CHRISTOPHER NOELLE AKA TOFA — LIGHT DESIGN

Surrounded by darkness — on the cutting edge of experimental cross-medial Art

SWINGING HOOP, 2018 — Swinging an LED Hulahoop during a rainy night in the industrial zone of Linz.

From Austria

CHRISTOPHER NOELLE AKA TOFA

From his career as a bike trials pro rider he learned early to see things from another point of view, a different perspective. Imagination and the search of thrill remained in every project that followed up since then. Today he looks back on 20 years of experience in Lightpainting photography and projection art and still finds new challenges as a creator.

Noelle mapped the Brandenburger Tor, worked with a robot on realtime generated Lightpainting at Ars Electronica and used surface reflections of a Porsche for its unvealing premiere. You can say that Christopher really lives multimedia art. For his latest project he invented the Holo-Painter — a tool that allows the fusion of fiction and reality by combining projection, photography, motion graphics and real surrounding.

If you sum up his compendium, the full spectrum of multimedia opens up from photography to film, to animation and motion graphics, to illustration and calligraphy, to painting and mapping projection, to sound design to NFTs, to typography to sculptures — for the artist it is a permanent evolving cycle, continuously triggering new ideas like a perpetual motion machine. —>

www.metofa.com

THE ROBOTIC SERIES 14, 2022 — A vectorized Op-Art pattern plotted with a touch-sensitive light-pen by a penplotter, captured in a single long exposure with a prism effect lens on the camera.

VECTOR SCRATCH PAINTING, 2022 — Using a pen plotter to scratch precise vector graphics into fresh paint.

—> The interaction of human, space and machine and the associated transformation process between the analog and digital world are the core themes of his work and studies. On the creative side, Noelle is bringing science and art together and by the conversion of robotics, motors and machines to artistic useable tools he creates astonishing results.

Painting with light is based on imagination and a clearly structured sequence of actions, it’s about taking control of the sources. Besides control, errors and imperfection are also essential components of the creative process. “Sometimes the clean result is less impressive than the one where I tumbled upon an obstacle in the darkness.” Noelle also painted his studio black so he can work in the dark during the day.

Noelle’s talk at Design Friends will take you on a journey from darkness to the light at the end of the tunnel, opening new perspectives of how to be and stay creative.

COMPLEXITY, 2022 — A vectorized 3D Rendering plotted with a touch-sensitive light-pen by a penplotter, captured in a single long exposure.

JELLY, 2019 — Using an acrylic blade to create a Lightpainting of an abstract shape of a jellyfish.

THE A SCULPTURE, 2022 — Lightpainting on a typographic sculpture that is based on a remix of a Vasarely graphic.

The Ant, 2019 — A CT-scan animation of an ant captured in movement. First studio test series for the Holo-Painter project (2022/23).