Dubbed the 'curator who never sleeps', Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and perhaps the most powerful figure in the art world — topping ArtReview's Power 100 list in 2016.

Obrist organised his first art exhibition at the age of 23 from his kitchen. Ever since, he has acted as a catalyst in creating bridges between different forms of art, movements and audiences. An example of his interdisciplinary approach is The Interview Project - an “endless conversation” started in 1996 that includes over 2400 hours of interviews with leading cultural figures of our time.

This conversation took place ahead of the Serpentine Galleries' 12th annual festival  — the Guest, Ghost, Host: Machine! Marathon — which will bring together artists, scientists, activists, engineers, poets, sociologists, philosophers, filmmakers, writers, anthropologists, theologians and musicians to consider the advent of ‘artificial intelligence’, consciousness, interspecies cooperation, machines, trans-humanism and non-linear time.

—David Maclean

DM: What came first for you – philosophy or art?

HUO: It probably won’t come as a surprise to say that it was art which came first. I was around 12 or 13-years-old when I first encountered the long figures and sculptures of Giacometti, and a few years later I began to have my first meetings with artists, starting with the duo Fischli/Weiss and moving on to Gerhard Richter and many others. So I would say that everything began with my first encounters with art back in Zurich and my trips to the other great museums in Switzerland.