MARKUS HECKMANN
Heckmann’s inspiration to work with light based media stems from the abundance of imagery in the club scene of the late 90s and early 2000s. Being exposed to the possibilities of generative and manipulative languages like director lingo, Heckmann started on the path of generative image creation and manipulation which to the day can be found in his professional and artistic works. After a 9 month internship with Derivative and a 6 month journey through history as the video jockey for Canadian Rock legends RUSH, Heckmann switched Universities to now attend Bauhaus Weimar and shape his experimental practice and previously gained experience under the direct influence of MX- Zehn’s Stefan Kraus.
With Derivative offering a position as a Technical Director in early 2006, Heckmann embarked on the permanent resettlement to Toronto where he has since lived and worked. As part of Derivative, Heckmann works on commercial and artistic projects alike which span major theme park attractions to public video installations and the development of fully fledged control applications like WhiteVoid’s KineticLights. Work on the winch and light control application culminated in a much savoured project – GRID – for Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke at Lyons 2013s edition of Nuit Blanche. The work with Robert Henke can be seen exemplary for Derivative’s relationship to some of the music industry’s leading figures and the ongoing effort to serve this community well. Apart from project and development work, Heckmann is active promoting TouchDesigner and teaching its uses in the fields of art and technology to the interested public at festivals and conferences around the world. In 2008 raster-noton and Derivative joined forces for a unique collaborative project which focused on the realization of the label artists’ visual presentation during their audio-visual live shows on the basis of Derivative’s TouchDesigner software. The work for Carsten Nicolai’s univrs eventually evolved into the realization of 3 further large scale multiscreen installations: unidisplay, unicolor and most recently unitape.
Heckmann’s personal endeavours have always tended to combine the aesthetic aspects of generative computer graphics with the almost physical aspects of light. Feeling very comfortable in a club setting, he started performing as a vj under the moniker “Farbraum Lenkungs Aktiv” at parties in his hometown of Leipzig and continues this practise, while now less frequent, under the name “Wuestenarchitekten” in Toronto. A collaboration with electronic musician Matt Thibideau in 2014 resulted in “reclusion”, an AV show presented at Mutek’s AVisions series. After a collaboration with Toronto based painter Rui Pimenta which was selected for the 2010 25fps Festival in Zagreb, a series of installations in Pimenta’ s Gallery as well as at Pimenta’ s initiated Art Spin events had Heckmann explore the possibilities of installation artworks. Aside from a collection of fake information visualizations and a singular experiment in interactivity the presented work more and more dealt and deals on the intersection of analog / physical objects or spaces and generated graphics or controlled light with a focus on the light and its presence in a volume. — Markus Heckmann was born 1977 in Leipzig, GDR. He attended the University Ilmenau and Bauhaus University Weimar studying Media-technology. Since January 2006 he is a Technical Director with Derivative, the makers of TouchDesigner, in Toronto, Canada.