Having been brought up in East Berlin, the blending of bodies with cityscapes, streets, and buildings has become a recurring motif in my work. The ever-present structures of concrete and cement shape my memories and environment to this day. I am endlessly fascinated by this tension between the hard, concrete forms of civilization—the rigid yet brittle frameworks we've created to contain ourselves in—and the softer, more fluid bodies that merge with these urban structures or cling to them. It reflects my thoughts on entrapment but also resilience and adaptation. In a way, the concrete becomes a visual language through which I comment on the forces shaping individual lives, identities, and societal roles, adding a layered, almost architectural depth. While the structures of society are rigid, bodies and identities are in constant flux, sometimes bending to fit into those frameworks, other times breaking free. Through my work, I aim to create a sense of people both being absorbed into and transforming their environment.

When I started creating *:: identity machine :: skin flesh cloth hair ::*, I didn't have a specific intention. I began by investigating how AI would respond when trained on a combination of my grandfather's and my own photography. Experimenting with this model, I was struck by how vividly it captured the vibe of my youth in East Berlin. The AI clustered bodies, limbs, skin, and textures in dense compositions, mirroring the crowded, concrete-filled spaces I remember—particularly around the Berlin Wall. This visual density of “civilization and humanity” resonates deeply with me. Beyond being a backdrop to my upbringing, it symbolizes a societal framework we attempt to squeeze into: rigid structures that try to define who we are, yet always fail to contain us entirely.

The Berlin Wall, which was intended to entrap people, to encase them, to shape their lives & their world, could not, in the end, hold back the people it sought to contain. This contradiction inspired my visual language—bodies clinging to and spilling from concrete, skin, flesh, cloth, and hair poured into artificial spaces, bursting at the seams. The Wall became a symbol of resistance, with artists like Sabine Kunz, Margaret Hunter, Kani Alavi, and Thierry Noir transforming it into an abstract canvas for human faces and forms. These influences shaped my work, not only depicting walls but using them to echo the fragmented humanity they sought to enclose. For many of us, the Wall was more than architecture; it was a constant, imposing character in our lives.

Growing up in Berlin-Hellersdorf, a part of East Berlin with its own oppressive concrete borders, has also impacted my perspective. An old classmate recently wrote an article in a German newspaper about our school and the challenges of growing up in this right-wing-leaning area. Today, our former school has become a refugee home—ironically, in a place that once fostered hostility, where Nazis handed out racist drawings and terrorized immigrants. The bleak architecture of these outer city parts only deepened the misery; people wanted to escape as soon as they could, unwilling to have their identities crushed in relentless light between towering, impersonal buildings.

The digital artworks in *:: identity machine :: skin flesh cloth hair ::* are inspired by these experiences of density, containment, freedom and identity. Using photography, collage, and artificial intelligence, these compositions combine surreal layerings of bodies, objects, and rigid, often architectural structures. The resulting interplay between structure and disorder conveys a chaotic, almost overwhelming energy, reflecting multiplicity and my ongoing negotiation of identity. My process begins by building a custom dataset with my and my grandfather's photography, combined with public domain images. I then train an AI model on this data, repeatedly applying it in a digital additive process. This allows me to sculpt bodies, objects, and structures into complex, multidimensional compositions.

Through recontextualizing these images, I explore perception and the notion of reality as something more fragmented and subjective. By shifting between figuration and abstraction, I aim to deconstruct and reassemble these rigid frameworks, filling them with elements that resist easy grasp. What is reality if not fragmented and subjective? What is identity if not fluid?

The works I created for *:: identity machine :: skin flesh cloth hair ::* are shaped by these tensions, drawing from both the density and resistance I experienced growing up in East Berlin.

The full body of work can be experienced on objkt.com. I launched it as one of my first cohesive collections there to give people access to it, to make it somewhat permanent on the blockchain and to sustain myself through the sale.

Tresor 1999

I Like Flowers But They All Die So Fast

DetroitBerlin