Portrait XO: „My favorite way of working is taking speculations of new technologies and turning them into tangible things like art and music, then having interesting conversations about them with people.“

Portrait XO / self portrait – courtesy of Portrait XO

Portrait XO is an experimental artist known for blending AI, music, and visual arts. While her exact real name is not prominently stated on official platforms, she is based in Berlin and has South Korean-American roots. She frequently collaborates with AI researchers and academic institutions, such as the MUK Vienna and the Creative Computing Institute at UAL.

Portrait XO will not only be performing at this year’s Blaues Rauschen Festival, but will also be holding a three-day workshop in Essen on the subject of “Data Ethics and Creative Practice – A Critical Workshop”, for which applications could be submitted in advance.

You’re returning to the Blaues Rauschen Festival for the second time. Back in 2022, you presented your project “Wire,” created with the help of databots and an AI you trained yourself. How do you remember that experience?

Portrait XO: I had a great time, it was lovely to meet other artists and connect with the locals of the region. It was my first time attending and participating in the festival, I appreciated the cute and intimate vibe of the festival.
Since then, the discourse around AI has evolved rapidly. How has your own perspective on the topic changed since 2022?

I think more creatives need to challenge the current paradigm of AI companies built on unethical AI models with extractive and exploitative business models.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  I’d like to see systemic shifts that incentivize ethical approaches, methods, and businesses as opposed to hyper capitalistic modes of working with the end goal of AI integration is incentived based only on optimization. They’re not sustainable, especially in creative fields. Doesn’t it make sense that companies built on unconsented data give back to society through shared equity?
We’re in the era of accelerationism where there’s a lot of gray areas due to lack of regulation in policies that everyone is trying to figure out. It means anyone can deepfake someone’s voice and/or train an AI model based on anyone’s work with unclear legal repercussions.

So what do we do in the meantime? Literacy about the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of AI I feel are important especially as AI tools are available to everyone and anyone. I personally don’t think underdeveloped minds should be engaging with AI considering all the hallucinations that are happening. I think it’s critical that when it comes to new politics, those who are impacted by exploitative methods of the evolving technologies are integrated to be part of the  decision-making process such as copyright. Every artist at the least should be able to consent and unconsent use of their data for training, and we need to address the challenge of deepfakes–shouldn’t we have agency over our likeness?

Do you see a shift in how audiences engage with AI-generated or AI-assisted art?

In terms of mainstream media and wider public discourse, I sense the overall perception of AI-generated art for the most part are not well received outside of the echo chamber of artists and people using AI to generate art and videos. I don’t think there’s enough wider dialogue of AI-assisted art.

Portrait XO (Photo: Dan Gorelick / SwinSR)

This year you’re presenting “Cost of Connection.” What can the audience expect from this piece?

It’s my first data driven audiovisual performance based on The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Sonically, it’s different to anything I’ve created as I integrated some new tools and custom AI models. People can expect to hear what data like unemployment rates, anxiety disorders, and world temperature anomalies sound like.

You’re not only performing at Blaues Rauschen – between June 5th and 7th, you’ll also lead a sound performance workshop. Is this something you do regularly?

I’ve been doing workshop more frequently over recent years and last year I was a guest lecture at laSalle University in Phildadelphia, USA for a term. They invited me to create my own program ‘Hybrid Arts: Advanced Digital Creation’ for their Masters of Science students.  I try my best to continue sharing and democraticizing creative tools and workflows.

The open call for the workshop was titled “Data Ethics & Creative Practice.” What does “data ethics” mean to you personally and in your artistic work?

Data ethics to me means understanding how I can ethically source data for training an AI model. It also means understanding other methods and approaches of using AI that’s on a sliding scale of ethics like training your own image generative AI model that’s built on an AI model that’s been pretrained on a bunch of copyrighted material. It means understanding how I can make intentional ethical decisions in the way I use AI for training data to generate new work.  When it comes to music creation, I’ve been very intentional from the beginning of my journey by using my own original recordings for training my custom AI model that was made by Dadabots and more recently, Neutone.

I didn’t want any of the AI models I used to be pretrained with other music, especially copyrighted material. I’ve tried a lot of different approaches including unethical AI models like SUNO and OpenAI to understand how it feels to use them while questioning how they impact me personally, creatively, and when do I see and feel ethical boundaries being crossed. 
Should artists who have their copyrighted works part of an AI model be remunerated and registered as part of copyright by the artist who uses the material to release commercially? 
What percentage should artist’s be compensated for being part of an AI model?  
These are questions we all need to be asking to be part of policymaking to ensure we don’t have decisions be made for us. GEMA sued SUNO and OpenAI and Hollywood has also pushed back on AI. We need to continue making a stance when boundaries have been crossed, and be part of sculpting fairer ways of using AI.

The call was open to artists, authors, designers, poets, and musicians – a very diverse group. How do you approach working with participants from such varied backgrounds?

The most exciting type for creative outcomes I’ve seen have involved interdisciplinary teams of people creating together. Working with people from different disciplines allows people to learn new perspectives, techniques, and inspiration especially when it’s outside of people’s usual comfort zones. It provides a new window and space to open for each to challenge their own practice in new ways while also offering their skills in a more collaborative way than they might be used to doing. Overall, the environment creates a lot of new learnings and I think expanding through shared knowledge while working with different types of people will by nature create really interesting outputs.
I learn just as much when bringing diverse people together so I see myself more as a facilitator than necessarily leading. I’m looking forward to witnessing everyone’s journey.

What role does collaboration – with humans or machines – play in your creative process today?

It’s pretty versatile. Aside from my solo works, I have collaborations with other artists and scientists with clearly defined roles and sometimes organic especially when they’re music collaborations. Working with machines has  been and still is a big part of my life since I started producing electronic music for years. I’m excited not only about new AI models but some new physical instruments.

The workshop explores the potential of digital data in artistic processes. Concretely – what does this exploration look like during the sessions?

I’ll be showing different workflows and open source AI models and tools for both audio and visual creation. They’ll learn about the differences between training an AI model based on their own original works vs. pretrained models. Participants will be asked to document their process, think, test, and use everything critically as a way to not only express interesting forms of expression, but be able to articulate ethical data creation through their practice in meaningful ways.

As an artist, how do you experience the challenges and opportunities of working with digital technologies in your day-to-day practice?

Over recent years I’ve started longing for more analog equipment to create and perform with especially as I’m so hyper digitized in the way I work. I think we’re very tactile beings and if we don’t have ways to be physically expressive, we atrophy. I’m aware that often times I cross my own boundaries and sometimes don’t push myself to get outside every day and see the sun. Such simple things that make such a big difference, I know. Spending so much time on my laptop to do everything from emails to composing, I’m hoping to perform in ways that integrate more organic instruments onstage. I started missing performing with a grand piano and it’s not something I get to do regularly because not all venues provide them and I don’t usually tour with my own piano.

Portrait XO live – photo courtesy of Portrait XO

You’ll be developing a 20-minute performance with the workshop participants. How closely will this be connected to your solo performances as Portrait XO?

I’m there to share my skills, strategies, and projects I’ve done in the past including the creation of my solo performances and offer help where needed. It’ll be an interesting challenge because it’s a pretty tight deadline for a group of people who have never met before to create and deliver a performance in such a short time. Whatever it ends up looking and sounding like will be very dependent on what the group chooses.  I’ll be happy to share constructive feedback and how things can be improved and refined as they work.

How important is physical presence or live performance in your otherwise tech-heavy work?

In my earlier performances, I used to play and sing with very low tech like a piano and guitar with voice. That’s how I started as an artist in London, performing at open mics exploring songwriting and discovering my voice.  A lot has changed since then and as my productions have become bigger in sound, I’ve been evolving how I present myself visuals.
Since I started integrating live visuals, I’ve become more interested in how I tell stories through visuals and sound as opposed to me as a physical being onstage as the center of attention. The way I think about a stage has changed and how I perceive myself and the way I’d like to be seen is constantly evolving. I’m thinking a lot about how to build visual worlds that work perfectly to my music. I’d like my art and music be the focus than me. The bigger the visuals the better, I’m happy to be a dot onstage.

You move fluidly between being an artist and a researcher. How do these two aspects of your practice inform one another?

Researching new technologies, methods, approaches and engaging with scientists and academics keeps me endlessly inspired and motivated. Being a researcher helps me to dive deeper into things I’m interested in by learning and digesting new information not just theoretically, but put things into practice and test them out before experiments become art–beyond tech demos. My favorite way of working is taking speculations of new technologies and turning them into tangible things like art and music, then having interesting conversations about them with people. I feel the most connected when I get to not only create and show people through performing/installation, but share new processes and interesting discoveries. Deep research work allows me to continuously grow and keep my mind active, I never want to atrophy.  I’m starting to read physical books again rather than reading only online.

As someone who spends a lot of time reflecting critically on art, can you sometimes put that aside and just follow your aesthetic instincts? In other words, is there still space in your practice for pure intuition?

Creating is usually really intuitive for me. When it comes to decisions I make from the aesthetics of sound to what pieces of tech I use, I usually start with clarifying what my intention is of creating. If my intention is to tap into melodic flow with voice, I’ll record a bunch of a capella vocals and try my best to not think about what I’m going to create and find out if I can surprise myself by surrendering that way. Having clear intentions gives me a framework to work in, and I allow myself to be interpret them freely without judgment until I’m finished. I try my best to keep the critical mind from interfering too much while I’m creating and allow it to kick in when I need it. I usually get neurotically critical during the final stages of mixing.

Portrait XO live – photo courtesy of Portrait XO

Like many artists of your generation, you combine music and visuals rather than keeping them separate. Does that ever feel like a burden? Creating in just one medium can already be demanding.

I’m super grateful for the birth of Ebosuite.  It’s been really empowering to be able to have more control of my visuals onstage and have the flexibility to perform AV shows on my own.  do love when I can perform with other visual artists onstage when there’s an opportunity to do it. I’m glad I got introduced to Ebosuite in 2019 because that’s when I started feeling more confident with the music I was making.  It meant I felt comfortable enough as a music producer to expand adopting visual skills into my workflow.  I think audiovisuals are better when the music and sound are polished regardless of what comes first. First and foremost, my work has to sound good.

You’re also the founder of the community platform Sound Obsessed, focused on computational creativity and human-machine collaboration. What motivated you to create a space for others rather than working solely on your own practice?



Sound Obsessed happened organically as I started to meet a lot of really interesting musicians and sound artists who were also multidisciplinary. It’s a niche community of humans using sound in fascinating ways. While Sound Obsessed is a registered ASCAP label I’ve been using to release my solo works, it’s also something I always say when I meet others who are just as weirdly obsessed with sound like I am– ‘you’re so sound obsessed’. The more I got to know all these interesting people who had such complex ways of working with many different mediums, there were some challenges we all unanimously shared: it was really hard to feel seen, understood, and validated for complex works that were hard to describe sometimes.

Sound Obsessed became my personal collection of interesting people I have met over the years, some as collaborators, and others as people I admire doing incredible works. Due to the sometimes frustrating nature of doing complex works that aren’t easy to articulate, when we got a small grant from Refraction Festival, we used the funds to launch Sound Obsessed as a sonic innovation archive. In the era of cloud storage being questionable in terms of longevity, I decided to invite people in the community to archive their innovative works on-chain to share their methods, approaches, milestones, and learnings. While it’s been challenging to keep it active due to my own busyness, it’s a passion project I hope to get some funding eventually to build a team to give it more attention. Over the course of many group chats and calls, it became clear that we all shared the need for critical thinking, share our considered thoughts on how all the tools we use impact creativity, society, and ecology, and give each other constructive feedback on our works. There are a handful of developers in the community that share new tools and allow the community to be initial testers like we did for our first group exhibition at Sonar Festival 2024.  Manifest.Audio shared their new MAX/MSP data sonification tools that allowed us to learn these new tools together and share what it means to sonify data.

The topic of funding always comes up in discussions about AI and the arts. Do you feel it’s becoming harder for artists to make a living and remain independent in today’s digital landscape?



There are challenges and new opportunities happening simultaneously.  There are some jobs that will be replaced by AI, and as creatives, the arts is currently being highly exploited without much needed policies to protect artists.  And beyond artistic works, I think we’ll be fighting for humanitarian rights based on how our data gets used without consent by corporations like social media platforms. There’s a real need to increase literacy of AI in general I think is currently lacking. AI like OpenAI hasn’t improved performance of truth while it’s becoming better at emotional delivery so we have more convincing lies. If we’re not careful and critical about these hallucinations, we’re entering a future that’s going to become weirder than we can imagine. I personally think every AI business that’s built on unconsented data should pay a larger tax that gives back to society. We need to start building new infrastructrues towards universal basic income/equity.

As Geoffrey Hinton once stated:
“We’re talking about having a huge increase in productivity. So there’s going to be more goods and services for everybody, so everybody ought to be better off, but actually it’s going to be the other way around.“

“It’s because we live in a capitalist society, and so what’s going to happen is this huge increase in productivity is going to make much more money for the big companies and the rich, and it’s going to increase the gap between the rich and the people who lose their jobs.”

I personally don’t want to see a future where artists are out of jobs because no one decides to hire them and instead decide to create visuals and music for commercial and capitalistic reasons without ever giving back to those who are not only impacted by this paradigm of working, but are extracted and exploited because our works are part of the models used to create these works. It’s already starting to happen and we need to start clarifying these boundaries and build fair remuneration systems. Think now is a good time to start building sustainable infrastructures and cooperatives.

Is there a record released in 2025 that particularly stuck with you? Which one, and why?
Max Cooper. „On Being“. His sound design is so incredible, ‚”I Exist Inside This Machine“ is my favorite from the album. I love the way he synthesizes and creates so many intricate layers. I’ve grown an even closer connection to his music as I’ve been getting to know him more recently. I remember seeing him perform live at Sonar in 2019 for the first time and didn’t know anything about him until then. That was the first time I witnessed an audiovisual artist like that and really inspired me to think about visuals for stage in a bigger way. It’s been amazing getting know how he creates, some of his workflows are so insane especially when you hear his music spatialized. I cried listening to very special spatial mixes by Richard Burki in Amsterdam during ADE last year.  Sometimes I tend ot make music that’s really intense and not necessarily pretty sounding because life feels really intense and challenging to stay grounded. Max’s music is so uplifting and his music really helped me through some dark times.

Portait XO gonna conduct „Data Ethics and Creative Practice – A Critical Workshop“ from June 5th till 7th at REHEARSAL STAGE/ROOM IN THE RWE Pavillon (PHILHARMONIE) in Essen as part of this years Blaues Rauschen Festival

Portrait XO gonna present “The Cost of Connection” as part of the Grand Finale of Blaues Rauschen 2025 on June 7th at RWE PAVILLON (PHILHARMONIE) in Essen.

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