YOU IMMEDIATELY KNOW WHICH LIGHTING SETUP CREATED WHICH FEELING.

[left page] Nordbahnhof, Selbstportrait, 2007

Mirrored photo at Berlin Nordbahnhof with the Berlin wall and TV tower as backdrop. "First the typo was painted into the air, then a colorfoil flash was used to freeze my ghost in the exposure."

[top] Yeah, Platoon, Berlin Mitte, 2008

“A big work light with a simple on-and-off switch is great for bold typographic letters.”

[bottom] Styrofoam Object, 2009

Studio setup of a styrofoam sculpture combined with various light sources. “The white picks up the reflections while you move your hands around the object, without touching it.”

BUT ONCE I’VE SEEN ENOUGH OF A PARTICULAR SCENE, I JUST MAKE A CUT AND SWITCH TO SOMETHING ELSE I PREFER.

The crossover between digital and analogue is something we are dealing with as a society.

That’s the core of my work. The conversion process between virtual and real world. You always need to move between analogue and digital skills. Each of those two worlds triggers the other one.

It’s like an intentionally imperfect translation process

I love errors! For example, if you do that Polaroid transfer technique, you start with a really clean graphic on the computer, transfer that to the iPhone and then print it with the Polaroid. Then, during that transfer process, I can just take a straw and push the colour gel around in the water. It behaves like folded paper and becomes something totally different. This all relies on experience and errors.

You’ve been involved with the music scene for a long time too. How’s music played into your work?

I’ve been producing music since the ‘90s. Today, it’s more on the computer, but I still have a couple of synthesisers hanging around too.

And I know how to get things working together somehow. If you’re making documentaries, you need all the audio working as well as the visuals, if you want to publish it.

I’ve been into electronic music since the mid ’90s. In fact, I started my visual career doing club visuals.

Back then, I was using two VHS recorders to play visuals for the crowd at techno parties.

That must have been an exciting time?

It was crazy! For example, I worked from 2007 to 2013 as art director in the oldest techno club in Berlin. It’s called Tresor . It’s all about diving into the music with a lot of fog machines, strobes, minimalistic lighting and fourto-the-floor beats! When you work in that environment, you meet a lot of musicians, artists, crazy people.

One of the great things about doing the night shift at a club is that you learn everything about the essentials of light. Then, coming back into your own creative process you immediately know which lighting setup created which feeling. You can take that knowvledge with you and transfer it directly to your artwork.

You were engineering people’s emotional state, in a way?

When you provide the visual experience for an audience, you have to be really aware of the effect you’re having, because too much light will disturb the entire feeling. Too little light is just as bad.

I’m a big fan of keeping it simple. So for me, it’s black, white and one colour.

Before that, you were a trials bike champion, how did you get from there to the visuals?

The trials bike riding gave me a chance to be in front of the camera, because they made documentaries about me, back in the early ‘90s.

One camera producer became a really good friend of mine, and he asked me, ‘Hey, don’t you want to come with me on a trip and do some filming for other extreme sports?’

That’s how I got into the editing part of creating films. By working on documentaries about other extreme sports people. And then with the editing of the film, you had to learn special effects, animations and so on. Editing animations led to club visuals.

People usually have difficulty switching from one field to another. But it seems to have been very natural for you?

It was always a natural progression. For example, during my biking career, I won lots of trophies, had my own sponsoring contracts and went on adventure trips around the world with photographers and filmmakers.

But it was in the pre-YouTube era. So there wasn’t this big social thing, like today. It was more about doing your own thing and getting paid from a couple of companies for having their bike on the cover of a magazine. That was a cool time.

But I broke my leg and had to stop sport for a year. At that point I had to make a decision about which direction I wanted to go next. So all of the things came one after the other by accident. I always chose what to do from a gut feeling.

I dived into the biking world for almost 15 years and it was a really intense time. I met a lot of crazy, cool people. But then I started a couple of internships and went to a big advertising agency in Hamburg.

After that, I studied fashion design, and became a professional designer.

While studying fashion design, I started working as a freelancer for agencies doing all the graffiti prints for big catalogues.

But once I’ve seen enough of a particular scene, I just make a cut and switch to something else I prefer.

You take on lots of things and you get them done. How do you manage that?

I always stick to what I love.

For example, music has accompanied me for almost 30 years, but I do it for myself. Sometimes it’s better to keep things as hobbies, because you can explore them as you like. Whereas, if you make it your business, you have to make them pay.

That’s the secret - keeping a balance between what you love and what you have to do to make a living.

Before we go any further, we must address one question : what is a pixelstick?

The pixelstick is one of the tools you can use for lightpainting. It’s a two meter long LED strip with an Arduino behind it. You can load a graphic onto the stick and the picture just shows slowly one line after the other.

So your pixelstick is playing a single line of a picture, while you leave a threedimensional trace in the photograph.

You can tell it to repeat an image in an endless loop, or just play it once, or just make a blue light. There are lots of different patterns you can use.

So the combination of having one more-or less-static picture, plus your movement, creates interesting things inside the picture frame.

“Before I wear new shoes I always love to get a clean

Spiro LP 06, 2017

Using two turntables with a custom spirograph extension arm is great for creating illustrations. “If you look closely, you can see that the extension arms broke during this shot. You can find the thred nut in the center, on the ground.”

Kuka, 2016

Research at the robotic laboratory of UFG Linz University for an interactive lightpainting performance and installation. “We mounted a pixelstick on a KUKA robot and programmed a motionpath.” This was later the opener of the first „Creative robotics“ exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center.

[top] Sparkles, Kraftwerk, 2013

The leftover from NY E : a firecracker mounted on a swinging rope.

[bottom] Dragon, 2016

This is a very complex pixelstick lightpainting, shot in one take. “I started with the tail, changed the graphic behind the first pillar, repeated two half circle movements then, went back behind the last pillar to change for the head part. Simple, eh!?”

ALWAYS STICK TO WHAT I LOVE.

[top] MH Kienle, 2015

Editorial shooting for Mens’ Health together with ironman champion Sebastian Kienle, combining a wet floor, a pixelstick tube led lights on the rims and flashlight.

[bottom] I Will Never Grow Up, 2019

When the batteries of the pixelstick are almost dead, the LEDs create a glitch by accident. “This phrase is a metaphor for keeping myself in childish play-mode.”

Do you then post-process in Photoshop?

I try to always shoot in a mode called SOOC - straight out of camera. So ‘what you see is what you get’ is my mission, without too much time invested into retouching in Photoshop.

I shoot everything in high resolution, JPEG and a raw file. Maybe if I think the surrounding has too much brightness, I go into the raw file and fool around a little bit with the settings. But I’m a big fan of not faking the pictures.

That ‘realness’ comes through in the graffiti projects you’ve done Graffiti always had a big impact on me because I love calligraphy, which is a kind of a special division within graffiti. I have kept that as a hobby for three decades now.

And I keep hold of that sketching experience today. I do a lot of stuff on the iPad, in Procreate.

You can then take a picture from Procreate, load it onto the pixelstick and get out into the environment and do a lightpainting with what you have created digitally.

It’s like a meditation, once you get hooked into something like that, isn’t it?

It’s good because I can paint something without the computer too. I just take a sketchbook and a good pen.

I can do it on a train ride, or outside, or at a swimming pool, wherever I want.

So I don’t need a computer to be creative.

You did a documentary about graffiti writers in Tokyo, didn’t you?

The first time I went to Tokyo was in 2007, to make a documentary about six graffiti writers who were invited by the Goethe Institute to take part in an exchange programme.

We stayed there for two weeks. We were hosted by a guy from the government who was into art. He was running a gallery called, ‘Tokyo Wonder Site’ which had an open platform where you could apply for grants.

Two years later, I won a grant to have a one month stay in Tokyo. I had a studio and could do whatever I wanted in my time there. So I made a lot of lightpaintings. For example, we produced a huge fashion series for a European street wear magazine.

I did a lot of street art too, going out with local writers, taking pictures. I came back with 10,000 images. A huge library, and that’s just from one trip!

It must be quite a job just managing your library these days?

Let’s just say I will have plenty to keep me busy during my retirement!

But the main mission, after all these years, is to find a publisher for a book. My experience, which takes a very meandering course through the creative fields, has not been seen by too many other people.

It could be interesting for others, it could trigger input for the new generation on how to find their own path in the jungle of creativity.

In that jungle, where does a job like your lightpainting project for Porsche sit?

Actually, I’ve worked with Porsche twice. Once for the lightpainting. I would love to have had more time for that, but when you are just one wheel in the entire production process, you don’t get that kind of freedom. You’re hired to do your painting.

But if you have the freedom to present the idea to a client, and the client loves what you do, that’s a big advantage. That’s how it was at Porsche.

Can you refine and explore the possibilities of that final, performance stage of your work?

The more often you have the chance to do something, the better you can make it. You add polish.

That’s the advantage in doing a project a couple of times. But in lightpainting, the project will never be the same twice. Even if you only move ten centimetres differently the second time, the result will look completely different.

Depending on what kind of idea you have, is it really reproducible? Is it a unique piece? These are the things that come to my mind when we talk about repetition. For example, last autumn, I worked on an audio-visual piece together with a break dancer. I made a mapping projection and he danced alongside the visual content.

Now that we have made the trailer from that first production, we are able to present it at other festivals, but each time you present it you think, ‘Yeah, I can tweak it a little bit here and make it better with that idea…’

Each time you reproduce something, the experience from the previous project will push you to new heights.

So a huge project like Schloss Charlottenburg would be very sensitive to small changes in the setup?

That was an insane project to work on. Back in 2012, we were involved in the brand new field of huge scale, surface mapping projection. We went out each night to a different building, and SchlossCharlottenburg was one of them.

Where other companies need months for pre-production, we just dived into it in one night and did one theme per building. We discussed with the client upfront, and then it just happened.

Working at that scale, you have to be clear with the vision you have in mind. You cannot lose focus on the basic idea behind a project.

The only way you could perfectly repeat a lightpainting is with a robot, maybe?

Working with the robot is always exciting. It’s a bit like being in the Tron world, or Terminator… It’s great to have access to something like that.

The university in Linz has a huge robotic laboratory. And I’m a good friend with the professor there. He lets me in from time to time, so I can fool around with the machine and try out some ideas.

In fact, I have a new mission in mind for the robot this year. But there’s