I am a largely self-taught visionary photographer, digital artist and Tao Alchemist working across photography, drawing, painting, digital processes and AI-assisted image making. My practice is exploration of perception, transformation and the relationship between the conscious, unconscious and collective imagination.
Since 2016, I have developed an intuitive, non-conformist digital practice rooted in direct engagement with nature. Beginning with deliberately blurred photographs of foliage and landscapes, I transform seemingly formless pixels into new imaginative forms and imagined worlds, This process challenges conventional ideas of photography and digital art, demonstrating how new artistic languages often emerge by breaking established rules, here Photoshop tutorial-ism.I became aware that it was non-conformist.Before integrating AI in my work not in Photoshop,or knowing about diverse apps I spent years developing an organic, human-led generative process in Photoshop, creating images from unrefined formless photographic data without AI-gen assistance; made me feel like a digital painter. Working with digital media since 2000, I have remained driven by curiosity about the expressive possibilities of the medium itself, evolving approaches outside institutional frameworks, not as a snobbery but as I had to.I called it Ex Nihilo or Kniff Art.
In 2023, I began integrating AI-assisted image generation into my practice. Initially, I embraced its speed, unpredictability, and surrealist potential as if the generator was a camera with a motor drive to find my 'tune' and then to evolve some of my source material further through experimentation in various generative models; I was focusing on my process (pure surrealist text-automatism) to find a basic approach as my own. As the medium matured, so did my approach.My practice prioritizes authorship , intentionality, and sustainability , embracing a "less is more" philosophy that values thoughtful creation over excessive generation.Generally I had to expand my digital creation with some good instinct and study the effect of words more closely.
My background is in analogue photography with a diploma.I trained in black-and-white darkroom printing, worked as a stills photographer on film productions, assisted fashion photographer Monika Robl in her studio and lab, and later worked in-house in Munich, producing commercial imagery for ski wear and BMW. After a personal turning point, I stepped away from photography for several years. Later developing a digital practice focused on self-scouted models, niche crime and thriller imagery, and the collective unconscious I returned through book-cover digital photography for international publishers for several years enjoying my self-directed studies and themes. My work has been exhibited or showcased and published internationally, including collaborations with Henry Boxer Gallery in London, Shrine’s The Empty Gallery in New York, the Computer Arts Society CAS, and *Zoom International Magazine* in Italy and wise.art platform in Geneva. ────୨ৎ────
