Most of what I do today I started when I was a kid. I took my first drumming lessons when I was 8. I wrote my first lines of BASIC code on my family’s old C64 around the same time. I used my father’s VHS camera to record my siblings and me mimicking our favourite TV shows. As a teenager these attempts at creation became more sophisticated: starting a punk band and recording rudimentary songs with only one microphone on a Dell laptop we found in our neighbour’s trash. Hacking into the Half-Life SDK to create my own interpretation of Counter-Strike. Designing an animated web cartoon series that very closely resembled South Park using Flash, when Flash hadn’t yet been acquired (and ultimately shut down) by Adobe.

The more sophisticated these attempts at creation became, the more they became interconnected: learning PHP enabled the punk band to be among the very few with their own custom website. Having a punk band meant learning to work in a team, to organize and to finish things. Knowing how to operate a camera and to utilize Photoshop meant we could design an album cover and shoot our own Behind-The-Scenes.

I ended up studying media design because it encompassed all of these attempts at creation. I learned about graphic design and the importance of typography, later came video editing and compositing, I taught myself After Effects because it wasn’t a regular part of the curriculum. I developed small video games and portfolio websites, often for fellow students because almost nobody there wanted to code. The university also featured a Pro Tools based recording studio where I spent many a night working on song ideas or soundtracking for a semester’s video assignment. It was a huge playground for all my favourite disciplines.

Fast forward to 2014, my second year in Berlin, when I met LEM-Studios founder Sebastian M. Purfürst with whom I started the music project SONICONOCLASM and who eventually became my close friend and creative mentor, as well as one of the few constants in my life: after becoming tired of the confines of being a full-time employee, first as a motion graphics designer in a small agency and later as a developer in a smart home company, I discovered I was ready to take things a step further and finally became a full-time freelancer in 2022 as a member of LEM-Studios collective, working in different teams and various disciplines, regaining the creative freedom I so much enjoyed.

– MFCB, October 2024