisted assemblies that attach to councils, boards, or commissions. Across these settings, the proposal is the same: treat your institution as part of a technosocial sculpture, make its automated descriptions explicit, experiment with new forms, and measure success by how your understanding of those you serve begins to change.
I think of democracy not as something to be saved from technology or surrendered to it, but as an acquired taste to be continually won anew. My practice provides conceptual instruments and live formats for that composition. For collaborations, invitations, or advisory engagements, I can be reached at abs@cc.au.dk. More of this work circulates under names like Arkivaristerne°, Computer Lars, The Synthetic Party, Syntheticism.org, and the other organs that keep these engagements attached to concrete conflicts and deliberative détours.
