Sophie Erlund is a Danish-born artist based in Berlin and Munich. Her work explores the more-than-human, investigating perception, transition, and our entanglement with artificial intelligence through sculpture, video, installation, soundscapes, and virtual reality. Exhibited internationally for over two decades, she has been represented by Berlin’s PSM Gallery since 2009. She holds a degree in Fine Art Sculpture from Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design in London and is a core member of the interdisciplinary research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER) at Aarhus University. With over a decade at Studio Olafur Eliasson, she fostered collaborations between art, science, anthropology, and philosophy. She has also taught at Julius Liebig University Gießen, Weißensee Art Academy, and the University of the Arts Berlin. Since January 2025, she has been Professor for Arts in Architecture at the Technical University in Munich (TUM).
How did you become who you are?
Sophie Erlund: I think who I am today—both as a person and an artist—comes from my curiosity and openness. Even as a child, I welcomed every situation with open arms, which sometimes worried my mother. Over time, I learned to navigate that openness while still embracing the unknown. At 16, I left Denmark to study in the U.S., driven by a strong desire to see the world. There, I met a remarkable ceramicist, Tobi Dicker, who became my mentor. She recognized my creative potential and encouraged me to see myself as an artist. Spending countless evenings in her studio, I discovered my passion for sculpture, which shaped my path from then on. Although there weren’t any artists in my family, I grew up surrounded by culture—visiting museums, going to the opera, and engaging with the arts. While I initially explored writing and music as creative outlets, visual art eventually became my primary way of expressing original thoughts.
You’ve worked across different disciplines and mediums in your artistic practice. How do you see your research developing at TUM?
I really want to bring immersive technologies, extended realities, and generative AI into sculpture in the expanded field. It’s not about replacing traditional object-based installations but expanding what sculpture can be. We’ll integrate media art alongside physical works more than was done before at the chair. At the same time, I want students to approach these technologies critically, with a strong theoretical foundation for why they use them.
Interdisciplinarity will play a big role. I have an extensive network of collaborators from fields like anthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and I’d love to bring those perspectives into the conversation. Art doesn’t exist in isolation, and I think engaging with ideas from other disciplines helps shape a richer, more thoughtful practice.
What perspective do you hope to bring to architecture students at TUM?
I still think of sculpture as spatial practice, even when I work with sound, video, or immersive VR environments. For me, an artwork isn’t just an object—it’s the full spatial experience. Sound, for example, has a physical mass, a volume, in the way that stone does; it fills the space and shapes how, and who we are, when we move through it.
Architecture and art share a concern for space, but their approaches may differ. While architecture often follows a programmatic logic, artistic thinking allows for more abstraction and open-ended experimentation. What I hope to bring to TUM is a space for students to explore artistic strategies—ways of thinking that aren’t about solving a design brief but about asking deeper questions. And being allowed to ask questions without having to produce an answer. I want the students to engage with spatial making in a playful, inquisitive, and open-ended way. And to be courageous in their exploration.
What excites me about being here is the opportunity to interface with many bright thinkers – students and colleagues – in a rigorous academic environment, and critically engage with the ways in which space is co-constituted. I see it as a dynamic dialogue, one that will shape both my practice and the perspectives of the students who engage with these ideas.
You mentioned working with AI. How do you see artificial intelligence influencing creative practice, and what are the challenges that come with it?
AI is a powerful tool, but it doesn’t replace human creativity. It generates images, text, and even theory, but in my experience, it still needs human input—someone to edit, refine, and make personal choices. AI works by predicting the most likely next step, but that’s not how artistic thinking works. You could say that artistic practice is an anti-convergent strategy, unlike AI which is trained on convergence.
One of my research interests at TUM is exploring how generative AI can be integrated into artistic practice in an ethical way. Instead of avoiding it, I think we need to understand its possibilities and limitations. I’ve been experimenting with AI in my own work, using it to co-write scripts for a new VR piece. I feed it my own writing and test how it responds in different voices. Sometimes, I only take a few words from it, weaving them into my own text. It’s more of a dialogue than a replacement for creativity.
What changes do you hope for in the future?
In terms of my work at TUM, I hope to build a strong art program that could eventually support PhD candidates—something that hasn’t really been in place before. Having a research-based approach in fine art would allow for deeper exploration, both in theory and practice, and create more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
More broadly, I think the way we think about art is continuing to change. Art has moved beyond traditional forms and institutions—it intersects with science, technology, activism, and social practice. It’s no longer just about objects in galleries but also about ideas, interactions, and critical thinking. I hope that we continue to push these boundaries so that art remains a space for questioning, experimenting, and reshaping disciplines.
I also think it’s important to recognize how art has become more accessible in some ways, breaking out of elite circles. But there are still barriers—both in academia and in the art world itself. I hope for a future where artistic practice is more integrated across different fields, where it is valued not just for its aesthetic qualities, but for its ability to provoke thought and inspire new ways of seeing the world.