Kim Albrecht

His work has been exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums, the Ars Electronica Center, the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the latter three institutions.

Kim Albrecht studied at Potsdam University. The recorded working language is German. The field of work recorded is science, art and data. Employment is recorded with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Freie Universität Berlin and Northeastern University. Work by Kim Albrecht is recorded in the collections of Ars Electronica Center, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

• Name — Kim Albrecht • Born — 1987 • Birthplace — Germany • Occupation — * Information designer • media artist • academic • Education — BA Graphic Design; MA Interface Design; PhD Media Theory, University of Potsdam • Employer — Folkwang University of the Arts • Title — Professor of Information Design • Known for — Critical and investigative data visualization • Website — https: kimalbrecht.com

Albrecht was born in 1987. He completed a bachelor's degree in graphic design and a master's degree in interface design, and received a doctorate in media theory from the University of Potsdam in 2023 with a dissertation titled Insight by de—sign: A Calculus of Computation, supervised by Jan Distelmeyer and Birgit Schneider.

Between 2015 and 2017 Albrecht worked as a designer and research associate at the Center for Complex Network Research (BarabásiLab) under Albert-László Barabási, then at Northeastern University, where he was embedded in a team of network scientists and cosmologists. He joined metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research group affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center, in 2017, and later became a principal of the lab. He co-founded and was director of metaLAB (at) Berlin. In spring 2022 he held a residency at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. From 2023 to 2024 Albrecht held a professorship at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. Since 2025 he has been professor of information design at the Folkwang University of the Arts, where he teaches information design, computational design, and data visualization. He has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, the Strelka Institute, and the Muthesius Academy. In June 2025 Albrecht co-organized the Data | Art symposium at Harvard University, co-hosted by metaLAB and the Barabási Lab, together with Jeffrey Schnapp and Albert-László Barabási. The two-day conference brought together artists, technologists, scientists, and designers working on the relationship between data and aesthetic practice; Albrecht's own work Post_Networks was among the pieces shown.

Artificial Senses (2017), made with metaLAB and supported by the Berkman Klein Center, visualizes the unprocessed sensor data that phones and computers generate, location, orientation, touch, audio, and camera input, in order to make the machine's own mode of registering the world perceptible rather than translating it into familiar human terms. Albrecht has described the sensors' apparent precision as misleading: a location request may return coordinates accurate to within centimetres, yet repeated requests from a stationary device return continually shifting positions. Writing for Triennale Milano, he situated the project in relation to Harun Farocki's concept of the operational image, arguing that the visualizations are deliberately not instruments for a utilitarian task but attempts to map machine operation itself. The project was shown in the Machine Experience exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums Lightbox Gallery, and is part of the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center. Watching Machines Loving Grace (2021) applies commercial facial recognition software to photographs from the Harvard Art Museums' American Professional Photographers Collection, foregrounding what the software discards. The work draws attention to the reductive operation by which computer vision crops rectangles from an image to estimate age, gender, or expression while stripping away the surrounding context. It was exhibited in Curatorial A(i)gents, a metaLAB group exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums Lightbox Gallery from March to July 2022. • Illustration — Artificial Worldviews is a series of inquiries into the system underlying ChatGPT about its descriptions of the world. Artificial Worldviews (2023) maps the knowledge structure of ChatGPT. Albrecht first prompted the GPT-3.5 application programming interface to enumerate the categories of knowledge it possessed, yielding 31 fields and 425 subfields, then recursively queried the people, objects, places, and ideas associated with each combination; the resulting graph contains more than 32,000 nodes drawn from 1,764 API calls. A second dataset repeated the method for the term "power". Among the findings, the system named men roughly three times as often as women and returned "Caucasian" as one of its most frequent ethnic designations, while the figure it associated most widely across fields was the marine biologist Rachel Carson. Albrecht framed the method as an alternative to interpretability research on model internals, arguing that a system's worldview can be approached through its outputs, much as humans understand one another by conversing rather than by inspecting brain structures. A visualization from the project illustrated Natures Nature's 10 feature in December 2023, the year the list included ChatGPT as a "non-person" entry.

Their Names (2020), made with Matthew Battles, lists over 28,000 people who died in encounters with police in the United States between January 2000 and the death of George Floyd in May 2020, using data compiled by the nonprofit Fatal Encounters. The project deliberately foregrounds individual names and the reports behind each record rather than aggregate statistics. #MeToo Anti-Network (2021), developed with conceptual support from Catherine D'Ignazio, Cole Martin, and Battles, visualizes the #MeToo movement through the mass of tweets that received little or no attention. Albrecht has described the project as a constructivist approach to designing with data, reversing the usual question of which representation fits a dataset in favour of asking what the data should be imagined as.

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Kim Albrecht worked in science, art, data, information visualization and data visualization. His work is associated with information art and new media art. He was employed by metaLAB (at) Harvard, Freie Universität Berlin, Northeastern University, Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg and Harvard University.

Kim Albrecht is recorded with the occupation contemporary artist. Recorded with the occupation university teacher. Recorded with the occupation graphic designer. Recorded with the occupation researcher. Recorded as artist, designer, researcher and university teacher. Recognition and collections.

Albrecht's work has been exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums, the Ars Electronica Center, the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Ludwig Museum Budapest, the Kunsthaus Graz, the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, the Four Domes Pavilion in Wrocław as part of the WRO Media Art Biennale, and the Cube design museum. Works by Albrecht are held in the permanent collections of Cooper Hewitt, ZKM, and the Ars Electronica Center.