Robert Zimmermann

I was born in 1982 in a small town in southern Germany. After living in Cologne for one year, doing my civil service, I started my study of Art Education in 2004 at the University of Passau, a small town at the German-Austrian border. After one year I applied at the Universität for Applied Arts in Vienna to continue my study.

I’ve chosen this kind of study because I consider art as a means of rethinking our surroundings, as a basic tool to question both, banal and complex structures which inluence our daily lives. Therefore I believe that it’s important to mediate this knowledge in order to sharpen the perception of people.

My main interest in doing arts is music, drawing and filmmaking.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing at all. One of my first childhood memories is when I was about 5 years old. I was sick, lying in bed and drawing rock-bands whose members were skeletons. I love black and white and all shades of grey inbetween, working with lines, areas and volume. I get confused by colours if I don’t use them separeted, in a graphical way.

My father plays acoustic guitar, so I also started playing the guitar when I was twelve. But soon I got bored with it and, of course, wanted to play an electric guitar. When I was fourteen two friends and I started our first punk-band. For about two years we played some gigs, then broke up and formed another one. And after that another one. The music grew harder and we ended up doing noise music.

I had to quit playing in bands when I moved to Cologne. For the lack of band members, and my growing interest in electronic music, I started to use the computer to produce sound and to sketch ideas. The next step was trying out recording on my own and then to play various instruments, all of them in quite a ragged way but I’m much more interested in the shape of the sound than in sophisticated playing. I try out guitars, bass, home organs, keyboards, digital synthesizers and drum computers, electronic effects and post-production possibilities to do music. The latest news is that I’ll start playing the violin this summer.

At the moment I’m busy doing an animation film, drawings of musicians and dancers in movement, recording improvisational music...