Andreas Vogel
Andreas was born in Quedlinburg in East Germany during the height of the cold war, which became a defining theme for the first quarter century of his life. Andreas grew up in Halle, the center of East Germany’s chemical industry and probably one of the most polluted places on earth at the time which also had a lasting impact on him.
After being rejected by the art school Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, Andreas studied mathematics and computer science at Humboldt University. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he was about to finish his master's degree and ready to conquer the world. After a working on his PhD in Madrid, a post-doc in Montreal and research in Brisbane, he washed up on the shores of San Francisco where he spent the next 25 years as entrepreneur, executive and researcher.
Around 2010, Andreas was working on a big data product, analyzing data from online games. While he was playing the games he and the team were analyzing, he started to appreciate the capabilities of game engines and AI software for making movies. As a result, he created a variety of videos including a satire series “The World according to Dr. V”, an action movie about a stolen nuclear warhead set in Ukraine, and renaissance paintings brought back to life through AI.
At the same time, Andreas had worked on ethical questions arising from advancing artificial intelligence, resulting in a series of blog posts under the title AI Society Life.
In 2018, Andreas wrote the book Postcards from East Berlin as a series of postcards illustrated with first day covers issued by East Germany’s postal service. Subsequently he started making digital art using East Germany’s stamps as his material.
In early 2022, he co-founded LEGACY - a Web 3 community and platform for capturing and preserving personal and institutional memoirs. Legacy could also serve to immortalize exhibitions and store art collections permanently.