well, hello there
Curiosity drives my design. I am always discovering, conceptionalising and subsequently creating from whatever sparked my interest. In recent years, this process concluded in a variety of light installations, various abstract visuals and lots of tinkering.
Explicitly, I create and transform environments, atmospheres and objects. The results can be digital, analog, active, interactive, passive or audio-reactive. Although I have a strong go-to repertoire to play around and prototype with, I love exploring new means and media to implement my designs. It seems that experimentation is half the fun.
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Have you ever felt like needing to punch a hole into spacetime? My attempt at doing just that was the result of a lengthy session trying to wrap my head around general relativity and all its implications. Fortunately enough there was an assignment due, which required me to design a luminaire to be placed in the St Nikolai church in Wismar. And so I built my interpretation of the strongest possible distortion in space-time – a black hole.
The object is merely a very very dark disc with an LED strip and a microcontroller mounted on the back. The supernatural effect is the result of the objet being suspended far out of reach below the churches beautiful vaulted ceiling, which the eerie light can wrap around. The singularity can be seen floating in the church until January 15th 2021.
Thank you to Prof. Bettina Menzel, Prof. Jan Blieske, Bipin Rao and the church staff.
Why is Light Art only ever shown at night?
While there is a multitude of pragmatic answers to this question, such as 'Well, you wouldn't see anything during the day, dummy.' – it finally led me to question how we, as so called modern human beings, see ourselves in the world. A world that emulates and sells bits of nature instead of encouraging the experience of the real thing. A world that is trying its utmost best at killing the remaining darkness, filling it with ever growing arrangements of LED-screens.
The project was an exercise in inversion and simplicity – an attempt at distancing myself from the tools that I work with on a daily basis to clearly see them as what they are meant to be: tools, not a medium, not a solution, just tools. I have to remember to ask myself: Is there a physical solution to this problem? Because most of the time, there is.
This particular sun consists of two iron discs around a glas lens, being held in an adjustable position by an iron ring. In the lenses focal point we see a small strip of thermobimetal that bends and shapes the passing light under its heat. This simple constellation presents us with a dynamic projection of cosmic light.
Thank you to Professor Tjark Ihmels, G.RAU for providing the bimetal and Dieter Fleischmann for aiding with the final metalwork.
'Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it is meaningless.'
Following Albert Camus' absurdist perspective, I went searching for visual phenomena that induce this very feeling of existential fear and ensuing comfort. I used the romantic motif of the window [Fenster] to contain what feels to me like a breach in the space-time-continuum. For some a look into humanity's future, for others, an unsettling reminder of our lack of control.
The hard to grasp visual aesthetic is the product of a 3m*2m*0.5m aluminum frame, multiple layers of acrylic glas and reflecting foil, lit by three projectors from different angles.
Thank you to Professor Tjark Ihmels and Deutsche Bahn.
'Ursprung' [origin/source] is an amorphous ever spawning seed, infinitely creating abstract vegetal vines. At the end of every life cycle, the plant disintegrates into the noisy soil it originated from, granting new life. The audio reflects this noise with distant rain and occasional thunder, growing more distinct and stereophonic as the plant gains in size. This brief rythm of life, death and [re]birth grants a calm but haunting atmosphere.
The projection was presented on a self constructed 4.8m * 2.4m concave array of canvases. Additionally, we had placed several cushions as well as a sofa to give the audience a place to rest and reflect.
Thank you to Kulturtage AKK and the BMW Club Mainz-Kastel.
For 'Die Maschine' [The Machine], our first idea was to create the opposite of the serene plant-growing happening in 'Ursprung', which resulted in throwing a deafening party. Our concept revolved around the idea of the audience being industrial era workers, and the DJ impersonating the factory overseer, making everybody rave [work] in accord with the beat. The visuals, just like the audience, consisted of a cluster of instanced objects, only assembling the bigger picture in union.
As advertisement during the day [apart from posters] we had placed a large grid of analog monitors outside of the room, each showing flimmering/glitching visuals merged with promotional info. Die Maschine lebt!
Thank you to Egon Bunne and the DJs Oliver Bollmann and Magnus Theobald.
With my abstract visuals, I often strive not for form, but for texture, self-induced movement and development with conceptual approaches, encouraged by real life patterns and cellular automata.