David Szauder
PROJECT
Across these screens, David Szauder builds a visual world that features puppetry, silent films, music videos, fashion ads and cyberpunk imagery. He draws on art and iconography of the past to create present-day imagery. Szauder openly uses AI to make art, positioning the technology not as an autonomous creator, but as an art-making tool. Created using what he calls a digital ‘stove’ to synthesise visual fragments, Digital Nostalgia for What Never Was renders old and new indistinguishable. Yet there is no doubt that Szauder is the author of the work, a product of the artist’s meticulous pre- and post-production process.
ABOUT
With a background spanning art history, programming, and media arts academia, David Szauder has developed a cross-disciplinary approach that treats digital tools as both material and subject. In recent years, he has focused on AI-assisted image making, training models on his own visual source material to establish a distinct aesthetic foundation. His projects evolve through repeated cycles of generating, editing, selecting, and sequencing images into coherent series. Beyond the generative phase, he further transforms the results through post-production, applying “classical” digital techniques to reshape, refine, and recontextualise the images.
Working with generative AI, he develops serial bodies of images that often present as short performances derived from fairytales, images of human-animal hybrids (Bestiarium, 2024–25), intricately embroidered folkloric robots and other ambiguous figures, drawing on and remixing references from art history, film, theatre and advertising culture. Recurring series by Szauder explore masks and concealment, near-photographic scenes that slip into impossibility, and quiet visual jokes that can turn unsettling in a second.
Social platforms, particularly Instagram, operate in Szauder’s practice as a site of publication and feedback as much as display – an environment where image circulation, attention and repetition shape how a work is read. Szauder’s animation and experimental digital formats examine the cultural consequences of emerging technologies. His AI-assisted work asks how authorship, taste and intimacy are altered when images are produced with machine learning systems, and how an artist’s sensibility can remain legible within semi-automated processes.