Kim Albrecht

Kim Albrecht is a German new media artist, information designer and researcher best known for his critical, investigative, and expressive data visualizations. He is professor at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF principal of the metaLAB (at) Harvard University and co-founder of the metaLAB (at) FU Berlin. Albrecht holds a PhD from the University of Potsdam is affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Albrecht’s work has been exhibited globally in internationally renowned institutions such as the Harvard Art Museums, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum New York, the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Kunsthaus Graz, Kaestner Gesellschaft Hannover, WRO New Media Biennale Wrocław, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others. Albrecht has won a number of international awards in the area of information design and his work is part of the permanent collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum New York, and the Ars Electronica Center in Linz.
==Career==
Albrecht's academic journey began with studies in graphic design, followed by interface design. Albrecht pursued a Ph.D. in Media Theory at University of Potsdam, which he completed between 2016 and 2021. In the professional realm, Albrecht has held several prominent roles. Early in his career, he worked as a research assistant at the Interaction Design Lab FH Potsdam in 2013-2014. This was followed by a stint as an artistic researcher at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University with Albert-László Barabási from 2015 to 2017. His time as a principle at metaLAB (at) Harvard began in 2017 joining the group around Jeffrey Schnapp. By 2021, Albrecht established metaLAB (at) FU Berlin. His most recent appointment since the summer of 2023 is as a professor at Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg in Potsdam, where he imparts knowledge in the Masters Program of Creative Technologies, Digital Media Cultures, and Media Studies.
==Areas of Research==
===Investigative Design===
Dr. Kim Albrecht's career has unfolded at the intersection of data aesthetics, technology, culture, and socio-political issues, utilizing investigative design as a significant method of exploration. Early projects saw Albrecht mapping complex topics like the wealth of billionaires in 2012 and exploring migration and ethnic identity through the lens of Cultural Interflow in 2016. Particularly notable was their endeavor to visualize Donald Trump’s extensive connections in 2017 and the representation of over 28,000 fatal U.S. police encounters, highlighting critical socio-political narratives and surfacing emergent patterns from vast datasets.
===Visualizing Complex Networks===
During his time at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University with Albert-László Barabási Albrecht specialized in the representation of network structures. Examples for this approach are his works on the cosmic web the representation of randomness in scientific careers and the network representation of the US Government.
===Data Aesthetics and Media Reflexivity===
Not merely content to visualize entities, Albrecht's work gravitated towards accentuating the processes underpinning data and image creation, exploring computational logic, and inspecting the boundaries of algorithmic visualizations. Projects like Artificial Senses and The Hairs of your Head are Numbered were critical endeavors in exploring live data visualization and affective computing, respectively, while pieces like Distinction Machine and Hypercam navigated the nuances of computational visualization and digitized human interaction.
Category:Artist
Category:Visualization (graphics)
Category:Designers
Category:German digital artists
Category:German graphic designers
Category:Design writers
Category:Information visualization experts
Category:Human–computer interaction
Category:1987 births