Under the moniker TOFA, Austrian based artist Chris Noelle works on multimedia art since the mid of the 1990s. He´s a restless creative soul whose transdisciplinary talent easily breaks with the common rules of a single jobdescription and his story is quiet outstanding from others and reads itself more like a myth:

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By a successfull bike-trials pro career in the 1990s, Chris tumbled upon photography and filmediting and dived into the world of multimedia art. Over the years he has merged all his passion into mapping projections, lightpaintings, motiongraphics, illustrations and robotic arts. He is a creator, exceptional outrider, visionary and already looks back on a outstanding artistic way of life.

To resume the multidirectional skills of this artist isn’t that easy but this is what you get if you’re in search of someone with real multimedia art background

 

Today the body of his work is based on the interaction between human, machine and space. The outcome could be described as fragile transdiciplinary art, often inspired by opart and minimalistic Bauhaus style. As a creator, he can be happy that he found an artistic way of life so each of his projects simultaneously triggers other artistic directions and is channeled into new outputs. By this Chris behaves more or less like a perpetual motion machine, always but never the same.

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Chris has teached filmediting and transdiciplinary photography and multimedia-art at Universities, showcased his work at TedEx, Ars Electronica and his artwork appeard in magazines like Vogue, Fastcompany Magazine, IdN, Art Magazin, Men´s Health, Page and StreetwearToday and companies such as Diesel, Lacoste, Red Bull, Microsoft, Sony, Carhartt, Carlsberg, Warsteiner and Converse have booked his creative output for exhibitions and campaigns.

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REWIND - HOW DID THAT START?

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With the age of 17 Chris started his professional career as extreme-sports-pro in bike-trials, riding competitions, jumping on rocks and batteling for international trophies. On the peak of this sports-driven-period, he could look back on countless national titles, 5 years in the Top5 Worldranking and finishing all off with the double Team-World-Champion Title, plus a UCI-Bike-Trials Vice-World Champion Solo Title (1995) and a Guinness-Book record in 1996. This led to attractive sponsoring deals with companies like Chrysler and Scott, having an own fashion-line from his shoe-sponsor Vans. So this was the first crosslink to the graphic world of fashion-design, which appeared a couple of years later to be in main focus of his career.

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Besides the sports-career, he started his apprenticeship at Jung von Matt in Hamburg in 1996 to deepen his skills in PR- and advertising-strategies and graphic-design. As this was way to boring for his personal creative approach, he decided to jump on the train of studying fashion-design (1998-2002) with a main focus on CAD illustration and graphic print-designs, before moving back to Berlin in 2002 with a diploma in his pocket.

Since then Tofa is working as freelancer on artistic projects and in collaboration with other artists and clients from different branches of the advertising world.

In 2003 Tofa bumped into the world of light-art photography – a longtime-exposure technique that´s using lightsources to virtually leave traces within a picture. With a scholarship in Tokyo in 2007 at Tokyo Wondersite Gallery, he jumped onto another level and today, Tofa is one of the world leading artists of this genre. To feature this individual, on www.lightwriting.de you can find a deeper insight of his photo-portfolio.

 

By the time he started working at Tresor as Art Director in 2007, he became co-founder of The Core., a team of and lighting-designers and multimedia-experts who work globaly on stage-, interior- and lighting-designs. Tofa is deeply involved in ongoing creative visual solutions for this company and started to focus on NFT art in 2021: www.thecoreberlin.com

By his move to Austria he joined forces with visual artist Johannes Menneweger abd together they work on projection projects under the label Modulux.

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