Max Haarich is a Munich-based artistic researcher and conceptual artist working across digital art, GIFs, installation, performance and glass mosaic, with a focus on artificial intelligence and web3.,,He founded the Munich Embassy of the Lithuanian artist republic Užupis after leaving a communications career, and later directed its Institute for Applied Paradox.His work aims to reveal and challenge predominant paradigms in order to explore otherwise unthinkable ideas.
He studied communication science at RWTH Aachen and critical thinking at the University of the Underground, then researched artificial superintelligence at RWTH Aachen before working as communications manager for Europe's leading startup center.,He is a reviewer for the MIT Press journal Leonardo and lectures at the University of the Underground, TH Augsburg and the University of Basel.
In 2022 he was artistic lead on Smart Hans, an interactive installation developed with an international team during the Deepfake Masterclass at Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven. Modeled on the horse Clever Hans, which appeared to read minds by sensing subtle body cues, the piece shows an animated horse that guesses numbers through posture recognition, warning about the reach of AI surveillance into private thought. The project won the Super Artistic AI Award in the Interaction category and the jury's main prize at the Lab30 festival. It was exhibited at Deutsches Museum, Science Gallery and the World Economic Forum.
Haarich also initiated TeleNFT, a fully on-chain teletext art project broadcast across Europe via teletext and stored on Arweave, held in the permanent collections of the Museum Francisco Carolinum and the Museum of Teletext Art.,In 2022 he curated 7bit movements, a project in which 13 international artists made 7bit GIF animations testing the boundaries of visual perception, contributing his own piece Schroedinger's Cats.His AI photographs were shown in the 2023 Munich group exhibition “NFTs MUST GO!”.His work appeared in “Paul Klee Digital” at the Kulturmuseum Bern.In 2025 he released Užupio Respublika, nine handpainted GIF loops depicting landmarks of the Užupis republic connected through synced animations.
