Artist by nature.Engineer by training.Worldbuilder by profession.

Growing up in the forest

I grew up on a clearing in the mountains of southern Austria — half an hour from Italy and Slovenia (Austria — not Australia — no kangaroos). Just three houses, surrounded by mountains, forest, meadows and cows that occasionally staged a jailbreak. The barefoot search party was my sister and me.

Yep — this was pre-internet and pre-mobile phone. There was exactly one app. It was called Outside. The graphics were impressive (Real Time Fog). The user interface was mostly mud.

I spent entire days turning the riverbed into a city of stones. My sister occasionally participated, mostly in the role of a resident with limited freedom of movement.

Maybe spending entire days in the woods does something to the imagination. My head was constantly full of stories, images and entire worlds that needed somewhere to go. I drew constantly, invented characters and regularly disappeared into whatever I was imagining — often with more commitment than whatever was happening in the classroom. One teacher called me Alice in Wonderland. She was not entirely wrong.

Circuits, charcoal & other early influences

Technology entered the story early, courtesy of a father with a rather contagious enthusiasm for anything involving circuits, cables or a blinking light. There was a C128, later a 40 MHz PC, MS Paint and a box full of floppy disks. At around thirteen, he taught me how to write my first computer program. This may have been the point of no return.

The C128 is still at my parents’ house, technically retired but emotionally available for Boulder Dash.

The urge to get all those images out of my head led me through charcoal, pastels, scratchboard, a novel and even classical singing before digital art finally gave me the medium I had been looking for.

3D brought the two halves together: one imagining the impossible, the other calculating how to build it. It combines imagination with construction, aesthetics with technology and creative freedom with exactly the right amount of technical problem-solving.

Gravity is optional, weather is negotiable and the camera is not bound by real-life physics. Your imagination is limited mainly by the number of GPUs at your disposal — and you can never have enough CUDA cores.

Two sides. Neither won.

The creative and technical sides were both there from the beginning. The logical side was later trained in software development. The creative one remained largely unsupervised. Fortunately, neither side ever won.

I can move between abstract ideas and structured thinking, combine them or let one challenge the other, depending on what a project needs. I see both the image and the mechanism behind it — what something could become, how it needs to work and where the weak or missing parts are likely to hide.

That combination is probably my greatest strength. Programmer thinking taught me to look at a problem and automatically run through the best case, the worst case and every inconvenient possibility in between. It allows me to understand complex systems from a bird’s-eye perspective, structure information and processes, identify missing or weak parts and turn abstract subjects into narratives people can grasp quickly.

Give me an ambitious new project, an early-stage venture or a heroic stack of Word documents with inconsistent terminology, and I am entirely in my element. I love finding the central idea hidden inside the complexity, sharpening it and translating it into clear positioning, language, a brand world and visuals.

Education

I studied Software Development and Business Organisation at the Higher Technical College in Villach, graduating with an engineering degree, followed by Media Technology and Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg.

Work

After four years in an advertising agency, I founded Phoenix Digital Arts in 2013 and became my own boss. I also teach at the University of Applied Sciences in Villach, sharing what I have learned through education, experience and a few highly instructive detours.

Since then, the work has taken me through three feature films, international campaigns and projects across a fairly improbable range of subjects — from carbon nanotubes and cryptocurrencies to start-ups, green screens, established brands, advertising and film.

Different industries, people and problems, but usually the same task underneath:

Understand the complexity, find the story and make it visible.

The experiment keeps proving the same thing:

You do not need to pick a side.