Legacy¶
The work started before there was a name for most of it.
In 1999, while the majority of internet users were still connecting over dial-up lines, I was producing livestreams: not video, but sequences of regularly refreshed still images, assembled into something that resembled a live broadcast if you were patient enough. It was fragile infrastructure for a fragile medium, and the people doing it seriously were few enough that you knew most of them. One of them was Ana Voog, one of the earliest and most influential webcam artists working on the internet, whose live presence and practice shaped the vocabulary of what real-time digital communication could be long before the tools existed to make it easy. To be working in that circle, at that moment, was to be at the edge of something that had not yet acquired its history.
By 2006, that experimental instinct had found a more sustained form. Anderecast was an internet video anthology series I conceived, produced, and ran for over 200 episodes between June 2006 and February 2008. It was an anthology in the full sense: each episode operated under its own laws of physics, with its own narrative, characters, and visual language. No two episodes looked or behaved alike. In its final year the series was reaching around 10,000 viewers per episode, before YouTube had made that scale of audience feel routine, before the infrastructure existed to make it easy, and before "content creator" was a job title anyone used seriously. It ran at a moment when the internet video format was genuinely being invented, and Anderecast was part of that invention.
Also in 2012, I produced Hinausgehen, a three-part audiovisual sonata presented at the Internationale Konstfilm Utställning at Länsmuseum Jönköping, Sweden. The work was projected through the museum's windows onto the city and motorway at the opening of the Lucia festival in December, operating at the boundary between film, installation, and architectural intervention.
Alongside the anthology series, I was building a music video and live visuals practice under the name Cerusmedia. Across a large body of collaborations with musicians and bands spanning more than a decade, the scope of the work ranged from production and direction through art direction, editing, and live stage visual design for international tours.
Among the artists I worked with over that period was Lesley Rankine, the musician and multimedia artist behind both Silverfish and Ruby. Salt Peter, Ruby's debut album on Creation Records, had been a formative record for me in the mid-1990s; the chance to work closely with Rankine on video and live tour material years later was one of those rare instances where admiration and professional reality arrived at exactly the same address. Translating such a personally beloved musician's creative language into something I was now responsible for visually representing over the course of released singles and shows was a pressure I eagerly accepted. The works were inspired by Rorschach tests, nature, and the weightlessness of internal monologues.
The collaboration with The Opiates — Billie Ray Martin and Norwegian electronic composer Robert Solheim — drew on a different part of my practice. Their music lived where Weimar cabaret, Chicago house, and literary portraiture met; the visual work I produced for their live shows and the live video for Silent Comes The Nighttime (Again) was informed by a visual language rooted in experimental film, the work of Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger, and a long engagement with psychoanalysis. The brief required holding that range of reference coherently across different venues, cities, and technical conditions throughout an international touring programme, remaining consistent without becoming rigid.
In 2021, the music video I directed, art directed, and edited for the artist ELECTROSEXUAL — (How to) Change Your Mind — won Best Music Video at the Singapore International Short Film Festival. The production was conceived and executed as a close two-person collaboration, with every visual decision deliberate and accounted for.
LUDWIG, 2016–2019¶
From January 2016 to September 2019, I co-owned and operated LUDWIG, a bar, gallery, and venue in Berlin-Neukölln. It was conceived as a space where creative practice, nightlife, and community programming could occupy the same room without one subordinating the others: a place where the programme determined the character of the space rather than the reverse. The curatorial principle was simple and demanding: give serious work a serious platform, bring artists from across geographic and stylistic boundaries, and trust the audience's intelligence.
The first major curated exhibition was CHAOSTROPHY: A Tribute to the Band Coil (22 June – 31 July 2016). It brought together over 45 artists from around the world working across all mediums: painting, photography, sculpture, textile, sound, and digital work, each responding to the music and legacy of Coil, one of the most influential and determinedly unclassifiable acts in experimental music history. The call for submissions was published by The Wire, the UK's foremost journal of adventurous music; the exhibition's finissage was covered by African Paper; and the work continues to circulate in the communities whose history it documented. It was my first curated exhibition and a demonstration that the venue could function as a serious cultural institution, not merely a social space.
The programme that followed ranged across exhibitions, concerts, literary evenings, performance series, and live-streamed panel discussions on political and social questions. LUDWIG gave platform to local and international artists working in forms that had few other natural homes in Neukölln at the time: experimental music, interdisciplinary media work, queer performance, and community-facing documentary events.
LUDWIG was covered across its lifespan by SIEGESSÄULE, Berlin's long-running queer culture publication. Coverage extended from the venue's early programming through to its closure in September 2019. A subsequent piece framed the closure in terms that went beyond the individual venue: to operate an independent cultural space of this kind requires the structural freedom to make mistakes, and that freedom is precisely what the economics of independent cultural operation in Berlin make most difficult to sustain.
Public record¶
Two decades of work across photography, film, video, live performance, broadcast, and cultural programming have left a documented public record. The Berliner and iHeartBerlin both produced profile features. SIEGESSÄULE carried coverage across multiple years and contexts. The Wire published the CHAOSTROPHY call. A 2016 retrospective by writer-director Kristie Alshaibi traces the arc from early-2000s Chicago experimental film work through to Cerusmedia's Berlin output. The work is catalogued on IMDb, Behance, and YouTube. The Internet Archive holds further traces across the timeline.
The current trajectory in AI systems and governed infrastructure is documented in the Projects and Method sections of this site.