The Computer as a tool for creative art work – today that is common and not especially exciting. As I had my dispute with the computer regarding the most different aspects over my whole work life at the Technical University of Munich since 1966, now for me it is a fascinating experience to use the computer for my own art work.

For that I am using different image processing, painting and CAD applications, not all at the same time, but sometimes several for one picture. These applications have different tools, filters and functionalities. Filters play an important role in my work, but by no means an exclusive one.

My approach is most of the times to convert a picture in several steps into a new picture using the possibilities of the particular applications, which is to “transform” pictures. Often several pictures are also conflated. So I am running through a chain of transformation steps, often leading into a dead end. In contrast to many other artistic approaches the computer allows to step back easily to previous versions.

The artistic and creative core of this approach lies in the assessment and review of a picture after each transformation step and in the decision of how to possibly proceed with the next step. In this assessment and decision process the artist’s personality is expressed. Regarding this aspect most art techniques differ only marginally. The stroke of a brush in painting is in the end a transformation in a new picture as well – sometimes with a dramatically different overall effect.

As a computer scientist I am fascinated and motivated using this working method again and again by experiencing and sounding out the endless variety of possible picture figurations. Therefore my work is so far not stamped by a characteristic handwriting, which might emerge when applying similar transformation steps again and again. I am not interested in that. Instead I focus throughout on the always new play with different possibilities. Under this consideration every picture pleasing me subjectively at last is a unique specimen. As I am normally not documenting the development process, it is generally not possible to develop exactly the same picture out of the source picture again.