Rainer Kohlberger

Berlin-based artist and designer Rainer Kohlberger knows a thing or two about digital design. The clean flat colour fields and neatly arranged gridworks on his website attest to his expertise in the area, and with a solid education in multimedia from the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, and with teaching stints in algorithmic media creation and audiovisual design, he’s well placed to produce work that is not only technically proficient, but visually and intellectually arresting.

Brimming with geometric shapes and evolving patterns, his images are reminiscent of Gameboy interfaces and frantic maneuvering of Tetris blocks. This is perhaps fitting for an artist whose work is keenly concentrated on the potential for interactivity and the possibilities of generative design – whereby visual content is produced by a pre-defined set of rules or algorithms.

In some cases, such as the Rain series, Kohlberger produces apps to encourage interactions between artist and user; different finger-taps on a touchscreen produce alternately shaped and coloured blocks, which rain down across the screen. Humming, Fast and Slow, meanwhile, alludes more directly to abstract painting, with ever-morphing tonal projections allied with audio content to create an absorbing array of sound and colour. His Killshot poster series, moreover, are derived from photographs taken in Iceland in 2010, and succeed in allying the block colours and sharp outlines of conventional graphic design language with digital elaborations of natural forms.