Hi and welcome to our page!

We‘re Banz & Bowinkel, an Artist Duo creating contemporary art for the 21st century – with digital tools.

Natively we‘re from painting, having studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen. But shortly after graduating our work started to shift from painting to working with the computer. why?

In the early 2000s we were roaming the Internet searching for footage as resource for our paintings and kept stumbling upon images that were „computergenerated“. And we were increasingly fascinated by those. Usually an image depicts something – and if it‘s just plain color. But what exactly did these computer-images depict? An illusion? The concept of an image beeing entirely created within a computer and the question of what these images would be standing for did not let go of us. And at that time it was already common to listen to computergenerated music, play computergenerated games and watch cg-films. Also literature had whole genres dealing with virtual worlds and future societies. But Art?
It suddenly struck us that we utilised a technique, that hadn’t had an update for centuries. Of course art knew photography and video. But they were feeding on reality, real footage. Something entirely synthetic? We were hooked. And we wanted dive deep into this generative abyss of a binary world. We longed to create images from the other side of reality and through this very tool that had altered our planet in a unprecedented way. we had taken the red pill!
And as we couldn‘t name any artist with a similar roadmap (there had been predecessors but those were outsiders to the common art scene at that time and still unknown to us), we decided this was on us! From there on we explored the thinking and making of computergenerated imagery. Through Prints, Apps, Films, Installations we seek to explore the inner workings of the computer and the ways in which our very existence is affected by this device.

So come on in – join us on our journey!