Short bio:

Heckmann’s inspiration to work with light-based media stems from the abundance of imagery in theclub scene of the late 90s and early 2000s. 

Being exposed to the possibilities of generative andmanipulative languages like director lingo, Heckmann started on the path of generative image creation and manipulation which to the day can be found in his professional and artistic works.After a 9-month internship with Derivative and a 6-month journey through history as the video jockeyfor Canadian Rock legends RUSH, Heckmann switched Universities from Ilmenau to now attend Bauhaus Weimar and shape his experimental practice and previously gained experience under the direct influence of MX-Zehn’s Stefan Kraus.With Derivative offering a position as a Technical Director in early 2006, Heckmann embarked on the permanent resettlement to Toronto where he has since lived and worked. 

As part of Derivative, Heckmann works on commercial and artistic projects alike which span major theme park attractions to public video installations and the development of fully fledged control applications like WhiteVoid’s KineticLights. Work on the winch and light control application culminated in a much-savoured project –GRID - for Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke at Lyons 2013s edition of Nuit Blanche. 

The work with Robert Henke can be seen exemplary for Derivative’s relationship to some of the music industry’s leading figures and the ongoing effort to serve this community well. Apart from project and development work, Heckmann is active promoting TouchDesigner and teaching its uses in the fields of art and technology to the interested public at festivals and conferences around the world.In 2008 raster-noton and Derivative joined forces for a unique collaborative project which focused on the realization of the label artists' visual presentation during their audio-visual live shows on the basis of Derivative's TouchDesigner software. 

The work for Carsten Nicolai’s univrs eventually evolved into Heckmann working on 3 further large-scale multiscreen installations: unidisplay, unicolor and most recently unitape.Heckmann’s personal endeavours have always tended to combine the aesthetic aspects of generativecomputer graphics with the almost physical aspects of light. Feeling very comfortable in a club setting,he started performing as a vj under the moniker “Farbraum Lenkungs Aktiv” at parties in his hometown of Leipzig and continues this practise, while now less frequent, under the name “Wüstenarchitekten” in Toronto. 

A collaboration with electronic musician Matt Thibideau in 2014 resulted in “reclusion”, an AV show presented at Mutek’s AVisions series as well as at the inaugural “Day For Night 2015” Festival in Houston, Texas. A further A/V show with Matt and Mark Thibideau called “Timbre” was part of Mutek’s2017 program. For the 20th edition of Mutek in 2019, Heckmann accompanied France Jobin and Richard Chartier for the DUO AV performance which was subsequently also shown at the inaugural PRECTXE festival in Seoul 2019. Most recently Heckmann was invited by France Jobin to collaborate on her live performance “entanglement” revolving around the concept and properties of entanglement in quantum physics and quantum fields theory with a premier at Mutek’s 22nd edition in Montreal.

A collaboration with Olaf Bender saw the presentation of the A/V show “Pilot “at 2017s LEV Festival inGijon. After a collaboration with Toronto based painter Rui Pimenta which was selected for the 2010 25fps Festival in Zagreb, a series of works in Pimenta’ s Gallery as well as at Pimenta’ s initiated Art Spin events had Heckmann explore the possibilities of installation based art. 

Aside from a collection of fake information visualizations and a singular experiment in interactivity the presented work more and more dealt and deals on the intersection of analog / physical objects or spaces and generated graphics or controlled light with a focus on the light and its presence in space