Alexander Schubert (1979) studied bioinformatics, multimedia composition. He’s a professor at the Musikhochschule Hamburg. Schubert’s interest explores the border between the acoustic and electronic world.
In music composition, immersive installation and staged pieces he examines the interplay between the digital and the analogue. He creates pieces that realize test settings or interaction spaces that question modes of perception and representation. Continuing topics in this field are authenticity and virtuality. The influence and framing of digital media on aesthetic views and communication is researched in a post-digital perspective. Recent research topics in his works were virtual reality, artificial intelligence and online-mediated artworks.
Schubert is a founding member of ensembles such as “Decoder“.
His works have been performed more than 900 times in the last few years by numerous ensembles in over 40 countries.
Questions and Answers:
3 FACTS
1: We are posthuman by default.
2: Our interfacing the world is postdigital.
3: Interfacing this world can be personal and poetic nonetheless.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
A strange mixture between something more neutral around scientific research / technology exploration / philosophic discourse on the other hand – wildly mixed with a more poetic, subconscious psychedelic layer.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
As a teenager, making experimental electronic music. I come more from a studio approach originally and then transferred some of these ideas / modes of working with material to staged and performative pieces which lead to a post-digital treatment of physical performances with musicians.
3. How will you integrate artificial intelligence into your project and which specific AI technologies or tools are you using?
My project “The Emergent Self” is a nearly completed musical research project centered around the development of an interactive, modular AI-driven music system from a post-humanist perspective. At its core is a performer whose actions—captured through sensors, video, and audio—activate a range of sonic transformations and autonomous processes. The system now successfully connects the musician to the AI in a responsive feedback loop, establishing shared agency between human and machine rather than mere instrumental control.
Built on a post-humanist understanding of identity as a composite of interconnected and sometimes opposing elements, “The Emergent Self” blurs the line between tool and autonomous entity. The result is a deeply integrated performer-AI eco-system that functions as a complex, interdependent whole.
This approach brings AI into a physical, personal, and embodied context, honoring human traits like intuition and spontaneity. Through a dynamic setup that balances initiative, response, and collective decision-making, the project emphasizes human centrality while maintaining the transformative capabilities of current AI technologies.
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Concerts and Performances.
5. What’s your favorite place in your town?
The closed-off roof of an tropical house under construction.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I was on the verge of going into neuroscience / computer science before I studied composition – so that might have been a likely candidate. But as I was looking for a less theory-based practice even without music making I might have ended up somewhere else.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
„you like music“ by death’s dynamic shroud
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Science labs that focus on brain interfaces or neuro pharmaceuticals.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
The piece „Asterism“ I worked on with a bigger team stands out as a memory.
It was an Immersive AI Oracle Simulation: Continuous two days of spiritual simulation, world building and deconstruction, excess, surrender, engagement and future observation.
Asterism is a simulation space for possible worlds: virtual, spiritual, dystopian and embracing. In a black hall, accessed through a preparation lock, an extract of reality is constructed – a complete natural copy of a living surrounding. This setting is interwoven with digital and AI controlled components, which create a space on the border of realities. It investigates the question of how much reduction can be done and still maintain the real – or what are the basic components to construct a spiritual experience. This clash and switching between worlds opens an insight into possible futures of a bio-technical nature in which humans are faced with new conditions. The setting was designed as an immersive experience space to which audience and performers alike were given access for 36 hours.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
It is quite central. A lot of the pieces I work with have some sort of technical interface in the core. So the starting point often is a experimental technical setup that is then used for exploration and interaction. This can either mean examining the impacts of that interface (somewhat objectively) or using it as a metaphor for non-technical aspects. In many cases it’s a combination of both.
11. How does your project contribute to the development of innovative compositional strategies involving AI?
Exploring the black box aspect of interaction with technology and specifically with AI seems like a very relevant topic to me. Maybe this use case can be insightful for other practitioners to also reflect and explore this aspect artistically.
