Was there something in childhood that influenced your decision to work in design and arts?

As long as I can think back, I've been making art and music. As a child, mostly by drawing, later with friends making videos and cutting them, exploring software and coding in my teens. So basically, my whole life I have been deeply connected to creative work and technology in all kinds of ways. Most of my teachers didn't support this at all — making art in class was often a sort of rebellion against what I was actually supposed to be doing.

How does living in Berlin shape your work and ideas?

I was born in Berlin and grew up here too, and it definitely shaped me a lot. In my late teens, I was diving into the club and music scene, and that — very much including the people I went with or met — shaped my interests long-term. There's a lot of subculture here, and the TouchDesigner community is also thriving with plenty of meetups and all kinds of events taking place all over Berlin. We're opening a new art and community hub for TouchDesigner and new media art here now, too! The art community is struggling and changing, but still very much present, and it makes it possible for me to get to know artists from all over the world.

You describe having fallen in love with visual programming and having already learned several programming languages. What drew you to this approach and to TouchDesigner?

I started back in the day with web coding (HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP, etc.) and then got into Processing. Processing was the gateway drug into generative art for me, and I explored it along with Arduino for a few years, but eventually found myself looking for something more powerful and interesting — that led me to TouchDesigner. When I started around six years ago, there weren’t many tutorials around, but luckily, I sat down and learned the software and quite quickly started sharing tutorials as well. My love for this versatile tool, as well as its community, has only grown since then.

Who are some of the artists that have influenced you?

That's a tough question — answering this in a complete manner would result in an almost endless list composed of visual artists of all kinds, TouchDesigner artists, musicians, and friends. One major inspiration and teacher was Matthew Ragan in my early TD years. Some other honourable mentions are Josef Pelz, Arsiliath, Vincent Houzé, mini_uv, Ko Hui, Fingacode, and all the people sharing their work at the TouchDesigner meetups and on my Patreon.

As for music, huge influences are Skee Mask, Objekt, Little Dragon, Maxwell Owin, Pink Floyd, Cocteau Twins, Nils Frahm, System Olympia, Dua Saleh, Gabor Szabo, The Durutti Column, Kelela, Gorillaz, Ivy Lab, Djrum, Machinedrum, Lord of the Isles.

How did you grow a successful Patreon?

When I first started making TouchDesigner art and shared it on Instagram and Reddit, people asked for tutorials, and I started making them — realising in the process that this is a lot of fun and it works well for me and, apparently, others. I'd never taught anyone before, so this was a bit weird for me in the beginning. Then people started asking for a Patreon, so I started one, not expecting anything at all. Now I live off of it. It sort of just grew, especially during the pandemic, and quite quickly, this became my main source of income.

I still do commissions, but I've got the privilege to be able to pick the ones I can and want to do. Usually, exploration, working on collaborations, just messing around or doing client work comes first, and out of all of these, things develop that I can then use for tutorials. Sometimes people request things or I have specific ideas that I then turn into tutorials, but it's hard to say how much work goes into what — everything is connected and influences the other aspects.

As someone who does music as a hobby, do you sense a strong connection between the visual arts, design, and music?

Absolutely. I am a very visual person and just have to close my eyes to see worlds of art and 'universes' connected to the music. Visuals and music belong together. And by that, I don't mean every concert needs to have live visuals, but really, our senses are interconnected, and our brain connects what we see to what we hear (and feel, taste, etc.). So, exploring what our technological tools can create and achieve is super interesting to me. On the computer, data is just data — you can convert from sound to pixel easily.

The music video 'Glass' that you did for Max Thomasberger and 'Mikrokosmos II — Shrine' for Tobias Blessing connects visuals and music. How do you balance making literal connections and more impressionistic ones?

This is difficult to generalise, but usually I listen to the music many times at first, then filter out what parts there are, create the visuals, and finally see what parts can react to or get influenced by the music. Meaning first, I create quite abstract art that, for me, fits the song or was requested by the musician, and then I add a more literal, technical connection to the audio on top. More generally, however, I simply do and don't think about it too much — it's all about the process and discovering what works and what doesn't while working on it.

You suffer from long Covid. How has this affected your life, and do you feel the urge to 'move on' from Covid has meant this has been somewhat overlooked?

Yeah, I have been dealing with Long Covid for almost three years now. It's completely upended my life and messed up everything. I've had phases that lasted for months with a variety of symptoms like fatigue, chronic pain, headaches, nausea, depression, anxiety, and sleeping problems — it's a ridiculously long list of pretty awful chronic experiences I've been going through. It's much better now, fortunately, and I can work again, which for the better part of the last three years was not possible, at least not consistently. It's been the most difficult phase of my life, but it has shaped me greatly, and I believe very positively in the long run. Not being able to make art for such a long time was terrible. It's so good to be back at it, but it's also pretty overwhelming. Let's see how it continues.

Do you have a dream project?

Honestly, I'm just happy I'm back to work right now. But as I mentioned earlier, we're starting a community and art hub in Berlin and that comes pretty close to a dream project! Apart from that, I really want to perform more on stage, and there are definitely some artists like the ones mentioned earlier that I would love to work with, as well as sharing my own music live with some visuals.

You will be leading a couple of the classes in Music Hackspace's upcoming TouchDesigner course. What can participants expect?

We'll dive into making more complex systems and integrating UI and custom parameters so we can easily share and collaborate on components or hand clients simple tools without needing to understand the backend. In the second session, we'll look into how to optimize these for better performance.