Official curated artist of Biohacker Summit
David Flusberg
David Flusberg is an American artist, author and entrepreneur based in Bucharest, Romania. His paintings and poetic writings form a canon of cryptic and mystical storytelling- at once autobiographical and mythological, and unbounded by space and time. In a previous stage of life, Flusberg was a management consultant from New York City, who went on to build 1,600 apartments across Romania. He is a certified scuba instructor, and many of his artworks are inspired by the in vitro state of consciousness he experiences while underwater- immersed in psychedelic sights and sounds.
David Flusberg, a former Wall Street real estate professional, shares how
Art, painting, and poetry is the ultimate biohack. It is the best way of getting into a meditative flow and tapping into the subconscious, connecting with ancient ancestors and the spirits of family, plants, and animals.
Summary
- Transitioning from Wall Street real estate to professional scuba diving, painting, and poetry represents a method of biohacking the soul to overcome high-stress corporate environments. - Engaging in art and poetry functions as a biohack for entering a meditative flow state, tapping into the subconscious, and connecting with ancestors, plants, and animals. - Underwater experiences, such as diving in the Galapagos, provide direct inspiration for artwork, including psychedelic interpretations of DNA and themes of aquatic instinct. - Abstract paintings incorporate sacred words from the Kabbalah and themes of spirituality to bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and contemporary artistic vision. - Artistic expression offers a way to escape material bonds and societal expectations, helping to rediscover a sense of freedom and a personal, divinely inspired path in life.
Article
Biohacking The Soul: Art, Poetry, And The Subconscious Flow
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, David Flusberg Offered A Vision Of Liberation Beyond The Metrics Of Modern Life
On Friday, 3 June 2022, at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki in Finland, David Flusberg stepped onto the stage not as a technician of the body, but as something rarer in the biohacking world: a cartographer of the inner life.
Flusberg, the official curated artist of the event, brought with him a language of painting, poetry, diving, mysticism and memory. His presentation, *Biohacking The Soul: Art, Poetry & The Subconscious Flow*, did not concern cold plunges, supplements or sleep scores. It asked a more disquieting question: what if the deepest optimization was not of the body, but of the self buried beneath stress, ambition and social performance?
That proposition gave his appearance its emotional charge. In a summit often associated with enhancement and human performance, Flusberg argued for art as “the ultimate biohack” and for the subconscious as a frontier no less vital than physiology.
From Wall Street Pressure To Underwater Revelation
Flusberg’s biography already carried the arc of reinvention. An American artist, author and entrepreneur based in Bucharest, Romania, he had once been a management consultant from New York and later helped build 1,600 apartments across Romania. Yet the man who addressed the Helsinki audience framed his transformation in more intimate terms.
“I used to be a stressed out Wall Street real estate guy,” he said. “But then I started to biohack my soul by becoming a professional scuba diver and a painter and a poet.”
It was the kind of sentence that could sound merely theatrical in lesser hands. But in the context of his work, and of the imagery that followed, it became a thesis. Flusberg was not describing a lifestyle pivot so much as an escape route from what he cast as an overcapitalised culture of exhaustion. His art and writing emerged as a refusal of the polished logic that insists a life must always be measurable, strategic and productive.
In Helsinki, that refusal took on the shape of testimony.
Art As The Ultimate Biohack
For Flusberg, painting and poetry were not decorative practices orbiting his life. They were the mechanism through which he entered another state of consciousness.
“Art, painting, poetry, it is the ultimate biohack,” he told the audience. “It is the best way of getting into a meditative flow and tapping into my subconscious, connecting with ancient ancestors, connecting to the spirits of my family, plants and animals.”
The statement carried both mystical ambition and pointed resistance. In an age of endless self-improvement protocols, Flusberg proposed surrender instead of control, immersion instead of analysis. The goal was not to dominate the self, but to listen to it.
His vocabulary was spiritual, even mythic. The subconscious, in his telling, was not a sealed psychological chamber but a living corridor between the personal and the ancestral, the human and the animal, the visible and the hidden. Art became a way of moving through that corridor.
The Sea As Studio, Mirror, And Oracle
Much of Flusberg’s imagery arose underwater, where he said many of his visions first came to him. A certified scuba instructor, he described the sea not simply as landscape but as portal.
One painting shown during the presentation was, he explained, “a psychedelic rendering of my own DNA,” seen while diving about 30 metres below the surface in the Galapagos with his two sons. The image united science and vision, bodily inheritance and altered perception. DNA, that most material code, became in Flusberg’s hands an ecstatic symbol, refracted through pressure, depth and light.
This was not escapism in any trivial sense. It was a reordering of perception. Underwater, the ordinary hierarchies of life loosened. Sound changed. gravity changed. Time changed. The body itself became strange, suspended between effort and surrender.
From that suspension, Flusberg drew a language of “liquid atonement,” “aquatic instinct,” and an “amphibious existence.” Through the glass of the scuba mask, he suggested, one might glimpse not merely marine beauty but “the fleeting essence flickering in the waves of the watery body that animates the adventure of our amphibious existence.”
It was a striking phrase, dense and lyrical, but also revealing. For Flusberg, the underwater world did not represent an alien realm. It recalled something primal in human nature, some half-forgotten condition of being less defended, less abstracted, less estranged from life.
Kabbalah, Poetry, And The Search For Ancient Language
Another work he discussed incorporated sacred words from the Kabbalah, extending his fascination with submerged consciousness into the domain of spiritual text and symbol. Flusberg noted that he had also written a book of poetry about his paintings, intended as a literary companion to the visual works.
This mattered because his project was never purely visual. He moved between canvas and poem as if both were fragments of the same coded manuscript. His storytelling, cryptic and mystical, drew equally from autobiography and mythology. Biblical figures such as Jonah and archetypal creatures such as Leviathan surfaced in his language not as ornamental references, but as vessels for ancient fear, transformation and rebirth.
In one passage, he spoke of “the bubble blowing fetus named Jonah” and of awaiting release “from the belly of the beast, that primeval being, Leviathan of our primal nature.” The imagery was extravagant, certainly, but it pointed to a consistent preoccupation: descent before release, enclosure before freedom, pressure before revelation.
A Rebellion Against Overcapitalized Stress
The sharpest edge of Flusberg’s presentation came when he turned from oceanic mysticism to social critique. Beneath the poetic current ran a clear indictment of the systems that train people away from instinct and into anxiety.
His poem lamented the way “academic abstractions” and prescribed paths had coerced people into forgetting their “basic instincts,” only to be delivered into “proficient portfolios of over capitalized stress.”
That phrase landed with unusual force at an event populated by founders, optimisers and high performers. Flusberg was not condemning ambition outright. He was naming its cost when detached from inner life. His critique suggested that many forms of modern success depended upon a subtle self-betrayal: the abandonment of the “child inside” in exchange for credibility, strategy and status.
“We leap loyally boldly beyond the bonds of insolvent materiality,” he said, “and strive to find the child inside the refuge of concealed reality.”
The line captured both the seduction and the seriousness of his project. To recover wonder, instinct and play was not, in his view, regression. It was recovery.
The Child Inside, The God-Given Destiny
Again and again, Flusberg returned to a language of freedom. Not freedom as consumer choice, nor as individual branding, but as an unburdening from the scripts imposed by institutions and expectations.
His poetry reached toward “the carefree bunny who bounces to the beat of the breeze,” a deliberately innocent image that stood against the hard vocabulary of mortgages, portfolios, and tactical advancement. Such contrasts could seem almost whimsical, yet they were central to his argument. Serious adulthood, he implied, had become too often a discipline of forgetting.
The presentation closed on a note of permission and grace. Flusberg described “the simple light motif of God-given destiny,” and offered words that “accept, allow, invite you to do you and me to do me.”
In another setting, such phrasing might have dissolved into cliché. In Helsinki, after a journey through submersion, scripture, ancestral spirits and social disenchantment, it sounded less like self-help than a plea for authenticity.
Why Flusberg’s Message Resonated
Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki was a gathering devoted to human possibility, and David Flusberg widened that category. He insisted that possibility was not only muscular, metabolic or cognitive. It was also poetic. It was spiritual. It was buried in the subconscious and waiting to be retrieved.
His presence at the event had been prompted, as the introduction made clear, by the organiser Temu’s visit to Flusberg’s studio and gallery in Romania. That origin story felt fitting. Flusberg’s work did not arrive through institutional fanfare or market validation, but through a felt conviction that his vision needed to be shared.
What he offered was not a protocol but an invitation: dive deeper, create more freely, distrust the abstractions that deaden instinct, and seek out those states, whether in water, words or paint, where the self becomes porous enough to remember what it is.
In a culture obsessed with hacking the body, David Flusberg suggested that the soul, too, had its methods of renewal. They were older, stranger and less quantifiable. But in Helsinki, they felt no less urgent.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki