Albert Barqué-Duran (Albert.DATA), PhD, is an artist and cognitive scientist whose practice treats cognition as an artistic medium. Working across installations, performances, and computational systems, he investigates how perception, creativity, agency and identity are transformed as human cognition becomes increasingly entangled with artificial and technological systems.

Rather than approaching technology as a medium in itself, his work uses it to intervene in the processes through which experience and creative intention are produced. Drawing from cognitive science, AI and human–computer interaction, he constructs experimental cognitive apparatuses in which biological and synthetic intelligence interact: perception can be altered, cognition externalized, creative agency distributed, and internal states translated into new aesthetic forms. Across his practice, these systems become environments for exploring altered and extended cognition, human–AI co-creation, creative alignment, neuroaesthetics, and the emerging cultural implications of increasingly capable machine intelligence.

Albert is currently Principal Investigator at IASlab (Interactive Arts & Science Lab), La Salle Barcelona – Universitat Ramon Llull, where he works at the intersection of artistic research, cognitive science and advanced human–AI interaction. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the Centre for Mathematical Neuroscience at City St George’s, University of London, and has held research appointments at the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard University and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, as well as a Lectureship in Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Lleida. His scientific research spans computational cognition, probabilistic reasoning and decision-making, moral cognition, and the architectures of human and artificial intelligence.

His artistic work has been exhibited and presented internationally across contemporary art museums, biennales, media-art institutions and festivals, including Ars Electronica, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Daejeon Biennale, Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Romaeuropa Festival, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Gray Area, Sónar+D, MUTEK, SIGGRAPH, Lincoln Center, among others.

His work has received numerous international distinctions, including the 2026 Runway Grand Prize in New Media, the inaugural Premio El Ojo Crítico for Digital Innovation in the Cultural Field from Radio Nacional de España, prizes from Re:Humanism, and recognition from the Art of Neuroscience. He was also selected by the Creative Europe programme We Are Europe as one of 64 Culture Activists shaping contemporary European culture.

Full CV available upon request.