David McCulloch

DR McCulloch makes work about the digital ecosystems that mediate love, sex, work, relationships, politics and sometimes our own interiority, drawing from his experience as a programmer and CTO in social media and startups. His method is algorithmic frottage: scraping himself against datasets, LLMs and PR-dressed-as-research, he captures the friction in oils, acrylic, ink, laser-etched tiles and abandoned Git repositories. Custom generative AI pipelines grope at his marks and hallucinate a past that is sometimes burnt into his work using a laser.

His practice is interdisciplinary and includes algorithmic drag (first prize, Hybrid Futures, UAL), an interactive emergent narrative artefact shown at Science Gallery Dublin (‘Non-Human Narratives’, ICIDS) and experimentation with AI at his studio in Tottenham, London. He holds an MA from Central St Martins and an MSc from Glasgow School of Art where he researched prompt engineering in a fine art practice and emergent narrative, serious games & VR.